Lancashire has earned its reputation for real ale, craft beer and proper cider, and rightly so. But walk into any family gathering from Preston to the Ribble Valley and you will find a good number of people in the driving seat, on medication, expecting, or simply not drinking. Too often they are handed a lukewarm bottle from the back of the fridge and left to get on with it.
That is a wasted opportunity. The same care a brewer gives to a brew — fresh ingredients, clean equipment, a bit of patience — transforms soft drinks entirely. Hedgerow fruit, garden herbs and a well-stocked spice drawer will carry you through the year, from forced rhubarb in February to sloes in October, with something genuinely worth pouring at every table.
A cordial is the workhorse of the soft drinks shelf. The classic ratio is roughly equal weights of fruit, sugar and water, though a good working formula is 500g prepared fruit, 400g sugar and 600ml water. Simmer gently until the fruit collapses, mash it about, then strain through a double layer of muslin without squeezing too hard — squeezing clouds the syrup.
Add the juice of a lemon to every batch. It sharpens the flavour and helps the colour hold. Bottle into sterilised jars and keep in the fridge, where it will last three to four weeks. Dilute one part cordial to five or six parts water, still or sparkling.
A shrub is a drinking vinegar, and once you have made one you will wonder why it is not on every bar in the county. The cold method is easiest. Weigh your fruit, cover it with the same weight of sugar, and leave it in a covered bowl for 24 to 48 hours until the sugar has drawn out a deep, syrupy juice.
Strain, then stir in an equal volume of vinegar — apple cider vinegar for soft fruit, white wine vinegar for anything delicate. Raspberry and thyme, blackberry and sage, plum and star anise all work beautifully. Dilute one part shrub to five parts sparkling water, or top up with a good tonic for something drier.
Shrubs keep for six months or more in the fridge, which makes them the ideal thing to have standing by when guests arrive unannounced.
If you want bubbles without buying them, a ginger bug is the place to start. Stir two tablespoons of grated ginger and two tablespoons of sugar into 500ml of water, then feed it daily with the same quantities for five to seven days until it froths and smells pleasantly yeasty.
To brew, dissolve 100g of sugar in a litre of water, add 30g of grated ginger and the juice of a lemon, cool to room temperature, then stir in 100ml of the strained bug. Bottle in flip-tops and leave at room temperature for two to three days, opening the lid daily to release pressure. Do check one bottle after 24 hours — a plastic bottle squeezed in the hand gives you a good sense of how much fizz has built up. Once it is lively, move it to the fridge, where it will keep for a fortnight.
Water kefir is another gentle route into fermented soft drinks, giving a mildly tart, slightly fizzy base that takes beautifully to elderflower or rhubarb cordial. For something simpler, make a lemonade base of 200ml lemon juice, 150g sugar and a litre of water, chill it hard, and top with soda at the table.
Come Bonfire Night, the soft drink offering usually collapses into tea. It need not. Mulled apple juice is every bit as satisfying as the alcoholic version: a litre of cloudy juice, a cinnamon stick, four cloves, a star anise, a few slices of orange and a knob of ginger, warmed gently for twenty minutes. Keep it just below a simmer — boil it and the fruit turns flat and stewed.
A spoonful of blackcurrant cordial in hot water with lemon is a fine thing on a wet Tuesday. Spiced damson cordial, thinned with hot water, tastes like autumn in a mug. And if you grow mint, lemon verbena or lemon balm, a handful steeped in freshly boiled water for five minutes makes a clean, bright infusion that costs nothing at all.
Keep a jug of something good on the table at every gathering and nobody is left nursing a warm bottle in the corner. That, more than anything, is what a proper Lancashire welcome tastes like.
Lancashire Beverages shares practical, down-to-earth guidance on lancashire drinks culture, covering real ale, craft beer, hot drinks, cider, soft drinks and home brewing. for readers across the UK.
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