If you’re already hoarding Kilner jars like a culinary Smaug, there’s no harm in adding a few glass bottles to your collection…
There’s nothing quite as unexciting as a UK supermarket soft drinks aisle. Five different versions of Coke and Pepsi, a row of suspiciously vibrant-coloured fruit squashes and an array of tonics and fizzy drinks largely intended to be used as mixers with alcohol (or to nurse a hangover the next day). Depending on the supermarket you might also find a bottle of elderflower cordial or cans of kombucha – each of these will be priced similarly to liquid gold. To top it off the aisle will also invariably be tucked in a dingy far-off corner of the shop, just to add to the experience.
People who want to drink less alcohol often find it hard in this country. I’m pretty certain that one of the main reasons for this is the lack of variety available as an alternative. It’s particularly galling in restaurants and pubs – where a Diet Coke (which will usually be one of the few available non-alcoholic options) will set you back almost as much as a beer or small glass of wine. You can either have a ‘proper’ drink or a can of sugar/chemicals and internally seethe at being ripped off.
I have no way to avoid being ripped off in restaurants unfortunately, but one thing you definitely can do is to start making drinks at home rather than buying them. This is something I started doing in the past year, sparked by my experiments with fermented drinks. It’s not only been really fun to learn about new methods, but also enhanced my diet and brought strong, fresh flavours to many meals.
How to make great drinks
When you’re extracting flavours to make a drink, this (literally) boils down to boiling an ingredient – usually a fruit or leaf – to draw the flavour into the water. The ingredient(s) you’re using are then strained from the water and the remaining liquid is heated with some additional sugar before being bottled and cooled. You almost certainly make an extracted drink every day in the form of a cup of coffee (although likely leaving out the bottling and cooling part).
The two primary drinks I make using this method are fruit squashes and elderflower cordial. The former of these has become a staple in my fridge because it’s easy and very cheap to make year-round. To make a litre of squash I add 600ml of water to 1kg of frozen mixed fruit, boil for around half an hour, strain out the fruit, add 500g of caster sugar to the liquid and dissolve this over high heat for a couple of minutes. After this I pour the squash into a sterilised glass bottle and leave it to cool.
With elderflower cordial the flavour comes from freshly picked elderflowers – which, unfortunately, are harder to come by and more seasonal than frozen fruit. If you can get your hands on some then you need first to pick the flowers off the stalks (you’ll need about 15 stalks worth of flowers for a litre), combine them in a bowl with the zest and juice of 2 lemons, and then pour 700ml of boiling water into the bowl with the flowers and citrus.
Leave this for a few hours (ideally overnight), then strain out the flowers, add 500g of caster sugar and bring the liquid to the boil while dissolving the sugar. As with the squash, simply pour this into a sterilised bottle and leave it to cool before storing in the fridge or a cupboard.
Why you should do it
The reason I would recommend making extracted drinks is that they taste real. The fruit squash tastes like fruit, with added complexity coming from the hints of whichever different fruits you combine when making it (the sweetest squashes I’ve made have more raspberries and strawberries, the most bitter have more small berries such as cranberries). Likewise, the elderflower cordial tastes fresh and summery in a way that I’ve never experienced with mass produced versions. Put simply, the squash tastes fruity and the cordial tastes floral, without any hint of artificiality.
This lack of artificiality also means I tend to drink less of my home-made concoctions than I would with their store-bought equivalents. These drinks feel substantial: they’re thick and flavourful without being syrupy. In some ways the process of preparing fruit squash is akin to making a thin jam, and when you think about it in this way it’s easy to understand why a glass feels more a part of a meal than a side-show to it.
These home-made drinks also have a more vibrant sweetness – interestingly lacking any of the sickly qualities I’ve often found present in sugary soft drinks. I say “interestingly” because the drinks I make undeniably have a lot of sugar in them. Indeed, one of the main things I’ve learned through making drinks at home is how much sugar we’re accustomed to drinking. It’s in no way a new observation to say “fizzy drinks have lots of sugar” – but when you’ve just finished making a drink with half a kilo of the stuff and it tastes less sweet than other drinks you’re used to, it really brings home the scale.
One of the joys I find in cooking more generally is that it gives me an understanding of what I’m actually eating – particular highlights include cycling all over London to find a specific vinegar and having a revelatory moment in relation to a jar of tahini. My experience making more drinks has turned into a voyage of discovery about sugar and the way it’s often hidden in even what might on the surface seem like healthy diets.
We need to talk about soft drinks
There’s a real culture of discussing the depth of flavour in relation to drinks – but interestingly this is limited very much to alcoholic drinks. This is particularly true of wine and whisky, but the recent growth in popularity of craft beer and microbreweries has seen many people approach beer in a similar way.
Outside of coffee, we simply don’t see this care and attention being applied to soft drinks. Juices, fizzy drinks and squashes are often infantilised and marketed very directly at children. Even fancier and more expensive brands like Cawston Press are selling their products in small juice boxes with straws.
A friend of mine recently tried some of my home-made water kefir and remarked that it was “a grown up drink.” I saw immediately what he meant: the bitter fermented taste balanced with the tanginess of the blueberries made the drink interesting and different – more than ‘just’ a soft drink.
This interaction has stuck with me as I don’t feel we often treat soft drinks as “grown up drinks” – as something worth paying attention to and appreciating as one might a glass of wine. I feel if we did then more people would care about the flavours and craft put into making all drinks – not just the alcoholic ones.
Appreciating the flavours of soft drinks as part of my meals has led me to start experimenting with them in ways I’ve never thought to do before. I can’t help but think cafes, restaurants and pubs would be better places if the available soft drinks had more variety (and lower prices). Plus it would make Dry January a hell of a lot easier.
