The modern craft cider movement

Through the middle of the twentieth century, cider in most producing countries consolidated. A small number of large companies took the majority of the volume, product was standardised, juice content fell in markets that permitted it, and the surviving small producers were largely farm operations selling locally. The category was commercially healthy in several markets and creatively static in nearly all of them.

What changed came from several directions at once. In North America a genuine revival built a sector from almost nothing, initially alongside craft brewing and using its methods of selling. In Britain a consumer campaign had spent decades keeping unfiltered cask cider visible, and a new generation of producers appeared who had a market to sell into. In France, Spain and Germany, producers within established traditions began working at higher specification and presenting their ciders as serious drinks.

The common features across these are small scale, independence from the large companies, an emphasis on whole juice and named fruit, direct relationships with drinkers, and a willingness to state method openly. None of that is a definition, but it is a recognisable orientation.

The movement arrived without a descriptive language of its own and borrowed two. From craft brewing it took the commercial forms — the taproom, the small-batch release, the can, the collaboration — which suited a sector selling in small volumes to a curious audience.

From wine it took the descriptive apparatus: single varietal bottlings, vintage statements, discussion of site and soil, sensory vocabulary, and food pairing. This fits cider better than the beer vocabulary does in one important respect — cider is an agricultural product made once a year from a crop that varies by site and season — and worse in another, since the wine frame carries pricing and formality expectations that cider has struggled to meet in the market.

The borrowing has consequences for how cider is understood. A drinker meeting cider in a beer frame expects a range of styles at beer prices; one meeting it in a wine frame expects vintage variation and a wine price. Both are being sold the same drink, and the sector has not settled which conversation it is having.

The structural obstacles are real and are worth stating precisely, because they explain the sector’s shape better than any account of taste does.

Cider is agricultural. A brewer buys malt and hops on a commodity market and can start brewing next week; a cider maker needs fruit, and traditional cider fruit is grown on trees that take years to bear and is available for a few weeks a year. Fruit supply, not brewing skill, is the binding constraint on new entrants.

Cider is annual. One chance to make product each year means slow iteration, high working capital and a long feedback loop, against a brewer’s weekly cycle. A producer can improve a beer eight times in the time it takes to improve a cider once.

Cider’s category associations were poor in exactly the markets where the movement had to sell. In Britain especially, the drink carried associations with cheapness and strength that beer did not, and a premium cider had to argue against them. That is a marketing problem with a social history behind it rather than a product problem.

Finally, the category is genuinely confusing. A drink that may be dry or sweet, still or sparkling, 2 per cent or 12 per cent, made from culinary or tannic fruit, with or without added fruit and flavourings, is hard for a newcomer to navigate, and the absence of settled style vocabulary makes it harder.

No jurisdiction defines craft cider in law. Where trade bodies have attempted definitions, they have generally used ownership independence and production volume thresholds — the approach taken for craft brewing — rather than method, because method is much harder to police and excludes producers for reasons unrelated to the intent.

This means the word carries no guarantee about juice content, fruit origin, fermentation, sweetening or filtration. Those are the questions worth asking, and each of them has an answer that a producer can state plainly. A cider described only as craft has told the buyer about the company, not about the liquid.

The movement’s durable contribution is probably not the word but the disclosure habit. Small producers stating their fruit, their fermentation and their treatment on the label has raised the level of information available in the category generally, and it makes the technical questions askable in a way they were not thirty years ago.