The history of cider competitions and judging

The agricultural societies founded across Britain from the middle of the eighteenth century existed to raise output and standards by publication, demonstration and reward. They paid premiums for improved practice, held annual shows, and awarded prizes in classes covering everything a member farm produced. In the western counties that included cider and perry from an early date.

The purpose of a prize class in this context was instructional. A premium for a well-made cider identified a practice worth copying, gave the winner standing among neighbours, and put a sample in front of other farmers who could taste what they were being told to aim at. It sat alongside premiums for drainage, for breeding stock and for new implements, and it belongs to the same reforming programme.

The criteria followed from the purpose. What the societies wanted was cider that was sound, would keep, and could be sold — because unsound cider was the principal economic problem of the trade. Refinement was secondary to not spoiling.

Through the nineteenth century the show class settled into a recognisable form: entries submitted in the maker’s own containers, tasted by a small panel of local men of standing, judged against each other rather than against a written standard, with results announced at the show. Classes were divided by type in a rough way — dry and sweet, cider and perry, sometimes vintage and non-vintage.

Judging in this system rested on shared local knowledge. A panel drawn from a single county knew what the cider of that county was supposed to taste like, and did not need to write it down. That is an efficient arrangement inside a district and a useless one outside it, which is why show results of this period say very little that transfers.

The class list is nonetheless a useful historical document. What a society chose to have classes for records what it considered the significant divisions of the product at the time, and following those lists across a century shows categories appearing, merging and disappearing as the trade changed.

The establishment of a research station for cider in 1903 introduced a second basis for assessment. Once juice and finished cider could be analysed for acid, tannin, sugar and alcohol, and once spoilage organisms could be identified rather than guessed at, the difference between a sound cider and an unsound one stopped being a matter of opinion.

This changed what a fault meant. Cloudiness, ropiness, acetification and the milky spoilage then called cider sickness had causes, and a judge who knew the causes could name what was wrong instead of simply preferring another entry. Competition feedback became technical advice, which is much closer to what the improvement societies had originally intended.

It also imported a bias that has never entirely left cider judging. Analytical assessment finds it easy to identify defects and hard to identify merit, and a scoring system built on identifiable faults will reliably reward the cider with least wrong with it rather than the most interesting one.

The structured judging now used at the larger competitions came to cider from beer and wine, and mostly from beer. Its apparatus is a written style guideline describing what each category should show, a scoresheet dividing the assessment into aroma, appearance, flavour, mouthfeel and overall impression, a points total, and a trained and examined judge. Frameworks of this kind were developed from the 1990s and have been extended and revised repeatedly since.

The gain is real. A written category description makes judging repeatable, transferable between countries and arguable in public, and it gives an entrant feedback they can act on. A cider judged in this way has been assessed against something a reader can look up.

The cost is equally real and is openly discussed within the field. A category framework rewards conformity to its own descriptions, so a cider from a tradition the framework handles poorly, or one that sits between categories, is disadvantaged for reasons that have nothing to do with how well it was made. Consumer organisations judging on different criteria again — dispense method, juice content, absence of treatment — produce different winners from the same entries, which is a useful demonstration that a competition measures its own standard.

Judging has shaped production, and the direction of that influence is worth stating. Rewarding soundness pushed makers towards cellar discipline and, later, towards filtration and stabilisation. Rewarding clarity pushed them further in the same direction. Rewarding category typicity encouraged makers to make ciders that fit a described type rather than ones that express a particular orchard.

Against that, competitions have preserved things the market would have removed. Classes for perry, for keeved cider, for bottle-conditioned and for single-varietal ciders keep small categories visible and give producers a reason to keep making products that sell in tiny volumes. Several of the specialist bodies in this site’s source register run classes for exactly that purpose.

The balance is not settled and does not need to be. A competition is an institution with an effect on what gets made, and understanding cider means understanding that the assessment frameworks are one of the forces acting on the product, alongside duty, retail and fruit supply.