Autumn cocktails: apple, whisky and sloe gin drinks for September to November

September is often warm enough for a long drink over ice. By November the evenings want something short to sip slowly. Choose by the month, and by what the orchard and the hedgerow are giving.

Halloween on 31 October has its own party drinks in Halloween cocktails. Bonfire Night five days later has the hot pots and flasks in Bonfire Night drinks, and Hot Buttered Rum and the other hot drinks built on rum are compared in hot rum drinks. From December, winter cocktails takes over.

The Stone Fence is spirit poured into apple and little else. Fill a highball with ice, add 60ml bourbon or rye and two dashes of Angostura, top with 120ml of cold dry cider at about 5% ABV and stir once. Set a thin apple slice on the rim.

The cider is the British, fermented kind, and the drink comes to about 3.1 UK units. For a softer, sweeter glass, use cloudy apple juice in place of the dry cider, which brings it to about 2.5. The colonial original was rum poured into hard cider, so dark rum in place of the whiskey has history behind it. Avoid clear juice from concentrate, which tastes of sugar more than apple.

The Harvest Mule adds ginger. Build 50ml bourbon, 15ml apple cider syrup and 20ml fresh lime juice over ice in a copper mug or highball, top with 90ml of ginger beer, stir gently and add an apple slice. The syrup carries the apple at 15ml, where juice would need far more and water the drink down.

Apple brandy is cider distilled and rested in oak. It tastes of dry baked apple rather than sweetness. Calvados is the Normandy tradition, and its Pays d’Auge appellation dates from 1942, as the Calvados interprofession’s consumer site records. Applejack is the American line, and the standard bottle mixes apple brandy with neutral spirit, which makes it lighter and rougher.

The Jack Rose is the classic built on applejack. Shake 60ml applejack, 22.5ml fresh lemon juice and 22.5ml grenadine hard with ice for 10 to 12 seconds, double strain into a chilled coupe and express lemon peel over the top. With three ingredients the grenadine decides the drink: one made from real pomegranate keeps it sharp, and a thick commercial bottle makes it cloying.

The Autumn Gold splits the base. Shake 45ml bourbon, 20ml apple brandy, 20ml fresh lemon juice, 15ml maple syrup and two dashes of aromatic bitters hard with ice for 10 to 12 seconds, double strain into a chilled coupe and rest a thin apple fan on the rim. The bourbon brings vanilla and structure, the apple brandy the orchard, and the lemon keeps the maple in check.

Calvados answers where a recipe simply says apple brandy, and it is the drier of the two. A straight American apple brandy, without the neutral spirit, gives a fuller and stronger Jack Rose than the recipe assumed, so taste it before deciding on the grenadine.

Sloe gin is sloes, the fruit of the blackthorn, steeped in gin with sugar. Regulation (EC) No 110/2008 counts it as a liqueur: sweetened, with a minimum strength of 25% against at least 37.5% for gin. Used in place of gin it gives a softer, sweeter drink.

Sloes ripen in autumn. Tradition says to pick them after the first frost, because freezing splits the skins and lets the fruit give up its colour faster; a night in the freezer does the same. Half fill a jar with pricked or frozen sloes, cover them with an ordinary London dry gin, add sugar at about half the weight of the fruit and turn the jar now and then for two to three months. The colour arrives within days and the flavour takes the full time.

The Sloe Gin Fizz uses a bottle from last year while this year’s steeps. Shake 45ml sloe gin, 15ml gin, 30ml fresh lemon juice and 10ml simple syrup, with 15ml of egg white if you want a foam, dry shaking it first for 10 to 15 seconds. Then shake hard with ice for 10 to 12 seconds and strain into a chilled small highball with no ice, top with 60ml of soda water and add a lemon wheel. If the egg white is raw, use British Lion eggs, which the Food Standards Agency advises are safe to eat raw.

The Old Fashioned suits the first cold evenings. Saturate a sugar cube with two dashes of Angostura in a rocks glass and muddle it with a few drops of water until it dissolves. Add one large cube or a scoop of large ice, pour in 45ml bourbon or rye and stir for 20 to 30 seconds. Express orange peel over the top.

The Paper Plane is equal parts: 30ml each of bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino and fresh lemon juice, shaken hard for 10 to 12 seconds and double strained into a chilled coupe, with lemon peel expressed over it. Bitter orange and herbs against whisky suit the darker evenings.

Explorers Gold is our spiced rum sour. Dry shake 50ml Expedition Spiced Rum, 25ml honey syrup, 25ml fresh lemon juice and an egg white for 15 seconds, then add ice and shake hard for 12 more. Double strain into a chilled coupe, dot two dashes of Angostura across the foam and express lemon peel over it.

The Maple Old Fashioned and the Toffee Apple Sour were written for Bonfire Night and are given in full in Bonfire Night drinks.

Apple cider syrup: simmer 500ml of cloudy apple juice until it has reduced by half, then stir in 200g of demerara sugar until it dissolves. Stop at half; reduced further, it sets rather than pours. Bottle and refrigerate it; we keep it for about two weeks. Use it at 15ml a drink, and never swap it for juice by volume. Made from juice, the syrup is alcohol-free; dry cider also works, but it may keep a trace of alcohol.

Honey syrup: two parts honey to one part warm water, stirred until it runs clear off the spoon, as Explorers Gold calls for. One to one gives a lighter syrup. Diluted honey no longer keeps like honey does, so we keep it in the fridge and use it within about two weeks.

Cinnamon syrup: equal weights of white sugar and water with three or four cracked cassia sticks, simmered gently, then left off the heat for an hour and strained. Take the bark out at the straining. Left in, in our experience, it keeps extracting and turns the syrup harsh within a week.

Maple needs no work. Buy real maple syrup, which lists one ingredient, in the Dark grade with a robust taste; lighter grades disappear behind whisky. It is thicker and sweeter than simple syrup, so stir it in well.

For a guest who is not drinking, the Hot Spiced Cider base without the spirit is a complete drink, and it keeps warm on the stove all evening.