Picking blackcurrants
July is always blackcurrant season.
We were recently introduced by our friend Dawn at Preserves at No 14 to the lovely folk at Grange Farm Soft Fruits near Wolvey.
What a fabulous soft fruit farm. Beautiful fruit, plentiful and delicious. Karen who runs the fruit farm, makes sure that the fruit trees and bushes are kept free of weeds, brambles and stingers. The strawberries are at waist height so they are accessible to everyone.
We’ve been three times this week and we’ve picked blackcurrants, redcurrants and raspberries. They are all delicious. Some of the blackcurrants didn’t make it into our liqueurs. They were sidelined to a batch of blackcurrant jam for us at home - my absolute favourite.
Grange Farm has been a fantastic discovery and we’ll definitely be back.
Picking season
It’s early July now - the day after the General Election and it’s all go in the fruit picking department.
If it’s June it’s strawberries and raspberries, and then gooseberries if they are ready. As we move into July, we are watching the blackcurrants and redcurrants in our garden to make sure we can pick our fruit before the local bird population helps itself.
This year the current crop doesn’t seem so bountiful. We’ve definitely got less blackcurrants than last year. That means we need to top up from a local pick your own farm. We usually pick from Cattows in Heather, Leicestershire. It’s nice and local, the fruit hasn’t travelled very far at all and it can go from the plant to the preserving jar in the space of an hour.
By August we are into plums and once again, our tree isn’t looking too heavily cropped. It was so cold this Spring, that the flowers didn’t set with fruit. Luckily we have loads of wild plum trees hereabouts so we will be making sure we catch as many of those as possible too. And we’ll supplement our plum bounty with some excellent Worcestershire Victoria Plums sourced for us by Stodd’s Fresh Fruit and Veg.
Towards the end of August, we’ll be picking mulberries and then the cultivated blackberries start to be ready, We’ll be picking wild brambles til the end of October most probably. We like to mix wild and cultivated blackberries: for the juice of the big garden cultivars and the sweetness of the smaller wild brambles. But soon the frosts will come and the picking season will be over for another year. Then we’ll be bottling for Christmas….but more of that another time.
Technology, technology, technology
One of the wonders of running a small business is keeping up to date with the ever changing technological world. Every five minutes there’s a new ‘must have’ app or a new way to get the message out about what we are doing.
We started off with a fabulous little book about social media for small businesses. This was before we even sold our first bottle and it seemed a bit bewildering at the time. But practice makes perfect and now we are prolific users of hashtags and alt text.
Over time we got a bit more tuned in and started to add our social media handles to our bottles and bookmarks. Our latest initiative is to put QR codes on all our bottle caps. Customers can find our website to order more quickly and easily just by scanning the lid. Easy peasy!
But we know there’s a lot more to learn and we look forward to stretching our brains and discovering more. If you’ve got any suggestions, we’d love to hear them.
Markets, markets, markets.
We meet so many lovely people when we are exhibiting at food, craft, artisan and Christmas markets. We love watching people as they taste our liqueurs and the “that’s amazing’ face kicks in. It fills us with joy every time.
Deciding where to exhibit is something that we reflect on every autumn. We’ve been trading for two and a half years now so we’ve gathered a bit of experience on where’s the right place for us to showcase our bottles. It’s fair to say that we make some great decisions and then there’s the occasional duff one - a ‘what are we doing here’ moment where we think that we are in the wrong place for our wares. That’s all part of being a small business I guess.
We will often take a new flavour to market to get some feedback, so customers have been recently sipping our new Rhubarb Liqueur and telling us what they think.
What's lovely is the following that we gather from each event. So many people take a little pack of our 4 minis home in their Pick and Mix bag to see which ones they like the best. Then they come back for a bigger bottle. That really makes us happy.
Experimenting with recipes.
One of the most popular fruits we use is Rhubarb. Our Rhubarb Gin and our Rhubarb Vodka are both always in demand , so we wondered whether it would make a good liqueur too.
We make all of our liqueurs the traditional French way, by soaking the fruit in wine first. So we’ve started by soaking a batch of Rhubarb in a light wine for a while. We’ll move on to the liqueuring process and see what happens.
Next step is to test it with some critical friends to see what they think. They are always honest - that’s why we recruited them. Based on their feedback we’ll modify it and then take a sample batch to our next event and ask customers for their thoughts. If it passes all those tests, we’ll design a label and make a full batch for sale.
We follow this process for any new flavour ideas. The combination of our critical friends and our customers, ensures that we have given each potential new product, a thorough trial. Here’s a few that didn’t make it: Apricot Vodka, Pear Vodka and Fruits of the Forest Liqueur.
If you’ve got ideas you’d like to see us explore, then do please get in touch via our contact form or social media. We’d really love to hear from you.
Following the seasons
Working with nature is important to us. We pick in season and either use immediately or fast freeze fruit to lock in the flavour. That way, we can offer our core flavours year round. There’s nothing nicer than sampling Raspberry Vodka when the garden is full of raspberries, or Blackberry Liqueur when the hedgerows are bursting with dark juicy blackberries.
But for some of our flavours, that doesn’t work so well. Our Seville Orange Gin is made in January when the bitter marmalade oranges are in season. We make a batch and when it’s gone, it’s gone til next January. Freezing oranges doesn’t work so well!
It’s nearly time to start picking elderflowers. Last year we made our first batch of Elderflower Gin and it sold out in three days - so we made more. Our lovely friend Lizzie picked some local elderflowers in the hedgerows around her home town of Brecon. We used those to make a special edition Brecon Elderflower Gin which we took to Abergavenny Food Festival. It went down a storm and we sold out pretty quickly. Buoyed by the success of the gin, we also made some Elderflower Vodka and that disappeared pretty quickly too, so we’ll be making extra this year. But Elderflowers don’t freeze very well either! So when it’s gone, it’s gone!
Spring is here and summer is fast approaching so we will be spending the summer picking raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries and anything else that catches our eye. It’s so nice to be out in the fresh air picking nature’s bounty.
The fruit you gave…
One of the greatest joys of our business is the number of customers, friends and and family who have so generously offered us their fruit. Like us, they don’t like waste and it’s great to use nature’s bounty for something tasty.
Natasha kindly offered us her sour cherries and we made a very successful small batch of Cherry Brandy. Anna gave us a small bag of quinces and we made a batch of Quince Gin which our tasting panel loved. For the last two summers, another Anna has offered us the pick of her gorgeous mulberry tree and our Mulberry Gin was born. Our neighbour Elaine gave us a box of nectarines and we experimented with a Nectarine Gin. It prompted us to try a Peach Liqueur and it has been very popular so far. That same lovely Elaine regularly gives a pile of Rhubarb from her family’s garden and we use it for Rhubarb Gin and Rhubarb Vodka. Jennie and Marjorie both offered us the crab apples from their lovely trees and we tried infusing Crab Apple Gin, which flew off the stall in the autumn. A family from Hinckley invited us to pick their damsons which are currently in our freezer and will be infused in Gin very soon.
We’ve been so grateful for the donations and of course all those lovely folk get some bottles back with their fruit in return.
Growing our range
At those first few markets we were selling 5 liqueurs made with fruit from the garden: Blackberry, Strawberry, Plum, Raspberry and Blackcurrant. We’d still got a glut of plums so we infused some of them in Vodka and launched our Plum Vodka. The hedgerows were bursting with sloes and bullaces so we had a go at some Sloe and Bullace Gin.
But our best seller by a mile that first winter was our Christmas Pudding Vodka. We couldn’t make it fast enough. Based on a recipe by The Hairy Bikers, we made and bottled a batch and took it to market. Our customers loved it and we began making batches every week til Christmas.
We’ve always been massive fans of a snowy winter holiday so we had a go at mulling our plum vodka with the traditional spices of mulled wine - or Gluhwein as we knew it from our many winters in Germany and Austria. We added cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and mixed spices and our Winter Spiced Plum Vodka was born.
We noticed that a number of our customers were asking if we sold any Gin, and so we started to experiment with a small range of fruit gins. To date we’ve made Strawberry, Rhubarb, Gooseberry, Pomegranate, Seville Orange, Nectarine, Hedgerow Fruits, Redcurrant and Bramble varieties.
Labels, labels, labels
Choosing the right label for our bottles was really important to us. It would speak to our potential customers, it would need to be attractive, legally compliant, say what we stood for, and be clear and easy to read. We worked with a couple of designers to explore initial ideas. What we thought we wanted (a traditional botanical image) ended up being nowhere near what our final labels would look like.
As part of the licensing qualification, we’d covered what legally had to be on the label, so that unit was easy to navigate. But picking an image style was hard and we went through many versions. We asked loads of critical friends for feedback. And this has proved to be a theme across our business. We never introduce a new product, or change our branding without consulting those trusted folk who give their time to tell us what they think.
Getting started
It all begins with an idea.
We have the most beautiful Victoria Plum tree in our front garden. It yields so many plums - too tasty to waste. So we had a go at making some Plum Liqueur. We’d been in France a lot, enjoying a Kir or two. We wondered about a plummy Kir instead of the more traditional cassis based drink. We decided to give it a try, making it the traditional French way, soaking the plums in a deep fruity red wine first. We gave some away as gifts and when people started asking if they could buy some, we wondered…..would this have wider appeal? The were many stages to pass through, so that we could sell our drinks safely and responsibly. There’s the licensing, the food safety, the labelling and so much more. But we worked through every step.
On 12 September 2021 we packed the car (having first remembered to insure it for business use) and set off for The Garage in Nottingham with a boot full of liqueurs, our tasting platters, beautifully made for us by David Entwisle at Isle Home and Garden and our biggest smiles. Our friend Lizzie came to help at that first market and we were genuinely gobsmacked that we sold 65 bottles in 4 hours. The feedback on our range of 5 liqueurs was absolutely amazing and we were overwhelmed with the response to our bottles after so many months of hard work. Of course, we thought that first market was a fluke so we were mightily relieved when the same thing happened the next week and the week after.