Homemade Christmas Gin

At Christmas it’s always great to have something homemade to give as a gift to friends and family. This year my gift was the gift of Christmas gin!

The decanter is from Denmark

How to make your own homemade Christmas spiced gin

I’ve not started an illegal still in my flat. The way I made Christmas gin is to flavour gin or vodka with spices and other botanicals or ‘bathtub style’. This name for making gin was made popular during prohibition when people would flavour illegally distilled alcohol literally in their bathtubs.

The method is to pick your botanicals and to leave hem to macerate in the alcohol for as little or as long as you need to get the flavour you want. For example you can make strawberry basil gin by macerating the soft fruit and herbs (separately) overnight or just for 24 hours. For my Christmas gin I chose a longer period of about two weeks and ended up with the deep golden colour as the alcohol picked it up from the spices.

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Add your spices:

My selection of botanicals – coriander, allspice, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and cardamom.

Coriander and cinnamon are traditional botanicals for gin, I absolutely adore gin with cardamom too! The nutmeg, cloves and allspice were the Christmas addition to the flavours. For this particular bottle I started with a bog standard London dry gin that we had knocking around the flat. No one would drink this gin given our huge selection of more interesting ones, so it seemed like a good way to make it special.

I also made another batch starting with some normal vodka. To make this into a gin I needed to add juniper berries to my botanicals – luckily Waitrose had these in stock!

The vodka needed additional juniper to make it into gin

I added the botanicals a little haphazardly. A couple of cinnamon sticks, a few cloves, a tea spoon of allspice etc and I think slightly less of the cloves / allspice would work best!

Then wait

After a week allowing the flavours to meld with the booze, I tried the gin and checked to see if anything else was needed.

The main addition I added at this stage was citrus. For me gin has to have a citrus component. Whilst this can be emphasised by the coriander, a fresh citrus peel brings a great zing to the nose and the palate. So the gin got Seville orange and lemon peel – thanks Tiva for bringing these back for me! The vodka got grapefruit and lemon peel.

After another few days (and copious tasting!) I decided it was ready. A pack of mini bottles was purchased from Amazon and the bottling up for gifts commenced!