Glossary · Milling and pressing
Ciderkin
Also written water cider, purr, small cider. Each is a name for the same thing, which is why none of them has an entry of its own.
Definition
A weak drink made by soaking pressed pomace in water and pressing it again, historically supplied to farm workers and to households as an everyday beverage of low strength.
- Subject
- Milling and pressing
- Also written
- water cider, purr, small cider
In more detail
Ciderkin belongs to the same logic as small beer: the strong drink was a marketable asset, the weak one was daily hydration. It is documented from the seventeenth century onward and disappeared with the truck system and the arrival of safe piped water.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Milling and pressing
Second pressing
Breaking up pressed pomace, wetting it with water, and pressing again to recover the sugar and extract left behind. The product is weak and is used for low-strength drinks or for blending, not sold as full-juice cider.
History
Truck system
The practice of paying farm labourers partly in cider rather than wholly in money. It was widespread in the West Country and the three counties and was progressively outlawed by the Truck Acts of the nineteenth century.
Milling and pressing
Pomace
Milled fruit — flesh, skin, pips and stalk fragments — before pressing, and the spent solids left in the press afterwards. Both senses are in everyday use and context distinguishes them.
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.
Somerset Rural Life Museum — cider collections
South West Heritage Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24
Pomona, or an Appendix concerning Fruit-Trees in relation to Cider
John Evelyn, Royal Society · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1664
Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1670 edition held by the Internet Archive. The attribution needs correcting and CiderHQ has corrected it: *Pomona* is not a book by John Evelyn. It is an appendix annexed to Evelyn’s *Sylva*, published by express order of the Royal Society, and the contributors recorded for the volume are John Evelyn, John Beale, Daniel Colwall, Paul Neile, John Newburgh and Sylas Taylor. Beale has his own entry in this register, and the overlap is not a coincidence — the two texts come out of the same Royal Society enquiry into cider in the 1660s. Citing *Pomona* as Evelyn’s flattens a collaborative compilation into a single-author work.