Bonfire Night drinks: hot pots, flasks and cold serves for outdoors

Nobody wants to shake a cocktail with a sparkler in the other hand. Choose one hot drink that can be made ahead and held warm, and one cold drink for anyone who prefers it.

Toffee apples, parkin and woodsmoke set the flavours: apple, caramel, ginger and baking spice. Bourbon brings caramel and vanilla, dark rum brings treacle, and both suit the night.

The Hot Toffee Apple is the drink most people picture for the night. Warm 150ml of cloudy apple juice in a pan, below the boil. Pour 50ml of bourbon and 15ml of caramel syrup into a heatproof mug, add the hot apple and stir gently. A cinnamon stick does the stirring. The juice keeps the mug at about 2.0 UK units, all from the bourbon. A dry British cider at about 4.5% ABV can replace it for a sharper mug; British cider is alcoholic, which takes it to about 2.7.

Heat the apple and nothing else. The bourbon waits in the mug, so its smell stays in the drink and off the stove. For a crowd, warm all the apple in one pot, portion the bourbon and syrup into mugs or a preheated flask, and pour the hot apple over as you serve. Spiced rum in place of the bourbon pushes it towards mulled flavours on a colder night.

Serve it at drinking temperature rather than scalding. Outdoors a mug cools quickly in the hand, and children move fast through a dark garden.

The Fireside Punch serves about fifteen. Put 750ml bourbon, 500ml cloudy apple juice, 250ml fresh lemon juice, 250ml maple syrup and 500ml water in a large pot or slow cooker with four cinnamon sticks, three star anise and one orange cut into wheels. Heat it gently for an hour before guests arrive, then hold it on low. It tastes better an hour in than at the first ladle. Each cup carries about 50ml of bourbon, a double measure.

For thirty, double the liquids but raise the spices by only half. Spice infuses faster than liquid dilutes, and a doubled spice bill turns the second hour bitter. A second slow cooker does better than one overfilled pot.

Scaling, dilution and how far ahead each part of a batch can go are set out in how to batch cocktails.

The Hot Spiced Cider is the pot for a mixed garden. Heat 1.2 litres of cloudy apple juice with two cinnamon sticks, six cloves, two star anise, a few strips of orange peel and 50ml maple syrup for twenty minutes without boiling, then keep it on the lowest setting. Ladle 150ml into each mug and add 50ml of bourbon or dark rum at the pour, or leave it out. The base has no alcohol in it, so drivers and children drink from the same pot.

The Guy Fawkes Grog is named for the night. Dissolve 150ml of honey in a litre of hot water, then add 500ml dark rum, 300ml butterscotch liqueur and 150ml fresh lemon juice, and hold it warm for about twelve mugs. It drinks sweeter than the Fireside Punch, so serve it in the second half of the evening.

The Spiced Rum Punch calls for spiced rum, so Expedition Spiced Rum is the right bottle for it: 500ml with 750ml cloudy apple juice, 500ml orange juice, 100ml fresh lemon juice and 100ml honey, plus cinnamon sticks, star anise and a few cloves, warmed until the honey dissolves. It serves about ten.

Hot Buttered Rum and the Tom and Jerry are made one mug at a time, which suits a kitchen better than a garden. Both are in hot rum drinks, with every hot drink built on rum side by side.

Every pot follows one rule: the surface steams and never bubbles. Boiling drives off the alcohol and the aromatics and turns cloves and cinnamon bitter. A slow cooker on low cannot easily overshoot. Use whole spices; ground spice clouds the pot and turns it bitter by the second hour.

Preheat each vacuum flask with boiling water for five minutes, tip it out and fill it to the top with the hot drink; an air gap cools it faster. Wide-necked flasks pour more easily with cold hands. Use separate flasks for anything alcohol-free, and label them.

Check the display’s rules before you pack a flask. Where a display bans alcohol or glass, a flask of the unspiked cider base gets round that.

At home, a slow cooker or urn on the drinks table covers the volume, and flasks cover the walk to the end of the garden.

Cold air works in a cold drink’s favour: ice melts slowly, and the drink stays cold to the last sip. Chill the glasses, or use insulated cups.

The Toffee Apple Sour is the cold twin of the Hot Toffee Apple. Dry shake 45ml bourbon, 25ml fresh lemon juice, 20ml cloudy apple juice, 15ml caramel syrup and 15ml egg white without ice, then add ice and shake hard. Strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass. The foam does not survive a jug, so make it to order. The egg white is optional; if you use it raw, use British Lion eggs, which the Food Standards Agency advises are safe to eat raw.

The Ginger Snap puts the warmth in the spice rather than the temperature. Build 50ml bourbon, 25ml fresh lemon juice and 15ml cinnamon syrup over ice in a highball, top slowly with 90ml of a properly fiery ginger beer and stir once. Make the syrup the day before: simmer 200g demerara sugar with 100ml water until it dissolves, add three or four cracked cassia sticks, take it off the heat, steep for an hour and strain.

The Maple Old Fashioned is the slow one for the end of the night: 60ml bourbon, 10ml dark-grade maple syrup and two dashes of Angostura, stirred for 20 to 30 seconds and strained over one large cube, with an orange twist. The large cube melts slowly, which matters when the drink is held for an hour beside a fire.

Set the drinks table well away from the bonfire and from wherever the fireworks are lit and watched, with space around it and enough light to pour by. Run slow cookers and urns from outdoor-rated extension leads, taped down or routed where nobody walks. Cover the drinks to keep ash out.

Serve in paper or metal cups. Glass breaks underfoot in the dark and is hard to find in wet grass.

Whoever lights the fireworks or tends the fire should stay off the drink until the display is over. Everyone else drinks better with food: jacket potatoes, sausages and parkin slow the alcohol down. Alcohol also makes you feel warmer while you lose heat faster, so keep a warm alcohol-free drink going as well.

Keep hot pots and mugs out of children’s reach, and give the alcohol-free pot its own ladle and a label.

Halloween comes five days earlier, and Halloween cocktails covers the party drinks for it. From December, winter cocktails takes over.