People's Choice: Your favourite cycling drink revealed

You’ve got to drink. As well as making you feel rubbish, dehydration limits your ability to put the power down. Even mild dehydration, where you’re just one percent under your correct weight because of water loss, can slow you down as much as six percent, researchers have found.

So you need to keep your body’s water supply topped up. There are loads of products on the shelves to help, including energy drink mixes that contain some sort of sugar to provide fuel along with the water, and electrolyte mixes, intended to replace the salts you lose with sweat. But what do you really like to drink? The envelope please…

1 Tap water — 24%

Water running from a tap (CC BY 2.0 Steve Johnson|Flickr)

Adam’s ale, H2O, aqua, l’eau — whatever you want to call it, it’s the basis of life and it’s also the most popular tipple in our poll. That’s not very surprising. Water’s refreshing, and also refreshingly cheap at about a tenth of a penny per litre from the tap. (Fill your own five-paragraph rant about the stupidity of buying bottled water here.)

2 Beer — 11%

Beers (CC CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 The Pingus|Flickr)

As far as we know, none of the breweries recommend their beverages for enhancing sporting performance, with the exception of Erdinger, which The Guardian says, “is being promoted as a healthy, correctly carb-loaded, post-workout refreshment in Germany, hence the ‘isotonic, vitamin-rich, reduced calories’ labelling”. However, Erdinger is alcohol-free, which purists would likely say means it’s not really beer.

Nevertheless, a bottle of chilled beer or good cider at the end of a long, hot ride is surely a reward well-earned.

3 Water then beer — 10%

Now you’re talking. Sensible, cheap tap water on the ride; beer at the end. What’s not to love?

4= High5 Zero Electrolyte Drink Tablets: Berry Flavour — 6% — £3.49/20

High5’s electrolyte tabs were the most popular sport-specific product in the poll. Each tab makes 750ml of drink — the size of a large water bottle — and contains Vitamin C and five electrolytes, including sodium, magnesium and potassium. Our reviewer was impressed with them for reducing cramps on long rides (though some dispute that electrolytes can prevent cramps at all) and comments from readers suggest that they're great for preventing hangovers!

4= Torq Energy drinks — 6% — £22.00/1.5kg

With a mixture of 60% maltodextrin and 30% fructose, this popular powder is claimed to deliver carbohydrates into the bloodstream faster than either of those two energy sources alone. As well as its effectiveness as a fuel source, people really seem to like Torq's taste, which is described as not too powerful, and pleasantly neutral.