How to Make Rhubarb Gin | Pink, Easy, Foolproof

Rhubarb gin is the easiest impressive thing you can make with a spirit. There’s no distilling, no equipment beyond a clean jar, and no skill required except patience, which is really just laziness with better branding. You steep chopped rhubarb and a little sugar in gin, wait a couple of weeks, and end up with a blush-pink, sweet-tart infusion that costs a fraction of the fashionable bottles doing exactly the same thing. If you want the finished article rather than the recipe, my guide to rhubarb gin covers the best ones to buy, and if you’re not sure which gin to infuse in the first place, start with my best gin recommendations. Everyone else, grab a jar.

This is a genuinely forgiving project. Get the ratios roughly right, keep everything clean, and time does the rest. Below is the master method, a faster roasted version for the impatient, and the handful of small decisions that separate a good batch from a great one.

Three things do the work: rhubarb, sugar and gin. For the rhubarb, the pinker the stalks, the pinker your gin, forced early-season rhubarb gives that vivid rose colour, while greener maincrop stalks taste just as good but produce a more muted, amber-pink result. For the gin, resist the urge to infuse your best bottle. Rhubarb is delicate and easily bullied, so a clean, juniper-forward London Dry works far better than something heavily botanical or barrel-aged; a mid-range supermarket London Dry is genuinely the smart choice here. And the sugar isn’t just for sweetness: it draws the juice out of the rhubarb through osmosis, which is why many recipes have you sugar the fruit first and leave it overnight before the gin ever arrives.

This is the version I’d make first. It needs about two to three weeks, almost all of it hands-off.

One tip worth heeding: when you strain, don’t press hard on the fruit. Squeezing forces pulp through and clouds the gin. Let it drip. A cloudy batch tastes identical, but the clear, jewel-pink version is the one people gasp at.

No fortnight of patience? Roasting concentrates the rhubarb and slashes the infusion time to a few days, the method Sipsmith champions. Heat the oven to 180°C, scatter 400g chopped rhubarb on a lined tray with 100g sugar (and a split vanilla pod, if you like), and roast for about 30 minutes until soft and fragrant. Cool completely, then add to a jar with 700ml gin and infuse for just three days before straining. It gives a rounder, jammier, slightly caramelised result, less bright than the raw steep, but ready before the weekend’s out.

Rhubarb takes a supporting cast beautifully. A little ginger adds warmth and a grown-up kick. Cardamom or vanilla push it towards dessert. A strip of orange zest lifts the whole thing. Strawberries turn it summery and even pinker. Add these with the rhubarb, but taste as you go, stronger aromatics like ginger and cardamom can dominate in a few days, so some people add them only for the final 3 to 5 days of infusing rather than the whole stretch. As olive magazine notes, a neutral gin is what lets these flavours actually come through.

The obvious move is a rhubarb G&T: 50ml over plenty of ice, good tonic, and a fresh strip of rhubarb or a wedge of orange, and it’s spectacular in the right glass. But it’s more versatile than that. It makes a gorgeous, blush-coloured French 75, a softer, fruitier Negroni, or a simple rhubarb sour if you’ve got a shaker and some egg white or aquafaba. Neat over ice after dinner, it behaves almost like a liqueur. And bottled up with a ribbon, it’s the homemade gift people actually want, which is the real reason to make a double batch. One to keep, one to give away, in theory.

Once strained and bottled, rhubarb gin keeps for up to a year in a cool, dark cupboard, the alcohol is doing the preserving, so it’s remarkably stable. Refrigerating isn’t essential but helps hold the colour and freshness a little longer, since that beautiful pink does gently fade with light and time. Which is one more argument for drinking it promptly, as if you needed one. For fuller detail on how gin itself is produced before you ever infuse it, my explainer on how gin is made is a good next read.

WRITTEN BY VIM, EDITOR OF 12×75. Please drink responsibly.