For all the trumpeting of English wine and brave talk of England’s flowering vineyards, beer and cider are Britain’s finest drinks. The odd good still and sparkling wine is harvested in England’s green and pleasant land – if we have a good spring and long Indian summer, that is. By comparison, there are rafts of great beers and ciders made all over the country year in year out, none of which is especially dependent on good weather, and each with its own distinctive taste and style. Just like wine, centuries of natural selection and experimentation with the right grains and hops, or apples, grown in the right place, combined with the local water and indigenous yeasts, have created unique British drinks.

Beer

The Romans probably brought viticulture, though possibly not the vine, to Britain after their invasion in AD43. Yet remains of grains and hops dating from prehistoric times, and evidence that the early Britons knew how to ferment a rough sort of beer, prove that British beer, not English wine, slaked the nation’s thirst first. But rather unfairly, wine, originally home-grown and then imported, became the drink of Britain’s ruling classes.

With such an ancient history and a return to traditional, locally grown British crops and produce, it is odd that great beer and cider continues to be mostly unsung, undervalued and underpriced. Compared with the stratospheric prices now being asked for fine wine, great British beer, at around 300 times cheaper than top-notch vintage claret, looks a bargain. Yet the image persists that beer is somehow a second-class drink. Bunkum. Beer is the only alcohol I order in a pub. And so devoted am I to real, cask-conditioned draught beer (and, luckily, I married someone who feels the same way) that entire weekends and holidays are planned round the real ale pubs we can call in at en route. I don’t just like beer, I love it. Yet people constantly express surprise that I drink it. How odd.

These days, with the enormous selection of beautiful bottle-conditioned beers on offer, bursting with all sorts of refreshing, bitter, hoppy, floral, fruity flavours, you don’t even have to go to the pub to enjoy real ale. And summer is the perfect time to get reacquainted with beer. No other drink is as refreshingly gulpable, complex and balanced as a great cask or bottle-conditioned beer, with just the right levels of bitter, hoppy flavours. Because of the extra yeast and sugar added before sale, cask and bottle-conditioned beers are still live and gently fermenting, and are very different from the evil, gassy, sterile lagers brewed here under licence, so make certain you are drinking the right beer.

Beer’s other great summer attraction is its delightful low alcohol content – at around 4 to 6 per cent, it is half that of wine, making it an ideal thirst-quencher on hot days. The new pale, low-alcohol beers are handy for those whose sporting pursuits come first, and the plethora of citrussy and blonde summer brews now ensures that perfect summer food and beer matches can easily be made.

I still drink India pale ale in the summer and tangy bitters too, as they work well with the sort of salady, cold meat and cheese lunches many of us relish at this time of year. Floral or fruity beers make great summer aperitifs, with Badger’s brilliant peppery, elderflower-charged Golden Champion Ale and its exotic peach-redolent Golden Glory two particular favourites of mine. Honey beers are the ones to serve at barbecues. The only beers that don’t work in the summer are heavy, malty offerings and the dark, strong porters and stouts.

Cider

Although British beer production easily outpaces and outnumbers cider, I have had a soft spot for cider ever since rough, earthy scrumpy enlivened my dreary Kent school-days. Times change and cider is no longer the hit-or-miss rural drink it once was, long on alcohol but short on finesse and flavour. Now British cider is increasingly becoming as sophisticated and cerebral a drink as wine, with specific regions, apples, styles and production methods spearheading its revival.

Cider’s renaissance has had a lot to do with older teenagers and twentysomethings wanting to find a different drink to down from the previous generation. Three summers ago, alcopops began to lose favour at last, and ice-cold, or “over ice” cider became the shout of choice for young drinkers. Cider is Britain’s fastest growing drinks category with an impressive 1 billion pints drunk annually.

Cider’s great summer strength is its glorious, refreshing, crisp, thirst-quenching, bittersweet apple quality. Hydrate and refresh yourself with a 12 or 13 per cent alcohol wine and you will fall over. Do the same with a 4 to 7 per cent alcohol cider and you will, eventually, just doze off in your deckchair. Wine needs to be sipped, not swigged, and in any case is best served cool, not palate-numbingly cold; cider takes happily to the big chill. One of cider’s least acknowledged attributes is that, unlike beer, its appealing, off-dry style works as well with young drinkers as it does with older folk and also makes a happy partner to the stronger, more assertive flavours of summer food, including blackened, spicy barbecued meats.

But the most exciting aspect of cider is its innovative, almost vinous identity. Just like single-varietal wine, single apple-based ciders have a distinction and pedigree all of their own. Thatchers at Sandford, Somerset, is the big name in single apple variety ciders with the levels of acidity, tannin and flavour that traditional ciders need, and jolly good most of them are too. Cleaner, more fruity, new wave single-variety ciders are also being made for the first time from cooking apples and eating apples such as Waitrose’s superb Cox’s Apple cider from Hampshire. Vintage dated ciders are another new development that, like wine, reflect the strength and weaknesses of a given year. Weston’s, from the Agatha Christie-sounding village of Much Marcle, Herefordshire, is the leader here, with its Henry Weston 8.2 per cent alcohol 2007 Vintage Cider almost wine-like in its intensity, while Weston’s newest own-label offering made for Waitrose has managed to trump its own version. It also produces impressive organic and low-alcohol ranges.

Lighter, fresher, more delicate ciders, made from pears and known as perry, are the latest development, and although I have yet to taste a really good one, by next summer Britain’s cider makers will no doubt have cracked this, too.

jane.macquitty@thetimes.co.uk

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