Are You Ready for Sloe Gin's Latest Comeback?
It's Déjà Vu All Over Again, Thanks to Simon Ford
Back in the late aughts, all it took to get a nation of cocktail bartenders excited was to reintroduce a long-lost product that made it possible for them to recreate a forgotten cocktail or two. Often these reintroductions happened in the tasting rooms at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans during the summer run of the annual Tales of the Cocktail convention.
I still recall one such revelation in 2008, when I randomly roamed into a Monteleone tasting room to find bottles and samples of Plymouth Sloe Gin. Plymouth was a bartender’s darling back then, a heritage gin from Plymouth, England, that had only recently been relaunched in the U.S. Anything Plymouth did at the time was news, and that they were bringing in their sloe gin was front-page stuff. All we cocktail mavens knew of sloe gin was the syrupy bottle of purple stuff that lurked in the back of our parents’ bar that was sometimes pulled out to make a once popular cocktail called the Sloe Gin Fizz. The brands left on the U.S. market were bottom-shelf specimens made with artificial colorings and flavorings. And thanks to drinks like the Alabama Slammer and Sloe Comfortable Screw, the liqueur had developed a reputation as a trashy spirit.
That afternoon in 2008, we sipped at the Plymouth Sloe Gin and marveled at its fresh, fruity, complex flavor. The world, that devil, had been keeping this nectar, the TRUE sloe gin, from us! Now we had it back. Life was good.
The man pouring out the Plymouth Sloe Gin that day was a chipper chappy from Bath named Simon Ford. Ford—the man who invented the modern-day concept of the liquor brand ambassador—wasn’t then quite the eminence in the liquor world that he would be become, but he was well on his way.
The other day, I sat across from Ford at a table at Keen’s Steak House in Manhattan. The occasion was yet again the introduction of a new sloe gin to the American market. But this time is was his own Ford’s Sloe Gin. In between his work for Plymouth and today, he had founded his own brand of gin, named after himself. As one of the best new London Dry gins out there, it has done quite well, and was purchased in 2019 by the Kentucky whiskey giant Brown-Forman, where Ford now works.
I recall Ford first telling me he was working on a sloe gin even before the Brown-Forman acquisition.
“It took three or four years,” said Ford. “I want this to be a celebration of Sloe Gin.”
One could argue that Ford missed the sloe gin boat in the U.S., which came and left the harbor more than a decade ago. After the initial excitement with which Plymouth Sloe Gin—and a few others, like Hayman’s and Sipsmith—were received, the buzz died down. The Sloe Gin Fizz did not make a roaring comeback, and there was not a flood of new sloe gin cocktails. (Though I do have fond memories of the dangerously drinkable, blackberry-topped Electric Kool Aid Acid Test at Death & Co.) The brief mania did inspire a few new American craft liqueurs, like Damson gin and Beach Plum gin; sloes don’t grown in North America. But then the cocktail herd moved on to the next new liqueur.
Ford thinks there was a lost opportunity there and he plans to correct that.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever gone in with their whole heart and said, ‘Let’s go for it. Let’s try and bring back the Sloe Gin Fizz as a classic.’” he said. “It’s always a sort of side project. I want to make sure the category gets attention.”
Ford took his time with his sloe gin, spending years on the recipe, searching for a point of differentiation from what’s already out there. “I don’t want to bring out something that is the same as you can get at the supermarket.” The base of Ford’s Sloe Gin is Ford’s Gin itself. After steeping flash-frozen sloe fruit in overproof gin for three to four months, he cut the alcohol level down to 26% before adding sugar. Ford then raised the alcohol level to 29%—unusually high for a sloe gin—to bring out more botanical flavor in the liqueur, and make the liquid less thick and syrupy than is usually the case. This was all done in hopes that bartenders will mix with the liqueur. To insure the home bartenders mix with it, four historical cocktail recipes are printed on the side of the box.
Ford, like most English people, grew up with sloe gin. Both of his grandmothers made a homemade version. “It’s like limoncello to the Italians,” explained Ford. “Everyone makes one.” His father’s mother had the best recipe. “On my mother’s side, she used to make her sloe in the old fish tank,” joked Ford. “The fish no longer existed. That was the vessel she used.” (The good Grandmother Ford sloe gin recipe is found on the side of the box.)
Unlike other new gin brands, Ford’s has done little in the way of experimental bottlings. There are no barrel-aged gins, flavored gins or pink gins in the line-up. “I’m a tradiinalist, in the sense that I like the classics,” said Ford. “I don’t think Ford’s Gin should do any innovation until it’s covered the classics. It’s a bit like cocktails. Don’t go making your own drinks until you know how to make a good Martini, Manhattan and Old-Fashioned.” That line of thinking has led him to limit Ford’s Gin’s output to the benchmark gin, a navy strength gin and, now, a sloe gin. (Eventually, however, Ford would like to produce a limited line of seasonal sloe gins, usually different spices and botanicals.)
Ford knows the sloe gin market is a small one, so he’s only made 2,900 cases, containing six bottles each. The 700ml bottles will be released only in the U.S., where it arrives this week, and the UK, though it has not yet arrived there.
Now the work begins to get bartenders and cocktail drinker to give sloe gin another chance.
“I don’t think the job was done then,” said Ford, talking of sloe gin’s last brief heyday in the late aughts. “I still think the Sloe Gin Fizz can make a better comeback.”
And now to the sloe gin cocktail recipes! But, first, this public service announcement: