Sweetness

Related terms

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

• Chemistry

  Residual sugar

  The fermentable sugar remaining in a finished cider, usually expressed in grams per litre. It is what sweetness legislation and style bands are written against.

• 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.

• Sensory

  Balance

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

• Chemistry

  Sorbitol

  A sugar alcohol present in substantial quantity in pears and in smaller amounts in apples. Yeast does not ferment it, so it survives fermentation and leaves a fully dry perry tasting faintly sweet.

• Cider

  Dry

  A cider or perry with little or no residual sugar, in which fermentation has taken the sugars essentially to completion.

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.

• Washington State University cider research programme

  Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center · university · passage verified 2026-08-24

  The single most useful open cider dataset CiderHQ has found. The programme’s cultivar performance database gives juice chemistry, orchard behaviour, bloom and harvest timing and cider-maker tasting notes for 73 cultivars grown at one maritime site over fifteen years, and — unusually — publishes its classification thresholds alongside its figures, so the classification can be checked rather than taken on trust. It also states outright that its results diverge from the English ones. Read in full on 2026-08-24 and transcribed into `data/trials/wsu-mount-vernon.ts`; four published figures were found to be impossible and are withheld there with their reasons.

• 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.