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History · 1990s to present

The North American cider revival

How did American cider come back?

In short

By reconstruction rather than by continuity. With the tradition broken, the revival from the 1990s onwards depended on imported European cultivars, recovered heritage American varieties, university research programmes and a generation of makers learning from books and from Europe.

It divided quickly. A large fruit-flavoured category grew from the drinks industry and behaves like a flavoured alcoholic beverage; a much smaller orchard-based sector works from cider fruit and single varieties. Quebec ice cider is a genuine addition to the world’s cider styles rather than a revival of anything.

Rebuilding the orchard

The first obstacle was fruit. A country whose orchards had been reorganised around dessert apples for a century had very little tannic cider fruit, and the varieties that had made colonial cider survived in collections and in scattered individual trees rather than in commercial plantings.

Two supplies were assembled in parallel. English and French cider cultivars were imported, evaluated and planted, which is why Dabinett, Yarlington Mill, Kingston Black and a range of French bittersweets now appear in North American orchards. And heritage American varieties — Harrison and Campfield among the most significant — were tracked down, propagated and returned to production.

Neither supply behaves as it does at home. European cider varieties grown in New York, Vermont or Washington State ripen differently, crop differently and analyse differently from the same cultivars in Somerset or the Pays d’Auge, which is one of the more useful lessons the revival has produced for cider science generally.

Research and the transfer of knowledge

Because the practical tradition had been broken, formal research took on a role it never needed to play in Normandy or Herefordshire. University extension and research programmes in New York, Washington State, Vermont and elsewhere ran cultivar trials, published juice analyses and worked on fermentation management for a group of growers who had no inherited practice to fall back on.

That work has a wider value. Analyses of European cider cultivars grown in North American climates are the strongest available demonstration that classification figures are measurements of particular fruit in a particular place, not fixed properties of a variety.

Alongside the institutions, the knowledge came from Europe directly: from English and French technical writing, from training courses, and from makers who travelled to learn. The intellectual debt runs one way, and the resulting practice is recognisably European in method even where the fruit and the climate are not.

Two industries under one name

The commercial growth of the 2000s and 2010s was overwhelmingly in flavoured, sweetened cider produced at scale, frequently from concentrate and frequently by brewing companies. It grew fast, competed with beer, and shaped what most American drinkers understand cider to be.

The orchard-based sector grew alongside it and is a different business in almost every respect: small volumes, whole-juice fermentation, named varieties, wine-like packaging and pricing, and a customer who is unlikely to have met the category through the flavoured products.

Describing these as one industry obscures more than it explains. They share a legal category and a word, and very little else. The tension between them is visible in trade organisation, in competition categories and in the recurring argument about how cider should be labelled.

Law, tax and definition

Federal tax rules had defined hard cider in terms that suited nothing the revival was making: the alcohol and carbonation limits were narrow enough that ordinary bottle-conditioned or well-carbonated cider fell outside the cider tax class and was taxed as sparkling wine. Producers organised around the problem and the definition was amended in the mid-2010s to widen the alcohol and carbonation limits and to include pear-based drinks.

This is a small piece of tax law with a disproportionate effect on what gets made. A definition that penalises carbonation discourages traditional-method and bottle-conditioned production; widening it removed a distortion that had been shaping American cider without anyone choosing it.

State-level rules on production, sale and direct shipping remain highly variable, and they continue to shape where small producers can operate and how they can sell.

Quebec ice cider

The one genuinely new thing to come out of North American cider is ice cider, developed in Quebec from the 1990s. Juice is concentrated by freezing — either by pressing frozen fruit or by concentrating pressed juice in the winter cold — and then fermented slowly to leave high residual sugar.

It has a family relationship to colonial applejack in that both use freezing, but the resemblance ends there: applejack concentrated a finished fermented drink, while ice cider concentrates the juice before fermentation, producing a sweet wine rather than a strengthened cider.

Quebec built a regulatory framework around the product, defining what may be called ice cider and how it must be made. That combination of a new technique, a defined product and a protected name is unusual in cider outside Europe.

How this developed

Certainty is marked on each entry. Where the popular account runs ahead of the evidence, that is said rather than smoothed over.

  1. 1990s

    Reconstruction begins

    Small producers in New England and elsewhere begin fermenting cider seriously; European cultivars are imported and heritage American varieties recovered.

  2. 1990s onwards

    Ice cider developed in Quebec

    Cryoconcentration of apple juice before fermentation produces a new sweet category, subsequently defined and protected in Quebec.

  3. 2000s

    University programmes engage

    Extension and research programmes run cultivar trials and publish juice analyses for cider fruit grown in North American conditions.

  4. 2010s

    Volume growth and divergence

    Flavoured and sweetened cider grows rapidly through beer distribution while the orchard-based sector develops separately.

  5. Mid-2010s

    The hard cider tax definition widened

    Federal rules are amended to raise the carbonation and alcohol limits for the hard cider class and to include pear-based drinks.

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