I made sloe gin again last year, starting with a similar recipe to the one I used earlier. I froze the sloes first which helps to split the skins and softens the fruit, which helps extract the flavour. After a few weeks in the freezer I put the sloes and sugar in a pan and warmed them through before putting everything in a jug.

When it came to straining the sloes, there was a lot more sediment than normal. I ended up with one bottle of clear sloe gin and one bottle of alcoholic sloe smoothie, which will probably work well with a mixer or fruit juice. The sloe gin was quite sweet so I poured some more gin on the sloes, without any sugar, to extract a bit more flavour. I gave this a few weeks then strained it and blended it with the first bottle. The end result was quite good but was more work than the old method.

I won't bother warming the sloes again. It results in too much sediment and is more hard work in the end, I'll stick to just freezing then infusing in gin.

When I made the Sloe Gin, I left the gin for 3 months before filtering and bottling it. I then poured a bottle of sweet sherry onto the sloes to see how much extra flavour could be extracted from them. I didn't add any sugar, I hoped that the sweetness in the sherry was sufficient.

Today, I filtered and bottled the sherry. It doesn't have as much flavour as the gin but it's still acceptable. Next year, I think I will leave the gin for 2 months rather than 3, so there should still be some flavour left in the fruit for a 2nd 'extraction'.

I've been told that it's possible to make a rather nice 'sloe liqueur' chocolate by taking the used sloes, removing the stones and mixing the flesh with melted chocolate, then leaving to set. I was going to do that today but removing the stones was very fiddly. I tried one of the sloes and found that it was fairly dry and tasteless. Having used them to make two drinks, I had probably removed too much of the juice and flavour.

This is my first attempt at making Sloe Gin. The units are mixed metric/imperial because I didn't note the weight of the sloes in kg.

• 2½ pounds Sloes (or sloe/wild plum mixture)
• 300g white sugar
• just over a litre of gin.

I made it in a 2½ litre jug which once contained cider. The sloes and sugar nearly filled the jug. I poured in as much gin as I could until it was nearly full.

I must remember to invert the jug a couple of times per day for the first few weeks, then every few days for the next couple of months. It should be ready to drink by Christmas.

I thought I'd have a go at making Sloe Gin this year. I went for a walk in the countryside near Coventry, to a place where I suspected there might be sloes. The first trees I found were quite poor with only a few sloes on each, and they were difficult to reach. I walked further and found a few trees which were much better.

I sorted and washed the sloes when I got home. I managed to pick 2½ pounds of them, although some were larger and may actually be wild plums.