Stillhead Wild Blackberry Gin
The black bears on Vancouver Island generally shy away from human contact. So, conservation officer’s point to unlocked garbage bins, bird seed, pet food and perhaps the odd picnic basket for luring the creatures closer to human neighbourhoods in the fall. But, if you ask us, Yogi is just looking for a wee nip of blackberry gin before settling into hibernation.
From Stillhead Distillery, on the southern outskirts of Duncan, BC, comes a richly fruity gin unlike any other. Although this region is not exactly wilderness, The Island is wild, rugged country, where even city folk live pretty close to the land and its wildlife. So, it makes sense that the main component of this gin is wild blackberries harvested locally by hand.
If it didn’t yield such wonderful fruit, you’d call the prolific blackberry plant, a weed. Bears though, consider its fruit a delicacy, and it grows pretty much everywhere that hedgerows or farmland have been left untended. There are no blackberries on earth as sweet and juicy as the ones that grow wild on Vancouver Island, so, weeds they are not.
Every summer, people from Duncan’s nearby Cowichan Indigenous communities pluck the plumpest blackberries from their spiney canes and bring them in buckets to Stillhead Distillery. Distiller, Brennan Colebank pays top dollar for prime berries, and his suppliers, whether they carry their buckets in the back of a pick-up, the backseat of a car or on a bicycle, know to pick only the ripest ones.
Colebank infuses the deep purple juice of the berries into his Wild Blackberry Gin, a drink he refers to as “a bramble in a bottle.” What blackberries Colebank can’t use right away he freezes and stores so production can continue year-round.
Big round plummy notes jump right out of the bottle then quickly turn to ripe jammy blackberries, black cherries and soft apples. Hints of raspberries and gooseberries join in along with cooked blackberry pie. A distinct citrus note, somewhat reminiscent of sumac lemonade provides balancing counterpoint.
You could be forgiven for imagining you are drinking a classic blackberry gin “Bramble” cocktail from the 1980’s, with delicate woody tones of blackberry seeds underpinning those big berry notes. A passing piney bitterness reminds us that this is gin, so there must be some juniper in the recipe, though clearly, Colebank has toned that down in favour of the fruit. Perhaps not so much a cocktail, you decide, as a fruit cordial with restrained honey sweetness in place of sugar.
At 37.5%, a pleasing peppery tang on the tongue adds some zest, though that fades quickly as more berries flood in. Hints of pine pitch and Canada balsam turn to slightly sour citrus notes on the finish. Dangerously delicious and risky too if you happen to leave your bottle outside unattended in June or July. On Vancouver Island, that’s mating season for black bears and gin or no gin, they can be quite high-spirited.