This Black Gin Cocktail is like Midnight in the Witch’s Garden on Halloween! This perfectly spooky drink is made with activated charcoal and blueberries to give this drink a creepy, black, and purple hue. Combine with gin, fresh lemon juice, muddled basil leaves, and diet ginger beer for a refreshing botanical drink. Enjoy these drinks that look like they came straight from a witch’s garden at midnight this Halloween!
Halloween is our absolute FAVORITE holiday, hands down! We live for the spooky season! If you're into it like us, we have plenty of fun and festive recipes that you can make to celebrate. This blueberry gin cocktail is a hit with its awesome dark hue. Super simple to make, and refreshing, and it certainly sets the spooky mood.
This drink is similar to our blackberry ginger gin smash, made a touch sweeter, and spookier. We want you to feel like you wound up with a cocktail in your hand after stumbling into a witch's garden at midnight. 😉
This recipe is refined sugar free, since it's made without any simple syrup. It's keto friendly, naturally gluten free and vegan. With fresh herbs, berries, and a few other simple ingredients, you're going to love how this easy and spooky cocktail comes together with minimal prep time.
This recipe is also available as a Google Web Story.
Ingredients:
- Basil leaves - Fresh basil to muddle and to garnish the drink. You could use fresh mint instead if you prefer.
- Fresh blueberries - Frozen can also be used as well.
- Lemon juice - Freshly squeezed is best.
- Dry gin - Whatever you prefer here.
- Activated charcoal powder - Technically optional, but this is obviously what gives the drink the dark black hue. If you want to enjoy this drink outside of Halloween, feel free to just leave it out.
- Diet ginger beer - You can use diet ginger ale instead if you prefer, or even some club soda or sparkling water. Keep in mind that the diet ginger beer is where the sweetness comes in, so if you replace it, you may need to add some sweetener to compensate.
- Ice - For the cocktail shaker and for the glass.
How To Make This Spooky Halloween Cocktail:
Gently muddle about 8 basil leaves per drink in the bottom of each highball glass. Set glasses aside.
In a cocktail shaker, the blueberries, muddle well.
Pour in your gin and the activated charcoal.
Give the mixture a good stir with the bar spoon.
Fill the cocktail shaker with ice, shake for about 30 seconds until cold. Add ice to the glasses, then double strain the mixture into both glasses.
Top off the glasses with the diet ginger beer.
Garnish with fresh basil. Serve, be spooky, and enjoy!
Activated charcoal is a superfine and odorless black powder. It's made from heating carbon rich materials like wood, coconut shells, peat and more at very high temperatures. It's super easy to add to this drink to make it perfect for Halloween.
This cocktail would be great all year long, but adding activated charcoal to it creates an amazingly creepy drink.
Even if you don't have activated charcoal on hand, this drink would probably still work well for Halloween because of the muddled blueberries, that create a rich purple hue.
As far as we know, activated charcoal is totally safe to ingest!
Now we aren't really able to give medical advice or anything like that, and activated charcoal is kind of a hot topic right now in the food world.
We have heard that this drink can even help you from getting a hangover due to its purification properties, but we don't know the validity of this claim. You can read more about activated charcoal here!
We used a dry gin for this recipe. You want the botanical flavors to shine through. If you aren't a fan of gin, we don't see any reason why you couldn't use rum, tequila or vodka. Choose something that suits your palate. We used Bombay Sapphire for this drink.
You can use fresh or frozen berries for this Blueberry Gin Cocktail. This time, we used fresh, because we had them on hand. Sometimes we use opt for frozen blueberries instead! We often have some that we handpicked on adventures to Traverse City, Michigan!
We'd recommend warming frozen berries up for a few seconds in the microwave before muddling just to get them to release some of those juices easily.
Traditional ginger beer is a sweet and carbonated. It does not contain alcohol (think root beer), but it's a common mixer with alcohol. Historically it's made by the natural fermentation of ginger, yeast and sugar.
Diet ginger beer sadly contains no fermentation, but is a carbonated beverage with a strong ginger flavor.
We get a lot of questions about the ginger beer we use in our recipes. If you're low carb or low sugar, we have included some of our recommendations below.
Our favorite brand is Diet Goslings. Drink Reed's is another good option, and we find at Trader Joe's. It's sweetened with erythritol, making it probably the cleanest option on the market.
We've heard that Zevia makes diet ginger beer as well, but haven't had the chance to try it yet.
You can also probably find diet Barritt's ginger beer at a store near you, or on Amazon. If you can't find diet ginger beer, we think you could use diet ginger ale, but you might need to add a bit of sugar free simple syrup.
Making a ginger spiced sugar free is super simple, by simply boiling and infusing some water with ginger, then combining it with your favorite sugar free sweetener.
Start by boiling fresh ginger or powdered ginger with some water to infuse the flavor. Once the water has a strong ginger flavor, stir in some sweetener to dissolve.
Use 1 and ⅓ cups sweetener for 1 cup hot ginger water, then stir to dissolve. We opt for allulose when making simple syrups, since it will not crystallize after getting cold.
We're hoping this is a simple and close substitute for diet ginger beer, but it's hard to replicated that spicy, fermented ginger taste that ginger beer provides!
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More Recipes To Try:
- Death By Chocolate Keto Pumpkin Brownies
- Purple People Eater Cocktail
- Low Carb Vampire Bite Cupcakes
If you get a chance to try this spooky cocktail recipe, let us know what you think, would ya?! Leave us a comment, or catch up with us on Facebook or Instagram, or pin to your favorite Pinterest board for later. We love sharing your versions of our creations over on Instagram @afullliving!
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Until next time,
Briana & Chamere
📖 Recipe
Spooky Black Gin Cocktail
Ingredients
- 8 grams basil leaves (about 16 basil leaves)
- 40 grams blueberries, fresh or frozen
- 2 ounces lemon juice
- 4 ounces gin
- ½ teaspoon activated charcoal powder
- 1 can diet ginger beer
- ice
- Garnish with basil
Instructions
- Gently muddle about 8 basil leaves per drink in the bottom of each highball glass. Set glasses aside.
- In a cocktail shaker, the blueberries, muddle well.
- Pour your fresh squeezed lemon juice, gin and activated cocktail into the shaker. Stir the mixture with a bar spoon.
- Fill the cocktail shaker with ice, and shake well for 30 seconds, until shaker is cold. Double strain into glasses filled with ice, then top off the drinks with diet ginger beer.
- Garnish with fresh basil.
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