Despite our national obsession with tea, its more chilled sibling, iced tea, keeps a fairly low profile on most British drinks menus, being much more closely associated with the US, particularly in the humid southern states.

There’s nothing more perfect for a party than a big bowl of punch, although it’s sadly fallen out of favour in recent years, only occasionally being pressed into service as a welcome drink at a Christmas gathering.

In many ways, punch can be regarded as the original proto-cocktail, an essential precursor to the bittered sling which, in turn, launched a thousand spin-off cocktails.

Despite the UK’s wholly unreliable weather patterns, there’s a handful of rituals that fall squarely inside the end-of-May-till-beginning-of-September window – picnics in the park, barbecues and cocktails that are 75 percent fruit salad.

Whether you’re hosting a barbecue, sports-tournament party or summer birthday bash, you’ll want to make bartending duties as easy and time-efficient as possible.

Because they lean heavily on large quantities of ice and a mechanical means of blending it, frozen cocktails are very much a twentieth-century invention. Here are our top 5 super-cooled favourites.

If there’s one stand-out perk of summer, it’s the joy of pimping your standard spirit-and-juice combo with a metric tonne of fruit salad and calling it a cocktail.

The early-nineteenth-century fusion of spirit, sugar and water known as a ‘sling’ laid the foundations for the rainbow of cocktails we drink today.

For every bottle of unwanted Metaxa in the understairs cupboard, there’s a cocktail that has the ability to transport you to a sunnier, happier state of mind.