Structure

Related terms

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

• Sensory

  Balance

  The relationship between a cider’s sweetness, acidity, tannin, alcohol and carbonation, judged by whether any one of them dominates unintentionally.

• Chemistry

  Tannin

  In cider usage, the phenolic material responsible for bitterness and astringency, principally condensed tannins — procyanidins — built from catechin and epicatechin units.

• Sensory

  Acidity

  The perception of sourness, and the sensation of freshness and mouth-watering it brings. It correlates with both titratable acidity and pH, but neither predicts it exactly.

• Fruit

  Bittersweet

  In the Long Ashton classification, a cider apple low in acid — conventionally below about 0.45 per cent — and high in tannin, above about 0.2 per cent. Bittersweets form the structural base of West Country cider.

• Sensory

  Body

  The perceived weight and fullness of a cider in the mouth. Full-bodied ciders feel substantial and coating; thin ones feel watery regardless of their alcohol.

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framework rather than a standing definition, and citing the wrong edition of one is the same class of error as citing a superseded specification.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.

• A Somerset Pomona: The Cider Apples of Somerset

  Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001. ISBN 9781874336877 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25

  Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001, ISBN 9781874336877. The author was Long Ashton’s cider pomologist, which is why this work is registered for Somerset cultivar identity at all — it is the nearest thing to a successor to the station’s own descriptions. No copy was opened. Not digitised in any open collection.