Glossary · Sensory
Balance
Definition
The relationship between a cider’s sweetness, acidity, tannin, alcohol and carbonation, judged by whether any one of them dominates unintentionally.
- Subject
- Sensory
In more detail
Balance is relational, not absolute. A cider at 12 g/L of acid is balanced if it carries enough sugar and body to meet it and unbalanced if it does not; the same tannin level reads as structure in a dry cider and as harshness in a light one. It is the single judgement that competition scoring weights most heavily, and the one most dependent on knowing the intended style.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Sensory
Structure
The framework a cider’s acid and tannin give it — the sense of a shape holding the fruit up. Ciders without it are described as flabby or soft regardless of their flavour intensity.
Sensory
Acidity
The perception of sourness, and the sensation of freshness and mouth-watering it brings. It correlates with both titratable acidity and pH, but neither predicts it exactly.
Sensory
Sweetness
The perception of sugar, and in perry of sorbitol. It is suppressed by acid, tannin and carbonation, so measured sugar and perceived sweetness diverge routinely.
Sensory
Astringency
A tactile sensation of drying, roughening and puckering in the mouth, caused by tannins binding and precipitating the proteins that lubricate the oral surfaces. It is a feeling, not a taste.
Sensory
Complexity
The number of distinguishable characters a drink presents and the way they change over the course of tasting. It is descriptive: a simple cider is not thereby a poor one.
Fermentation
Bench blending
Making small measured trial blends of finished batches and tasting them before committing the tanks, so that proportions are chosen on evidence rather than arithmetic alone.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
BJCP Beer Style Guidelines — cider and perry categories
Beer Judge Certification Program · classification framework · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24, and the edition matters. CiderHQ registered the 2015 cider guidelines; BJCP has since published a 2025 cider edition, and the old URL now redirects into the current guidelines index. A competition style guide is a dated framework rather than a standing definition, and citing the wrong edition of one is the same class of error as citing a superseded specification. CiderHQ treats BJCP as one competition framework among several and never as the universal cider taxonomy.
Washington State University cider research programme
Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center · university · passage verified 2026-08-24
The single most useful open cider dataset CiderHQ has found. The programme’s cultivar performance database gives juice chemistry, orchard behaviour, bloom and harvest timing and cider-maker tasting notes for 73 cultivars grown at one maritime site over fifteen years, and — unusually — publishes its classification thresholds alongside its figures, so the classification can be checked rather than taken on trust. It also states outright that its results diverge from the English ones. Read in full on 2026-08-24 and transcribed into `data/trials/wsu-mount-vernon.ts`; four published figures were found to be impossible and are withheld there with their reasons.