On draught

Related terms

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

• Cider

  Draught cider

  Cider dispensed from a cask, keg or box rather than from a bottle or can. In British usage it also implies a serving format eligible for the reduced draught rate of alcohol duty.

• Serving

  Gravity dispense

  Serving cider from a tap in the cask or box by gravity alone, without pump or applied gas. It is the traditional method for still farmhouse cider and the standard at cider festivals.

• Equipment

  Keg

  A sealed pressurised container for dispensing cider under applied gas, as distinct from a cask, which is vented and served by gravity or hand pump.

• Equipment

  Cask

  A wooden vessel of staves bound by hoops, bulging at the middle so it can be rolled and turned. Casks both store cider and shape it, admitting a slow ingress of oxygen through the wood.

• Serving

  Hand pump

  A manual suction pump on a bar that draws cider from a cask in the cellar. It agitates the cider slightly on the way up, which raises what carbonation there is.

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.

• CAMRA cider and perry standards

  Campaign for Real Ale · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24

  Opened on 2026-08-24. Registered for the consumer-campaigning vocabulary — "real cider", "full juice" — which is advocacy language rather than legal definition, and is recorded as such wherever CiderHQ uses it.

• Alcoholic products duty rates and the Alcohol Duty regime

  HM Revenue & Customs · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24

  The UK alcohol duty system was reformed in August 2023 onto a strength-based footing, with draught relief and small producer relief alongside it. The rate table was read on 2026-08-24 and carries an effective date of 1 February 2026. CiderHQ records the band *structure* — which is stable and explains why producers make the strengths they do — and states rates only with that effective date attached, because a rate with no date on it becomes permanent and wrong.