Botanical

Where this is covered properly

The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.

• Style

  Botanical cider

  Cider infused with herbs, flowers, roots or bark, a small modern category with old antecedents in the practice of flavouring fermented drinks with what was to hand.

• Production

  Wood and botanical infusion

  Steeping oak in chip, cube or stave form, or bark, root, herb and flower material, in a neutral vessel to flavour a cider without the vessel itself doing any of the work.

Related terms

Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.

• Cider

  Hopped cider

  Cider dosed with hops, usually after fermentation and usually for aroma rather than bitterness, so that the hop’s oils sit over the apple.

• Cider

  Fruit cider

  Cider to which other fruit, fruit juice or fruit flavouring has been added, before or after fermentation. The base must still be cider for the name to apply.

• Cider

  Spiced cider

  Cider flavoured with spices such as cinnamon, clove or ginger. In North America the phrase also describes hot, unfermented spiced apple juice, which contains no alcohol at all.

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.

• Vinetum Britannicum, or a Treatise of Cider

  John Worlidge · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1676

  Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1678 edition held by the Internet Archive. John Worlidge, active 1669–1698; the work ran to further editions including 1691, so a citation to it should say which. The full title is broader than the short one CiderHQ uses and matters for what the book can be cited for: it covers other fruit wines and drinks alongside cider, so it is evidence about seventeenth-century English fruit fermentation generally rather than about cider alone.

• 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.