It’s going to be hot in the UK for the next 2 or 3 days. Consumption of cold drinks will increase accordingly. So what’s your favourite tipple, alcoholic or otherwise to cool you down on a hot day?
I’m quaffing a glass of sparkling Highland Spring as we speak. Ice cold from the fridge, with a dash of Robinson’s Mini Focus – lemon, lime and ginseng. There’s no more refreshing drink. Or is there? After some strenuous lounging about in the sun later (yes, I know we need the rain) I may succumb to a glass of ice cold Sauvignon Blanc.
Drinks are on me. What’s yours?
My mother always used to say best drink for a hot day was tea. I like ice cold water
She was absolutely right, I always have a large mug of Yorkshire Tea, whatever the weather.
Yesterday it was 36 deg C in Ottawa, I did drink some tea, but what really cooled me down was swimming in the river. Lovely.
Tea does cool you down. Presumably why tea , in various forms, is still popular in India.
Masala chai is one of life’s great things.
I have prepared Robinsons Peach and raspberry in the fridge col as cold can be
Builder’s tea, luv – no sugar, I’m sweet enough already. Hahaha.
Are you finished wiv that Sun, mate?
We had a couple of weeks of over 30 degrees not long ago here in Sweden. This morning at 7 am it was only 9. Went to our go to beach, never mind the horseflies. The water was about 24. Had a cool bag with us containing, amongst other things, iced coffee, which is ideal in such temperatures. Needs to be white, a bit sweet.
In Greece I find a large ice cold beer works best.
Define scorcher please. Min max humidity and feels like temp.
We get heat warnings here when the temperature plus humidity makes it feel like temp is in the 40s. Highest this year was 47 I think which may have been record breaking. Probably a bit lower in the UK
Well, a UK scorcher is around 30 degrees Celsius, usually enough for the popular press to get its collective knickers in a twist. Obviously higher temperatures are available elsewhere in the world, but our British heatwaves are more modest knotted hanky on the bonce affairs.
Lime and soda with ice.
Or on the increasingly rare occasions I want a cold beer then a bottle of chilled Leffe. I can’t drink more than two of those though. I feel bloated very quickly and will burp like a bullfrog then fall asleep.
I’ll stick with the lime and soda then.
Ginger kombucha, ice cold. Cools you with a kick. Not used it as a mixer, yet, but tempted to.
Cool, clear water.
…as opposed to cocktails of every hue and description?
At home, my preferred hot weather drink is chilled half-and-half red grape juice (not from concentrate*) and filtered tap water. Out and about it’s either a slightly-chilled IPA or the old trusty lime and soda.
*Currently, Sainsbury’s own not-from-concentrate grape juice (the one I usually get) is completely out of stock in this area. All they can offer instead is Welch’s grape juice,which is from concentrate and tastes rather unpleasant. And costs twice as much.
Sons of pioneers are hungry men…
I’ve been straight edge for many years … I enjoy a shrub. Fruit vinegar and sugar mixed with sparkling water or tonic. Perhaps blackberry.
Oh, that does sound nice. I shall seek out a shrub
I’m on a one man mission to bring back the shrub … from the days before refrigeration smugglers would add it to barrels that had been kept offshore after the salt had seeped in. You can still buy rum and shrub in some Bristol and Cornish pubs. Recipes on the net easy to make with sloes and blackberry being good. Some people have a spoonful or two neat as a morning pick me up but also good with water lemonade tonic or drizzled on salad or meat. Apple is very good with whisky too they tell me.
I’m going to make a jar of cold -brewed coffee overnight in the fridge to see me through.
Now there’s a thought…
Worked wonderfully, strained through the aeropress. Unfortunately the weather doesn’t seem to have played ball though the sun is breaking through the clouds now.
Hubes, erm, what exactly is cold brewed coffee?
I’m imagining there’s a bit more to it then coffee that has gone cold…
Simplicity itself, put grounds in a jar put in the fridge go to bed, sleep and it’s ready to drink in the morning.
There’s lots of recipes on line but that’s mine and basically that’s all the recipes say. Even the bitter taste from cheaper coffee is improved as it eliminates the bitterness.
We have one of these:
https://www.cremashop.se/en/products/hario/filter-in-coffee-bottle/2137?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=PerformanceMaxSE_HM&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21634345169&gclid=Cj0KCQjwzOvEBhDVARIsADHfJJS_jfn5573vMcfDxVMftDDt3gQgykWxbGMl4NO82PUr9p6C73sg75gaAtEjEALw_wcB
So, no water then??
Just spoon it straight from the jar and chew.
I don’t suggest water as I always follow W C Fields advice about water.
But yes of course water.
Totally agree on tea and water. But if a drink is called for, a bottle of Aspel’s Organic Cider is heaven.
Besides the obvious (a decent Czech lager or similar), our go to recently has been the Aparol Spritz. Aparol, Prossecco, and a dash of soda over loads of ice with slices of orange to garnish. We got into them big time in Italy earlier this year.
One of the ingredients of Aperol is rhubarb which reminds me I made this for our wedding ‘rhabarberschorle’ diluted it’s a very refreshing summer drink made from unsurprisingly rhubarb.
Oddly enough I first saw Aperol being drunk in Florence on honeymoon and wondered what this orange drink was. Very refreshing.
Likewise I ordered and drank Aperol before I knew what it was on a visit to Venice. Everyone around me was enjoying large glasses of orange drink so when the waiter asked I just pointed and said, ‘Cosi’.
I heard a lot of talk about that drink but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
A pitcher of refrigerated water with lots of ice cubes and some cubed watermelon plonked in for a fresh, only slightly sweet taste. Yum!
Here, height of summer is usually circling the 42 mark. Refereeing in that temperature in the evening is touch.
For immediate relief, cold – so, Coke Zero of any flavour, or chilled water if there’s nothing else.
To enjoy and get relief: crispy beer, or Coke Zero, or Kirks Sugar Free Creaming Soda.
For savouring: a mammoth G&T from one of the many wonderful Australian distilleries. Maybe FeverTree, maybe SodaSmith from Tassie.
We Aussies are generally scornful of British notions of heatwave and drought. However, that said, I arrived in London in summer in 1983 from Morocco having travelled through West Africa and I found the heat in London stifling- oppressive mugginess.
London in a heatwave is hotter than anything I’ve experienced here in NZ. But here we have far more nice, sunny days and a cool sea breeze is never very far away.
London always swelters in summer. It lives under a dome of polluted air covering the whole of the conurbation sprawl that is basically most of the south east of England. It’s a sweaty city.
Getting worse too. Joyfully, the clay on which it sits and the Underground is carved from is of a type that retains heat over time. Measured at an average of 14 degrees Celsius by the original Victorian builders, it’s now at 26 degrees. (This from a post by the estimable Prof. Hannah Fry)
As a bronchial asthmatic the Tube, efficient and highly convenient as it is, struck me as one giant germ incubator. Hot and stale air.
Maybe it is better now.
It depends where you as air con is very limited, and notably isn’t present on the Central and Northern Lines which might welcome it most.
https://secretldn.com/air-conditioning-tube-map/
Something I was reading a few weeks ago:
Passengers have long complained that in summer heat, trains on the deep tube lines should be air-conditioned. The problem with that is that train aircon pumps out hot air while cooling the carriages, which would make the tunnels even hotter than they currently are, thus requiring a lot more energy to cool the carriages. Or there would have to be extra ventilation shafts bored on the deeper underground lines such as the Northern and Central.
Yes, I’ve read similar over the years too.
My feeling, and the advice I would give as an individual obliged to use the services over the past 30 years is; Bore. The. Fucking. Holes.
Here it is.
London. It’s big and sweaty
I’m not really sure the thought of a sweaty Hannah Fry is what I need on a day like today.
Umm…err…gulp…
Apart from being my fave Ginger, she went to the girl’s school* across town from the Comp. I attended, albeit 14 years later. Checking Wiki, I was an undergrad fresher when she started primary school. Jeez.
(*) where my mum was also a pupil, when it was still a Grammar
A bit hot under the collar perchance.
I’ve just had a Magnum Classic to calm me down.
Said Hannah.
83 was pretty hot all over Europe, I was inter-railing
Used to love a cider with ice. Can’t be doing with the bloating feeling and near instant headache it gives me these days. Never used to feel like that, must be an age thing.
This post has made me ponder what to drink when I’m meeting some old work colleagues in a pub beer garden tomorrow. I’m usually a real ale guy, but this pub has been chosen because it’s handy for the station and that beer garden rather than the choice of ale. It’s forecast to be hot too, so it will probably be a couple if Guinness 0 to maintain the image of convivial boozing.
Since living down under I have grown to appreciate the care taken to deliver an ice cold beer. I know it’s a cliche but a really cold beer at a barbie is triffic – it touches the hem of Jesus Christ’s cloak.
If you have a summer gathering and you haven’t chilled the beer enough, You’ll have to go out and buy some cold ones.
One thing I love about having beers in some (all?) Mediterranean countries is when they bring the glass out of the freezer – nothing worse than a cold beer in a warm glass!
Off tangent, but I have had two German friends react with shock at my purchasing a small fan for my bedroom. It’s around 30 degrees today in Berlin and I am not a fan of sweltering, sleepless nights. A fan quietly oscillating away near the door makes things so much more pleasant. Yet one person told me I was mad to have a fan in my bedroom – “the noise- how will you sleep” and the other reckoning lying awake sweating like a pig should be “all part of the summer experience”
I’m with you on this. I have an air circulator fan in my bedroom. It’s whisper quiet and I use voice control via an echo dot to control it. Why endure uncomfortable nights when you don’t need to do so?
We live in a tropical country with 30+ degC days and often at least 25degC at night. We have air conditioners but unless it is really really hot (which happens a few times a year) we try not to use as it makes the air very dry and so you wake up with a very dry mouth.
As such we have a couple of standing fans in the bedroom and windows open (with slotted blinds to maintain airflow). Noise wise, I don’t really see as a problem (guess I got used to it) but I still don’t like the fan blowing directly at me (my wife does) so it has to be on “rotate” mode.
I would prefer to replace with a huge ceiling fan like we have in the living room, but for some reason the wife thinks it will fall on us whilst sleeping.
Pimms No. 1 cup. A pint with 1 part to 4 of lemonade and tons of ice. The usual fruit mix is cucumber, orange and strawberry but there are a few variations, including one with champagne instead of lemonade. It’s a classic for a reason.
Pimms counts towards your five a day fruit intake.
I use also use frozen fruit instead of ice cubes and a touch of mint.
Ah yes, I forgot mint. Even more refreshinger.
The previous hot spell, a little while back, had me pouring sweat at the slightest physical effort* and living very close to my electric fan. This current spell doesn’t seem to be affecting me as much, which is inexplicable but good news.
*Chewing food. Putting clothes on to go out. Typing at a keyboard.
Yes, I think the humidity is lower this time round. I have yet to switch my fan on.
6am: get up, open all the windows and doors. Fill house with cool (~16C) air.
8am: close them all, close curtains.
rest of the day: sit in the cool dark and type nonsense at strangers.
Having a modern (20-y-o) house with lots of insulation helps.
There’s a bit of the slow-boiling frog thing going on, but generally it has been OK this week.
I see there are a few comments from ex-pats and people living abroad pointing out that it’s far hotter in many other places. Something you tend to see whenever there is a relative heatwave in the UK.
What I have seen and heard for the first time this year are comments from people from relatively hot countries complaining about the heat in the UK. You don’t have to look far on social media to find people from America saying things like ‘ I always thought they were moaning about nothing, but know I am here, it’s a furnace ‘.
On a more personal level, I work with people from Hong Kong and Hyderabad in central Southern India, all of whom were complaining about the heat in June. And my friends from Kerala, who now live in Eastbourne.
I am puzzled. It’s not even been that humid this year.
Any theories ?