Backpacking Gin

While backpacking in the Caribou Wilderness I kept noticing potentially-edible plants and parts-of-plants– coyote mint leaves, pine sap, juniper bark and berries, green manzanita berries, fresh pine tips, not-yet-open pine cones, and yarrow flowers. Inspired by some recent reading of Pascal Baudar I collected a variety of them, and when I was home crushed and infused them individually into both vodka and fortified wine. I regularly tasted each component infusion and strained it (anywhere from a few days to a month later, depending how strongly the flavors were developing), then blended a mix of them into the final result. This let me include only a small amount of components that would have been overwhelming in larger quantities. I didn’t have the means to re-distill the alcohol, so the end result is not transparent, and the flavors are quite intense, but it’s a memory of a particular time and place.