James Murphy of the band LCD Soundsystem is to launch his own brand of coffee, but he’s not the first musician to be lured by the beverage

Should we be surprised that LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy is trading his beats for beans and planning to launch his own brand of coffee? Not really – the surprise is that someone usually so ahead of the curve would have left it this long. After all, Will Oldham announced his own Bonny Billy Blend of coffee in January (overtones of “chocolate, leather and non-wacky tobaccy”, apparently). And David Lynch, who released his debut album last year, has his signature on bags of coffee sold through his website.

Mr Scruff’s organic English Breakfast tea was a labour of love, involving trips to Assam to choose the leaves. Moby founded a Lower East Side teahouse called Teany (teaNY, get it?), and Billy Corgan wants to follow in his footsteps by opening one in Chicago, making opening teahouses a favourite pastime of annoying bald musicians from the 90s.

Why warm beverages? The obvious answer would be that it’s just an expensive folly, the credit-crunch equivalent of Roger Daltrey’s trout farm. But having tried both Lynch’s coffee and Mr Scruff’s tea, I can confirm that both are fine products, so maybe they are on to something. Are you listening, Lady Gaga? There’s a gap in the chai market you’re not exploiting here.

A simple salted crisp is a fine thing. Why do manufacturers insist in drenching their latest creations in weird-tasting chemicals?

Following their horribly named “Do us a flavour” marketing campaign of a couple of years ago, Walkers have just announced a new irritating gimmick – what’s that flavour? – introducing three “mystery” crisp flavours for the public to identify. I’ve just tried them. Packet A tastes of salt and stale milk, and a glance at the ingredients reveals it contains “mystery dairy seasoning”. Packet B smells of concentrated tomato syrup and tastes of dried blood (that’ll be the suitable-for-vegetarians “mystery meaty seasoning”); while packet C is vaguely curried and yoghurty and may turn out to be chicken tikka masala (it has pictures of chicken breast, chillies and coriander on the packet “for inspiration”).

I pine – don’t you? – for a time when crisps were just crisps. Why this need to take nice shards of fried potato and dust them in weird chemicals that never resemble what they’re supposed to? Walkers have decked their latest packets in pictures of fresh sage, chives, ripe tomatoes, crumbly parmesan and – good God – yellow peppers. This is presumably supposed to make the crisps look more upmarket, but it just seems grasping and odd.

“Posh crisps are the biggest scam of our time,” said Jay Rayner a while back. Four quid is too much for a small sachet of fried potatoes, even if the spuds have been “fried in extra virgin olive oil” (a stupid idea) or “dusted with pink Himalayan rock salt” (posh salt being an even worse scam than posh crisps). India Knight is another journalist who can’t abide expensive chips. They’re “annoyingly crispy,” she says, “so there’s no meltiness at any point, only these spiky shards – and to me they taste overwhelmingly of stale oil … Crisps are fried potatoes. They are not a thing that needs to be faffed about with.”

The trend for fancy flavoured crisps began in the 1950s with the appearance of then-exciting flavours like cheese and onion or salt and vinegar. Rayner Banham’s delightful essay The Crisp at the Crossroads, written in 1970, explains the rapid changes British crisps were undergoing at that time, how advances in packaging and processing were making possible new flavours and longer shelflife, and increasing profits for manufacturers. “The old basic salted crisp,” Banham wrote, “has lost almost half the market to new fancy flavours”.

The situation has only worsened. High-end crisps – this should be an oxymoron – seem unable to stay happy as cheese and onion or salt and vinegar, but powder themselves instead in the supposed aromas of Parmesan and shallot, or balsamic vinegar and Alaskan sea salt. Many posh crisps, with their airs and refinement, seem to insinuate the cost renders them somehow less unhealthy than cheap ones. (And a baked crisp is no crisp at all.) Most loathsome of all are those crisp flavours that seek to shake off their snacky heritage and try instead to imitate proper dishes: chicken chow mein, roast beef and yorkshire pudding, or scallops with coriander foam.

Knight calls Walkers’ ready salted “an honest crisp”. The market leader makes 11m packets a day and, somewhat worryingly, is the most recognised brand of any kind among children aged seven to 15 (above The Simpsons, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and the Wii). Plain Walkers are excellent crisps – pleasantly flimsy, if a mite oversalted. But even before this new adventure in flavour experimentation, their “Sunbites” range featured the likes of sun-ripened sweet chilli and sour cream with cracked black pepper. Yeurgh.

I went to the Burts factory in Devon a couple of years ago – there’s a truly gripping video of me stirring the crisps here – and though I was sure the owners made a decent crisp, I’m still unconvinced that lobster or bloody mary are acceptable flavourings for them. Tyrrells are nothing special. I admit to a fondness for the firm crunch of a Kettle Chip, for the way those crisps wriggle and curl like scratchings, and for that company’s relatively green credentials. But a simple crisp is a fine and perfect thing. It needs no adornment other than salt. It should stand proudly as a democratic, egalitarian food, enjoyed by anyone – not as some shibboleth of lifestyle, wealth or taste. What other food is so meet and fitting in that other great leveller, the British pub?

The sap won’t be rising for a few weeks, but when it does you need to be ready to tap it

Nothing in the forager’s calendar is more seasonal than birch sap. Blackberries, wild garlic and most other wild foods are around for months; with birch sap you have two weeks, three at the most. In Dorset, where I live, it is approximately the middle two weeks of March, but it can be slightly earlier or later, depending on the weather. It may seem a little early to talk about it now but you do need to be prepared for birch tapping – mentally, physically and administratively – so I am giving you a head start.

I am going to come clean. I do not see the point of birch sap wine. With most alcoholic drinks the ingredients are there to provide the flavour or the sugar and sometimes both. Birch sap wine contains very little of either so it cannot do these things – it just supplies the water. But I know that a lot of people swear by the stuff and will disagree with my dismissal of what they consider to be a first class wine. If you like birch sap wine let me know and tell me why I am wrong. No, really.

Having said all that, I do love collecting birch sap so, apart from the odd batch of wine to remind myself how right I am, I make birch sap syrup to pour on my pancakes. I boil the fresh sap down until half of the water has gone, then transfer to a bain-marie (to stop it “burning”) and continue until only 10% is left. I then strain out all the bits through some muslin and add sugar to form the syrup. You can reduce it all the way to a syrup (less than 2% of what you started with!) without adding the sugar but the flavour is far too strong and bitter for most people.

So how do you go about collecting this arcane ingredient? First, of course, you will need to find some mature silver birch trees with trunks at least 25cm in diameter (downy birch won’t work) and obtain permission to drill holes in them from the owner – not always easy. (The ones outside the Tate Modern in London are too small, by the way).

You’ll also need some kit. A hand drill and drill bit, a bucket to collect the sap (I sometimes use a four litre milk container with a hole strategically cut in the side near the top), some tapered wooden plugs (candle waxed at the sharper end to seal them), a mallet and something to carry the sap home in.

You will also need some spigots or spiles. These are virtually impossible to obtain in the UK so you will have to find them online from Canada or the US where they are uses for sugar maple tapping. You can rig up something with tubes and pipes but I have never been able to stop it all leaking. Check, using a scrap of wood, that your plugs and spiles tightly match the drill bit you will be taking with you.

Off to the woods. Drill a slightly upward slanting 5cm deep hole into your chosen tree at waist height. If nothing comes out when you are half way in, the tree is dry. Stop drilling, hammer in a plug and try another tree. After three no-shows it will be worth waiting another week. If all is well, hammer in a spile, hook on your bucket through the little hole you will have made in the rim and cover it. Come back the next day to collect your sap – if you are lucky you will get about two to three litres from each tree. Very carefully plug the holes – if you don’t the sap will continue to flow and the poor tree may not recover from this added insult.

Birch sap tastes almost exactly like water – but the freshest water you have ever tasted, with just a hint of sweetness (0.7% sugar is the highest I have ever found). It does not keep very long – about four days in the fridge – so use it as soon as you can. Here is how you make the wine.

4.5 litres of birch sap
200ml white grape juice concentrate
Juice from two lemons
1.2 kg white sugar
Sachet white wine yeast
Yeast nutrient – follow instructions on packet

Gently heat the sap in a pan with the lid on to 75C and keep at that temperature for 20 minutes. Take off the heat and stir in the sugar until it is dissolved. Closely cover the pan and allow to cool. Transfer to a fermentation bucket and add the lemon juice, grape juice concentrate, yeast and yeast nutrients.

Keep the bucket closely covered for five days then siphon into a demi-john, fit the bubble-trap and leave for about two months. Rack-off into a fresh demi-john and bottle when it is all nice and clear. This stuff goes bad for a pastime, so be extra careful making sure everything is sterile and the bottles well sealed.

The flavour? Light, dry, fruity, with a faint piquancy of wet paper bag.

Cookery books thankfully no longer have ‘invalid cookery’ chapters but food has always been used to combat colds and bugs. We turn to soup but have you considered savoury jellies?

Once upon a time, most general cookery books included chapters on “invalid cookery”, conjuring images of valetudinarians, coaxed into spooning up bowlfuls of thin gruels, arrowroot jelly and sago milk pudding. I thought of this recently when my family were beset with endless rounds of colds and bugs. Modern cookery books aren’t much help – recipes are either too rich and indulgent or focus on specific diseases, with little on general illness. So I find myself supplementing advice from mother and aunt with that from the older books.

Colds aren’t so hard – adults are happy with toddies, soup and anything spicy, my mother-in-law keeps me supplied with Johar Joshanda which is better than any Lemsip, and the kids love fruity, honey sweetened jellies and sorbets. It’s harder to find nutritous food for stomachs upset by medication or gastroenteritis. The general advice is solid common sense. Don’t ask your patient what they want – choose easily digested food you know they like. Avoid unexpected textures – gristle, bone, lumps. Small, varied portions are best, think tempting morsels. My mother was brilliant at this and an expert at arranging a tray – I try to do the same for my family now.

The recipes in the books I looked at had changed little from the 1700s to the 1950s. There are strange omissions – potatoes (good for bland starchiness) don’t get a look in, which I find odd, as they are the first thing I want to eat when ill (crisps, chips or mash). Honey is almost always overlooked in favour of sugar. Herbs, spices and vegetables are under-used. One of the few references to curry comes from the pseudonymous Mistress Dods and contains a healthy amount of garlic, chilli, ginger and turmeric. Few specific illnesses are addressed, although Hannah Glasse bizarrely offers a sage liquor for treating thrush in children.

Many dishes don’t suit the modern palate; tripe, gruels, milk puddings (also not good fare for phlegmy colds) feature frequently, as do some very odd combinations – Agnes Jekyll recommends a lunch of toast, spread with chestnut puree, topped with slices of pheasant and garnished with gravy and warmed plums. At least this has flavour, but I find it is unpalatable as Mrs Beeton’s toast sandwich – I prefer instead Marguerite Patten’s marmite or bone marrow on toast. Incidentally, Marguerite Patten is a great believer in Vitamin B rich marmite – she also adds it to milk and soup as it helps “combat the fatigue of illness” and gives flavour to otherwise bland food. I would add that anything umami can help increase a listless appetite.

All the books acknowledge that fluids are key with any illness, so I tried a few variations. Barleywater was the surprise hit – it’s cheap and simple to make and soothing on the stomach, especially if you don’t add lemon. Whey turned out to be a good alternative when milk was too rich. Soups, jellies, custards are perfect for slipping down easily, though chicken soup – seen as a universal panacea – is trumped by the cookery writers back then by beef tea. I prefer chicken but beef tea (really beef broth) is excellent if you are self-medicating – turn it into bullshot with a good glug of vodka.

My other main success was savoury jellies. When I mention them the majority reaction is disgust. I have no idea why – they are restorative, sustaining and championed by some of my favourite chefs (Fergus Henderson’s trotter gear, Simon Hopkinson’s chicken in aspic) and a cooling alternative to soup. The children in my family had no preconceptions and loved them, especially a beef one I coloured with beetroot. My absolute favourite takes Jewish penicillin to its xenith – Fanny Cradock tells us to smash up some chicken, put it in a jar, cover with cheap brandy and simmer (a slow cooker will do it) for 24 hours before straining. As she says – it’s miraculous.

Have you ever discovered an archaic recipe which you turn to in times of illness? Have you any recipes handed down to you that you swear by?

We’re looking for the best budget eats in Cheltenham and Gloucester. Can you help? Review our chosen 10, then have your say on the Word of Mouth blog

Calling the Cotswolds! Shout out to Stroud! Big up Stow-on-the-Wold! Yes, the Guardian’s crack squad of cheap chow aficionados (that’ll be me, then) has been busy running the gastronomic rule over Cheltenham and Gloucester, in a bid to find a variety of venues where visitors can eat well, on a budget, between race meetings and cathedral tours.

Regular Word of Mouth readers will know the drill by now: you need to be able to eat for under £10 a head. That means the list might range from a sensational chippy or sandwich shop to a great gastropub or a good restaurant that does a notably cheap lunch. You can review my choices in Gloucester and Cheltenham here.

But, as ever, this post is more an opportunity to chew over the places that I either missed or couldn’t get to. My 10 included Vanilla, El Bahdja, Pepper’s, Blue Thai, Svea and the Swan, but what of Cheltenham’s Gusto (recommended to me by a couple of in-the-know locals, but they were shutting-up shop at just gone four, on a Thursday, despite what it says on the website) or Gloucester’s C&W African Experience? The latter is a reputedly brilliant find, but it was closed at lunch the day I was in town.

In Gloucester, I was also stymied in my attempts to try a Pilgrim’s Pie. It sounds great, but the cathedral cafe was having none of my attempt to get them to serve me one before midday. Did I miss out? I recently wrote a tongue-in-cheek preview of how 2012 was going to pan out in food, in which I predicted that the coming together of several key restaurant industry trends (specialisation, austerity, speed) would lead to someone opening a venue that sold nothing but toast. Little did I know that down at Gloucester docks this is already a reality. Kind of. On Toast serves all sorts of gubbins: from cheddar, leeks and tabasco, to (yes, I realise how ridiculous this sounds) Mars Bars and Curly Wurlys, either on or in toast. Frankly, my mackerel, lemon and horseradish didn’t work. Lemon juice doesn’t react well to being heated in a Breville. But are there better savoury options?

Over in Cheltenham, there were quite a few places that, for a variety of reasons, just failed to make my shortlist. Should sausage and mash specialists the Railway have made the cut? Is the cream tea at the Daffodil one to bear in mind? Is Brosh all it’s cracked up to be? I felt it would be squeezing it in, slightly – over other, more useful venues – to include its evening bar menu, from which you would only be able to afford two or three tapas dishes for under £10. Would they satisfy an appetite? If you’re picky about what you eat, would it nonetheless be worth visiting Brosh and sticking to tap water?

The Royal Well Tavern has a good rep, but is currently closed for a refurb. Is it one to check next time around? Heading out of town, is the Royal Oak in Prestbury worth visiting at lunch? Has anyone out there tried interesting Ullenwood social enterprise, the Star Bistro? And what of the Cotswolds’ hinterland? Can you suggest other competitively priced destinations as good as the deli at Made by Bob in Cirencester?

Does the Labour power couple have a secret culinary weapon as they (allegedly) scheme their rise to the top?

Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper have been accused by Labour conspiracy theorists of plotting to seize the party leadership, not on the conference platform or in the smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear, but in the kitchen. Their secret weapon, according to one weekend report, is lasagne. How unscrupulous can an MP get?

Much more unscrupulous and more extravagant in the bad old days, when much of elite politics was conducted over dinner, drinks or both, in private houses in SW1 or in West End clubs. In those days the inter-war Tory politician and diarist Sir Henry “Chips” (a nickname, not a diet) Channon would regard dinner with a couple of exiled monarchs, Winston Churchill and the Duke of Windsor as a quiet night in. Such habits faded after 1945, and gave way to Harold Wilson’s HP sauce, John Major’s peas and Margaret Thatcher’s famous home-made shepherd’s pie, all much more democratic. Nowadays even David Cameron, an Etonian who felt obliged to resign from White’s Club, the poshest in St James’s (Dad had been chairman), courts Tory MPs with lasagne. Not just any old lasagne either, but lasagne allegedly cooked by himself.

Anything Cam can do, so can Balls. The ferociously aggressive shadow chancellor has been rebranded as a chap who weeps during Antiques Roadshow and wants his wife, the shadow home secretary, to become leader after Ed Miliband (er, um) retires. More new man than New Labour, his new golden rule is crisping the delicious cheddar bechamel sauce he makes for his oregano-kissed lasagnes.

Does this amount to a plot? Yes and No. Balls’s mentor, Gordon Brown, lost the Labour leadership to Tony Blair over Italian food in north-London restaurant Granita (says he) and personally preferred bonding over pizza, beer and football with favoured MPs at Geoffrey Robinson’s Park Lane pad. Successive “curry house plots” were launched, for and against Brown, by Labour colleagues, an updated version of the Indian Mutiny.

All Ed and Yvette are doing is raising battered party moral by hosting MPs and activists in their lovely London and Yorkshire homes, say culinary loyalists. Pull the other slow-cooked pork leg, whisper surviving Blairites, who fear the ambitious power couple is running the show. The truth is that charismatic loners can capture a party without ever consulting Delia’s Summer Collection. Gregarious plotters can over-reach themselves. And Blairites, who have never tasted Ed’s delicious “stiff sponge” with its growth-orientated dollops of caster sugar, double cream and eggs, may just be jealous.

Planning to cook your first turkey or looking for alternatives to the big bird? Read Fergus Henderson’s tips for your Christmas dinner centrepiece and all matters meaty

In the first of our three lunchtime Christmas cookery clinics this week, Fergus Henderson, the man who revolutionised the way many of us think about meat, is at the helm at 12pm GMT to talk turkey and alternatives for your meaty centrepiece.

Fergus may be famous for his love of the lesser known parts of the animal but fear not, his no-nonsense approach applies just as readily to roasting a chicken or grilling a steak as it does to cooking a pig’s head.

So don’t hold back on your questions, whether you want tips on basting, trussing or stuffing a turkey, are looking for inspiration for alternatives to the big bird or want ideas for meaty accompaniments, post your questions below and keep an eye out for Fergus’s responses from 12pm.

More live chats this week:
• Thursday – Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on vegetarian dishes
• Friday – Nigella Lawson on desserts and baking

In line with increasing sales of draught real ale, new and exciting beers in bottles are making waves

Change is afoot among ale drinkers. Increasingly, bottled beers are providing serious competition for their draught peers. And we’re not just talking about folk drinking at home: this is among real ale enthusiasts in the pub.

Draught has comfortably ruled the roost for decades and now represents around half of national output, the other half being divided between cans (33%) and bottles (17%). But the figures vary wildly when you bury into craft beer territory. Half of Welsh brewery Otley’s output is bottled, and quantities are increasing – they’re currently looking for a new bottling plant. Nigh on all of London’s Kernel Brewery‘s products are bottled; statuesque in no frills brown glass with rustic hand-stamped labels.

These breweries are setting new standards for bottle-conditioned, full-flavoured beers. They stand alongside Scotland’s Brewdog, with its Punk IPAs, and the more homely Bristol Beer Factory as a new breed of British brewery creating nutty professor-type products to rival those of Europe and the US.

Evin O’Riordan opened Kernel only a year ago and he simply can’t brew enough in his single railway arch to meet demand. He says bottles simply suit his beers better – hoppy IPAs and pale ales are best served colder and more carbonated than casks allow. And he has yet to find a pub willing to serve his knockout 11% Imperial Brown Stout on tap.

He agrees that bottles are becoming more popular and attributes it in part to a shift in attitude. People want to drink beer in environments other than pubs: in craft ale bars, at home, in restaurants matched with food. The macho image so popular in marketing campaigns has dramatically lost its appeal. People are rejecting the stuffy old man or braying lad tag attached to cask and keg beers.

Over at Otley’s, company director Nick Otley stresses that bottles allow for flexibility – bars and households can stock an unfathomable number of beers from around the world, while this just isn’t possible with draught. Consistency is a key factor too. Bottles have a far longer shelf life (avoid clear glass if you don’t want a drink oxidised by sunlight) and are far more likely to taste fresh every time. Once a cask of ale is vented it can turn after three days.

Even the traditionalists at CAMRA are becoming convinced of the power of the bottle. Iain Lowe is the campaign’s research manager and agrees the case for bottled beer is strong when it comes to imported, high alcohol products served in the correct glassware. He recalls a time when bottled beers were the only way of getting a decent brew. In the post-war austerity of 1950s Britain, cask ales were almost invariably grotty and poorly kept. Pub goers would reluctantly buy a half – to be topped up with a bottle.

CAMRA’s Bottled Beer Guide, first published in 1998, is plugging away for the cause, but can the sceptical publican be convinced? Steve Taylor runs London craft beer bar Mason & Taylor, where the split between beer sold on draught versus bottle is 50-50. The bar neighbours the soon-to-open Redchurch Brewery who, inspired by their friends south of the river at Kernel, will be producing a mainly bottled product.

Steve reckons every landlord would agree you can never beat prime real ale pulled fresh from the cask, but the case for bottles is mounting. A bad pint is still remarkably easy to come by to. People want reliability and quality over quantity. They enjoy the theatre of the bottle pour – a shot glass of sediment being optional. For the seller, all the preparatory work is removed – just keep the bottle cool.

An exciting renaissance of the bottle is under way, an offshoot of the current real ale revolution. Will it affect cask devotees at all? Nick Otley says it’s “pointless” pitting draught and bottles against each other as the products are so very different, but surely a bit of healthy competition over the beer mat is the name of the game?

guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle

From the bucolic and sunkissed to the urban and gritty, ciders are an unusual family of drinks. What’s yours?

I don’t think any food or drink plummets through quality quite like cider. Its best examples are sharp and auburn, tasting of hay and meadowsweet. In the middle lie the fizzy wee of Strongbow, its jumped-up, overbranded cousin Magners and a slew of similar products like Gaymers and Bulmers. Thrashing at the bottom is gutrot white cider, at once the friend and enemy of many underage and homeless drinkers.

This country has had a continuous tradition of cider-making for at least 1,000 years, and likely longer. It’s hard to be sure because both Roman orchards and the eighth-century monasteries that revived them might have used their fruit for eating or cooking. The Normans have always been enthusiastic cider-makers and no doubt a few came over after 1066. But basic scrumpy-making isn’t particularly difficult, and it seems probable that not long after the apple left Turkey, Iran or elsewhere in western Asia, people worked out how to ferment its juice.

Real cider remains happily bucolic, rooted in druids and wassailing and hymned by the sprites of the orchards. The jug-eared mugs you traditionally drink it from are descended from old English loving cups.

But cider has only recently returned to fashion. It all but vanished in the first half of the 20th century, choked by hops and decimated by Britain’s sad rejection of domestic apple varieties. By the 1960s it was close to a yokelish footnote. Its market has swollen more than fourfold since the 70s thanks in large part to a favourable tax situation. The Treasury takes a little over 30 quid for every 100l of “mainstream” cider, compared to about £125 for beer and just under £170 for spirits. (“Fizzy” cider attracts a much higher tariff.) This was to protect traditional cider-makers and revive a moribund industry, and to a large extent it succeeded.

Companies like Sheppy’s and Aspall had been quietly making cider through the slump, and unlike most of their competitors (Bulmers, Magners, Gaymers), both avoided being taken over. But all cider producers benefited from the system, and 2m new cider apple trees were planted in the UK between 1995 and 2006.

In its final budget in 2010 Labour announced plans to hike the duty on cider 10% above inflation: it shelved these plans after a bizarre and very British outcry. I’m not sure this rediscovered taste for the drink means we cook with it any more: English recipes use cider almost exclusively in pork dishes, though Normandy has been somewhat more inventive.

Sadly, the cider renaissance also helped to spur the growth of white cider, which remains the cheapest way to get drunk. Alcohol and homeless charities are tireless in explaining the social costs of white cider. In April this year the chief executive of Thames Reach likened its use among alcoholics to that of heroin among heroin addicts, and Alcohol Concern has called for it to be banned altogether. All cider has to contain at least 35% apple juice by law, but white cider manufacturers make this up using imported apple concentrate.

It seems astonishing that Magners only launched nationwide in 2006, so ubiquitous has it become. I have to say I find it unpleasantly acidic and gassy, and the conceit of serving it over ice is perhaps the most affected thing to happen to alcohol since Anthony Blanche’s brandy alexanders. But what a clever bit of marketing that was: fill the glass with ice and sell less product for more money. Magners led to the relaunch of Bulmer’s Original and, this year, to Stella Artois’s “Cidre”, which I haven’t tasted but which the great beer writer Pete Brown describes as “not unpleasant … but odd”.

As the Guardian’s wine writer Fiona Beckett points out, by buying decent cider you get “the best artisanal products Britain has to offer for the same price as the dullest commercially produced wine”. Despite 40 years of government-led investment, most of us could still be drinking more of this criminally underrated drink, which at its best easily rivals champagne. I like Westons from Herefordshire, and Healey’s sent me a bottle the other day which was excellent. But there are now enough small cider producers that every half-decent pub should stock them, and there’s only one way to find your favourite.

guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle

The fruit of the rowan or mountain ash is left untouched by bird and beast alike, but there is one very good use for these bright red berries

I have never understood the draw of birdwatching – birds are boring creatures and keep moving about. Taste nice though. Birders no doubt feel the same about the appeal for mushroom hunters. On a British Mycological Society foray to Gibraltar Point once, our group was questioned by an incredulous flock of birdwatchers – “What on earth are you doing?” they demanded. They were walking around with their eyes raised to the sky, we with our eyes to the ground. Perhaps my disinterest in things ornithological will explain a gap in my understanding.

I pick berries every year, but I seldom see birds eating them and hardly ever find a tree which has enjoyed their attentions – elderberries and cherries being exceptions. Some of our trees are burdened with berries until Christmas. One tree, despite its reputation as a good food source for our avian friends, seems to bear its fruit, untouched, for nearly half of the year. It is the rowan or mountain ash.

The fruiting seasons have come early this year and rowan berries have been around for at least of couple of weeks. The rowan is an easy tree to identify despite the fact that sprays of red berries appear on several other small trees such as whitebeam and guelder rose. The leaves are pinnate, that is, they are made up of opposite pairs of leaflets. The tree grows just about everywhere from suburban street to Scottish mountainside so you will not have any trouble finding one.

The uncooked berries are slightly poisonous and a small nibble proves they taste awful (perhaps the reason the birds avoid them). The sharpness is not too bad, it is the bitter aftertaste and high pip density that spoils this tempting looking fruit. Certainly rowan berries have found little use in the kitchen, rowan jelly being its main defence against foraging oblivion.

But there is rowan berry wine. The earliest mention of an alcoholic drink using the berries I can find comes from the late eighteenth century – “The poorer sort of people in Wales make a drink called diodgriafel by infusing the berries in water” it says. The same story appears again and again in later works – it may be a figment of the original writer’s imagination for all I know, but I would be interested to hear if anyone else has heard of diodgriafel. In any case, the following simple recipe (brewing away in my shed as I write) is from my friend Erin and likely to be more palatable:

2kg rowanberries, snipped off with scissors, picked over and washed
1.2kg sugar
500ml white grape juice concentrate
Juice of 2 lemons
1 tsp of wine tannin
1 tsp pectolase
1 tsp yeast nutrient
Sachet of white wine yeast
About 4 litres of boiling water

Put the berries in a food grade plastic bucket and mash them coarsely with the end of a rolling pin. Boil the water then stir in the sugar until dissolved, bring to the boil again and immediately pour over the berries. Cover and allow to cool. Add the grape concentrate, pectolase, lemon juice and tannin. Cover and leave for 24 hours then stir in the yeast nutrient and yeast (activated if necessary).

Cover and leave for a week, stirring every day for the first five days. If your brew has separated nicely into three layers – sludge / liquid / sludge – carefully place the end of a siphon at a strategic height and siphon off the liquid into a clean demi-john – though a bit of sludge won’t hurt. Otherwise strain through clean muslin using a funnel. Top up to the bottom of the neck with boiled and cooled water if necessary. Fit your bung and fermentation lock and leave to ferment for a couple of months.

Rack off into a fresh demi-john and leave until all fermentation has stopped for a week, then bottle. Rowanberry wine benefits from a long maturation period in the bottle – at least a year.

guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle