Why our pink gin doesn't stay pink

Sun-Kissed is our strawberry and rhubarb gin. It's made in small batches with real fruit, and the first thing most people notice about it is the colour. When a bottle is fresh, it's a soft pink. 

But if you've had a bottle of Sun-Kissed Gin on your shelf for a few months, you might have noticed something. It's not quite as pink as it used to be. It's drifted towards a blush orange. That's not a fault.

Here's the story behind it, including the 1,000 litre mistake we had to make to learn how to do it properly.

The 1,000 litre fruit smoothie

The first time we made our Sun-Kissed Gin, we'd never worked with real fruit infusions before. We knew what we wanted: a gin that tasted of strawberries and rhubarb, made with the actual ingredients, not flavourings out of a bottle. So we did the obvious thing, which turned out to be the wrong thing. We tipped kilos and kilos of fresh strawberries and rhubarb straight into a tank full and gin and left it to macerate.

A few days in, we had a tank full of what was essentially alcoholic fruit smoothie. About 1,000 litres of it. The strawberries had disintegrated. The rhubarb wasn't far behind. We spent days filtering it out, batch by batch, trying to save the gin underneath.

It took us so long to clean up that we knew, for next time, we needed a better system.

How we make Sun-Kissed Gin now

The fix was simple in hindsight, which is usually how these things go.

We put the strawberries and rhubarb into muslin bags. The bags go into the gin, and the gin pulls the flavour and colour out over five days. When the infusion is finished, we lift the bags out cleanly. No disintegrated fruit, no filtering marathon. Just gin. It's a smaller change than you'd think for a much bigger result. The colour is cleaner. And our cleanup time went from days to about an hour.  And, because we were able to retain the strawberries soaked in gin, our Gin Jam was born.

Why the pink fades

This is the bit that surprises people. Sun-Kissed Gin comes out of the infusion naturally pink. We don't add anything to make it that way. The colour comes straight from the strawberries.

The catch is that real fruit colour is a moving target. The compounds in strawberries that give the gin its pink hue are not stable forever. Light, time, and the gin itself all work on them slowly. The pink starts to soften almost immediately, and over the course of a few months it shifts to a blush orange.

If you were to compare a bottle we made last week with one made six months ago, you'd see the gap easily. They taste the same. They just look different.

Nature doesn't stay pink for long. 

Why the pink fades

We could fix the fade in about thirty seconds. A drop of red food colouring, or a synthetic pigment that holds in alcohol, and every bottle of Sun-Kissed Gin would be the same shade of pink whether you opened it today or in six months.

We'd rather not. The reason we make Sun-Kissed with real strawberries and rhubarb is so that what's on the bottle is actually what's in the bottle. Adding a colourant to fake the appearance of fresh fruit, when we've gone to the trouble of using fresh fruit, defeats the whole point.

So we leave it. The bottles that have been sitting on shelves the longest are the most orange. The ones that have just left the distillery are the pinkest. 

One last thing

There's a version of small-batch distilling that's mostly about how the bottle looks. Pretty pink gins are a category now, and a lot of them get their colour from somewhere other than the fruit on the label.

We chose the other version. Real fruit, real colour, real fade. It costs us a bit more, takes us longer, and means our bottles don't all look identical when they sit next to each other on a back bar.

For us, that's the point. If you can see the difference between a fresh bottle and an older one, you can also taste the difference between a real strawberry gin and a strawberry-flavoured gin. 

Got a bottle of Sun-kissed at home? Hold it up to the light and have a look at where it's at. Then come and tell us what colour yours has turned.