Glossary · Serving
Decanting
Definition
Pouring a bottle-conditioned or unfiltered cider off its deposit into another vessel, or pouring it in one steady movement so the sediment stays in the bottle.
- Subject
- Serving
In more detail
A bottle-conditioned cider should be stood upright for a day before opening so the deposit settles, then poured without stopping. Sediment is harmless, and some drinkers deliberately include the last of it; the choice is a matter of preference, not of correctness.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Faults
Sediment
Solid material settled at the bottom of a bottle or cask: yeast, tannin-protein complexes, pectin or tartrates. Expected in bottle-conditioned and unfiltered cider, unwanted in a bright one.
Fermentation
Bottle conditioning
Carbonating cider by fermentation inside the sealed bottle, either from primed sugar or from sugar left over from an incomplete ferment. The yeast deposit remains unless the bottle is disgorged.
Fermentation
Unfiltered
Packaged without filtration, so the cider retains yeast and colloidal material and is usually hazy. It is a process statement rather than a quality claim, and unfiltered ciders throw a sediment.
Fermentation
Lees
The deposit that settles under a fermenting or maturing cider: dead and living yeast, fruit solids, pectin, tartrate and protein. Gross lees are the coarse first deposit; fine lees are the finer yeast layer that forms afterwards.
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.
The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.