So it’s finally summer, and the thirst is real, oh Lord the thirst! In some parts of the world you can drink slushies, but in the sort of parts of the world where there is no 7-Eleven or there persists an overt concern for health, you might have to rely on fruit juices to sate your appetite for something wet and cooling.
Fruit juices these days come in all sorts of flavours. Long gone are the days when it was orange, apple, or some musty grapefruit that tasted more like mandarin! So let that dry and sticky mouth feel be altogether quenched with some of these delicious and less so fruity summer drinks!
Pineapple Juice
Pineapple juice around summer often means one thing, which is piña colada. But without the alcoholic accessories the juice alone is a sheer delight. And as an added bonus, pineapple juice is good for a sore throat, ideal if you’ve been out partying until the early dawn, or remain at home with the windows shut suffering from allergies and an excess of pollen.
Lychee Juice
From their origins in South Asia, lychees have become so popular in continental Europe that the French schooling system between 15 and 18 entirely revolves around the fruit. With their translucent, floral-scented flesh hidden away behind vivid pink-red rinds, lychees truly are a treat to discover. Their juice has been slower to take off, but has enjoyed a surge of interest over the past couple of years, meaning that with a glass of delicious lychee juice in hand, you’ll be on-trend this summer.
Strawberry Juice
Who hasn’t been down the bottom of the garden one summer time and come back with their face all seeded and red! Strawberries are without doubt the quintessential summer fruit, and while the imagination might hurry towards cream and meringues and ice cream and tartlets, strawberry taken as a juice can be pretty nice also.
Cherry Juice
A cherry is not a berry, but sometimes these fruits – with their small stature and idiosyncratic inner stones – are bundled together with the ‘fruits of the forest’, comprising the blackberries and raspberries which belong more to the autumn and come not from the forest at all, but instead from the bramble bush. Funnily enough the cherry too – despite flourishing in some places even as early as spring – feels like an autumnal fruit in juice form, perfect for cool and cosy nights under the duvet when amorousness starts coming to the fore.
Lime Juice
Lime juice is traditionally served as a component part of gimlets, margaritas, and mojitos. But the juice on its own is increasingly drunk. However there seems little reason to favour lime juice and limeade over its lemony brethren, which is more common and less tart.
Coconut Juice
What comes from the insides of this husky brown fruit anyway? Is it a water, a juice, or a milk? The answer is: it is a water, but none of it tastes nice anyway, and you’ll be lucky if you can find a piece of the meat which isn’t dry and sorely lacking in flavour. Coconut is a transitional fruit. It is better the more transitions it goes through. Desiccate the thing for chocolates or pastries or turn it into a cream and slosh through cocktails or sauce, but coconut au naturel is awful, the most overrated of all the fruits. And it is absolutely no good as a juice.
