The first fermented apple drinks

Apple juice ferments on its own. The yeasts that do it live on the fruit skin and in the surroundings, the sugar is already in solution, and a container of crushed apples left in a warm place will begin fermenting within a day or two whether or not anyone intends it to. This is the single most important fact about early cider history, because it means the drink does not require a discovery in the way that distillation or malting does.

The practical consequence is that the interesting historical question is not when fermented apple juice first existed but when people began doing it on purpose, at scale, with fruit chosen for the job. Those are three separate developments and they need not have happened together or in one place.

It also means that the absence of early evidence is not evidence of absence. A household fermenting a crock of crushed crab apples leaves nothing behind that a later archaeologist can identify with confidence, and would have had no reason to record it.

The wild apple of Europe, Malus sylvestris, is a small, hard, sharp and often intensely astringent fruit. It is not a fruit anyone would grow to eat, but sharpness and astringency are not defects in a fermented drink, and small hard fruit gives juice with concentrated acid and phenolics. Whether prehistoric communities pressed such fruit in any quantity is unknown, but the raw material was widely available.

Charred and waterlogged apple remains turn up on European archaeological sites from the Neolithic onward, including fruit that has been cut and dried. That establishes that apples were gathered and stored. It does not establish what was done with the juice, because pressing and fermenting leave the same fruit debris as eating and drying.

The relevant distinction, in orchard terms, is between gathering wild fruit and cultivating selected trees. Cultivation requires grafting or at least deliberate planting, and it is the point at which orchards, rather than woods, start to shape what the drink tastes like.

Modern archaeological chemistry can detect traces of fermented beverages in pottery: acids, sugars, plant markers and by-products absorbed into the fabric of a vessel. This work has genuinely transformed the study of early wine and beer, and it is often cited in popular cider writing as though it settled the apple question too.

It does not, for two reasons. The first is that the markers used to identify fruit residues are rarely specific enough to separate apple from other fruit, and malic acid — the obvious candidate — occurs widely in plants and degrades. The second is that many early fermented drinks appear to have been mixed: fruit, grain, honey and resin together. A vessel that carried a mixed ferment including apple is not evidence of cider.

The honest reading is that residue analysis places fermented fruit drinks deep in prehistory across Eurasia, and does not isolate an apple tradition within that. Anyone claiming a precise origin date for cider from this literature has read it selectively.

Cider as the word is now used implies several things at once: apples rather than mixed fruit, deliberate pressing, controlled or at least intended fermentation, and usually cultivated fruit. Each of those arrived at a different time in a different place, and several of them arrived more than once.

A useful comparison is bread. Asking when bread was invented produces no good answer, because gathering grain, grinding it, wetting it, cooking it and leavening it are separable steps spread over millennia. Cider is the same kind of question, and the same kind of non-answer is the correct one.

The point at which the record becomes usable is much later, when documents rather than deposits carry the evidence: estate accounts, tithe disputes and inventories that name presses and vessels. From that point the history is real and specific. Before it, the honest position is that fermented apple drink was probably widespread and is undocumented.