Glossary · Cider
Cider
Also written hard cider, cyder. Each is a name for the same thing, which is why none of them has an entry of its own.
Definition
A fermented alcoholic drink made from the juice of apples. What may legally be sold under the name varies sharply between countries, so the word describes a family of drinks rather than a single specification.
- Subject
- Cider
- Also written
- hard cider, cyder
In more detail
The core of the definition is agreed everywhere: apples are milled and pressed, and the resulting juice is fermented by yeast, which converts its sugars to ethanol and carbon dioxide. Beyond that, national law diverges. French regulation requires cidre to be made from apple or apple-and-pear juice with no added water or sugar-derived alcohol. United Kingdom excise law works instead from a minimum apparent juice content, which allows dilution to a degree that would be unlawful in France. United States federal tax law defines a narrow "hard cider" tax class bounded by strength, carbonation and permitted fruit, and taxes anything outside it as wine.
The spelling cyder is an older English form still used occasionally as a deliberate archaism. It carries no separate legal meaning. In North America the unqualified word usually means unfermented juice, which is why the fermented drink is specified there as hard cider.
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
Production
Wild fermentation
Letting the microflora already present on the fruit and in the press house carry the ferment, in a succession rather than as a single organism.
Style
Dry cider
Cider fermented out or finished so that little fermentable sugar remains, leaving acid, tannin and alcohol to carry the palate.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Cider
Hard cider
The North American term for fermented, alcoholic apple juice, used because the unqualified word "cider" means the unfermented pressing there.
Cider
Sweet cider
In Britain and Europe, a cider at the sweet end of the sweetness scale, with enough residual or added sugar to taste distinctly sweet. In North America, the same phrase means fresh unfermented apple juice, usually unfiltered.
Perry
Perry
A fermented alcoholic drink made from the juice of pears, and specifically from perry pears rather than dessert pears. It is not cider made with pears added: it is a separate drink with its own fruit, chemistry and problems.
Law and labelling
Apparent juice content
The proportion of a cider that is treated as having come from apple juice, calculated for excise purposes from the product’s composition rather than measured directly at the mill.
Milling and pressing
Must
Freshly pressed, unfermented juice, from the moment it leaves the press until fermentation begins. The word is borrowed from wine-making and shares a root with German *Most*.
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.
Alcoholic Products Technical Guide, section 2 — alcoholic products (formerly Excise Notice 162)
HM Revenue & Customs · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24
What may be called cider or perry for UK duty purposes. The substantive text now lives in section 2 of the Alcoholic Products Technical Guide rather than in the notice itself, and the passages below were read there. The widely repeated "35% juice" figure checks out — but note two things the figure alone hides: it is a tax threshold rather than a quality standard, and concentrate and dilution both count towards it.
Légifrance, JORF texte n° JORFTEXT000051223792 · legislation · retrieved 2026-08-24 · covers In force from 1 July 2025; “artisanal” and “rosé” from 1 January 2026
Opened on 2026-08-24, and it turned out that the entry CiderHQ had was describing a repealed instrument. The décret of 20 February 2025 replaces the 1953 décret and the 1987 one that amended it, and it changes the thing this site had been repeating: the doux, demi-sec and brut categories are no longer residual-sugar bands. They are now defined on acquired alcoholic strength together with density at 20 °C, an extra-brut tier has been added, and the four bands deliberately overlap so that a producer can place a product with a hydrometer rather than a sugar analysis. The pages that said otherwise have been corrected. What could not be done is a verbatim read: legifrance.gouv.fr returns HTTP 403 to retrieval, so the text was read through a summarising fetch and every operative figure was then checked independently against the UNICID interbranch briefing, which reproduces the table. The two agree.
Hard cider tax class and labelling requirements
Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) · regulator · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24. The address CiderHQ had registered — ttb.gov/wine/hard-cider — now returns 404; the bureau publishes its cider material at ttb.gov/cider/cider-resources, and the record has been corrected. The substantive hard cider definition is in 27 CFR §§24.10 and 24.331, which CiderHQ cites directly and has verified to the passage; this page is the regulator’s own gateway and its industry circular pointer, not the operative text.
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24