unique frustration of Liquor Store Archaeology (though I guess this was also part of its appeal) lay in its zenlike experience. What we found was never what we were looking for. The harder we looked for something, the more likely it was that we’d never find it. This became especially frustrating as I began to hear tales of more and more lost spirits being revived. Other than in boutique bottle shops in big cities, it was nearly impossible for several years to find all the rediscovered gins and rye whiskeys and vermouths and bitters that cocktail world insiders were buzzing about. With liquor store shelves taken over by the booze equivalent of suburban McMansions, there seemed even less room left for these idiosyncratic tastes. Though we’d been using the word archaeology facetiously, at a certain point it really did feel like we were trying to recover fragments of an ancient Rome or Athens from beneath the layers of newer, shinier cities.
We also had to be on the lookout for frauds during our archaeological digs. I became excited one day when I found a bottle of sloe gin, which I hadn’t seen in many years. For me, sloe gin evokes a youthful summer night long ago at a particular watering hole on the Jersey Shore that served pitchers of sloe gin fizzes and Alabama Slammers (that frightening mix of sloe gin, amaretto, and Southern Comfort), leading to a make-out session with a hair-sprayed Jersey girl in a Camaro in the Wawa parking lot. Ah, sloe gin, like Proust’s madeleine for a once-mulleted boy like me.
It was only later, when I was speaking with an affable British chap named Simon Ford, the so-called “brand ambassador” for Plymouth gin, that I learned my sloe gin of memory—as well as the dusty bottle I’d found—was not the real thing, but a poor imitation. “Full of artificial flavoring and artificial coloring,” he told me, with disapproval. “The kind that gathers dust in dive bars.” The syrupy facsimile sloe gin was the kind of thing you’d find in embarrassing drinks such as the Sloe Comfortable Screw (sloe gin, Southern Comfort, and orange juice), or the Sloe Comfortable Screw Against the Wall (which adds Galliano), or the Panty Dropper (a horrifying concoction of sloe gin, Kahlua, and half-and-half).
Real sloe gin comes not from some factory in the Garden State, but from England. It’s made from (who knew?) sloe berries (the sour, almost inedibly bitter fruit of the blackthorn, a relative of the plum) which are macerated for several months in real gin. In England, it is made mostly in family kitchens in autumn and carried in flasks during hunting season. “Sloe gin, to the English, is a little bit like limoncello is to the Italians,” said Ford. “In the countryside, everyone makes their own.” So for Ford, the tart, ruby-colored spirit reminds him of walking through the idyllic English countryside, picking ripe sloe berries from hedgerows with his grandmother, and sipping her homemade elixir on a cold day by a warm fire.
About ten years ago, Plymouth dusted off its dormant 1883 recipe for sloe gin and started producing very small batches of it. Sloe berries are in short supply, and it takes more than two pounds of them to make one bottle of the gin. By late 2008, Plymouth, at Ford’s urging, finally managed to produce enough to export a small amount over to us.
It’s fascinating how one liquor can inspire such different nostalgic connections for different people. For me, a sip of a Sloe Gin Fizz does take me all the way back to the Jersey Shore—even though it’s not made with the same sloe gin I’m remembering. I must say, it’s bittersweet and a bit disconcerting to realize that one’s coming-of-age memories are based on a lie. But this Proustian experience flows both ways. “I taste my grandmother’s sloe gin now, and it’s disgusting,” Ford told me. “But I don’t tell her. I always tell her it’s better than the one we do.”
When it comes to Liquor Store
We also had to be on the lookout for frauds during our archaeological digs. I became excited one day when I found a bottle of sloe gin, which I hadn’t seen in many years. For me, sloe gin evokes a youthful summer night long ago at a particular watering hole on the Jersey Shore that served pitchers of sloe gin fizzes and Alabama Slammers (that frightening mix of sloe gin, amaretto, and Southern Comfort), leading to a make-out session with a hair-sprayed Jersey girl in a Camaro in the Wawa parking lot. Ah, sloe gin, like Proust’s madeleine for a once-mulleted boy like me.
It was only later, when I was speaking with an affable British chap named Simon Ford, the so-called “brand ambassador” for Plymouth gin, that I learned my sloe gin of memory—as well as the dusty bottle I’d found—was not the real thing, but a poor imitation. “Full of artificial flavoring and artificial coloring,” he told me, with disapproval. “The kind that gathers dust in dive bars.” The syrupy facsimile sloe gin was the kind of thing you’d find in embarrassing drinks such as the Sloe Comfortable Screw (sloe gin, Southern Comfort, and orange juice), or the Sloe Comfortable Screw Against the Wall (which adds Galliano), or the Panty Dropper (a horrifying concoction of sloe gin, Kahlua, and half-and-half).
Real sloe gin comes not from some factory in the Garden State, but from England. It’s made from (who knew?) sloe berries (the sour, almost inedibly bitter fruit of the blackthorn, a relative of the plum) which are macerated for several months in real gin. In England, it is made mostly in family kitchens in autumn and carried in flasks during hunting season. “Sloe gin, to the English, is a little bit like limoncello is to the Italians,” said Ford. “In the countryside, everyone makes their own.” So for Ford, the tart, ruby-colored spirit reminds him of walking through the idyllic English countryside, picking ripe sloe berries from hedgerows with his grandmother, and sipping her homemade elixir on a cold day by a warm fire.
About ten years ago, Plymouth dusted off its dormant 1883 recipe for sloe gin and started producing very small batches of it. Sloe berries are in short supply, and it takes more than two pounds of them to make one bottle of the gin. By late 2008, Plymouth, at Ford’s urging, finally managed to produce enough to export a small amount over to us.
It’s fascinating how one liquor can inspire such different nostalgic connections for different people. For me, a sip of a Sloe Gin Fizz does take me all the way back to the Jersey Shore—even though it’s not made with the same sloe gin I’m remembering. I must say, it’s bittersweet and a bit disconcerting to realize that one’s coming-of-age memories are based on a lie. But this Proustian experience flows both ways. “I taste my grandmother’s sloe gin now, and it’s disgusting,” Ford told me. “But I don’t tell her. I always tell her it’s better than the one we do.”
When it comes to Liquor Store
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