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Learn about cider
Fermented apple juice is the whole of the definition and almost none of the answer. These pages start from nothing and assume nothing.
Cider is made in a dozen countries that do not agree on what the word means, from fruit most people have never seen, by methods that range from a wooden press in a farm building to a continuous plant running on concentrate. A page that tells you what cider “really” is, without saying whose law or whose tradition it is quoting, is describing one country and calling it the world.
Each page below takes one question, answers it in the first few sentences, and then gives the detail behind the answer. Where the honest answer is that it depends on where you are standing, the page says so and then says what it depends on.
There is no beginner’s version and expert version of anything here. The same evidence standard applies to what cider is as to the fermentation chemistry in the science section.
What the thing is
Start here if you have never thought about cider before.
How cider is made
The whole process from orchard to glass in one page: growing, harvesting, milling, pressing, fermenting, maturing, blending, adjusting and packaging — and what each stage decides about the finished drink.
What cider is
Cider is fermented apple juice, but the word carries a different legal meaning in every country that makes it — and in North America it often means the unfermented juice instead.
What perry is
Perry is fermented pear juice, made from pear varieties grown for the purpose. It is not simply cider made with pears: sorbitol in the fruit means a fully fermented perry keeps a sweetness a fully fermented cider cannot.
Why cider is not just fermented apple juice
The one-line definition is true and misleading. Fermentation removes the sugar that carried apple juice’s flavour, creates several hundred compounds that were not in the fruit, and leaves behind acid and tannin that the sugar had been hiding.
The fruit it is made from
Most cider apples are close to inedible raw, and that is the point rather than a defect.
What makes a cider apple different
Cider apples are selected for juice rather than for eating: higher tannin, often lower acid, more sugar per unit of water, and a tolerance of being stored in a heap. Most differ from dessert fruit in degree rather than in kind, except for tannin, where the gap is very large.
How cider apples are classified
Five systems sort cider fruit, and they disagree about how many classes there even are. The English scheme uses four, on acid and tannin thresholds set in Somerset; the French five families; the Asturian nine technological blocks, six of them compound characters with no English equivalent; perry pears a fourth arrangement; and the American competition framework classifies the drink instead of the fruit.
Why cider apples taste unpleasant raw
Cider apples taste unpleasant raw because their tannin content is many times that of a dessert apple, and tannin that reads as structure in a fermented drink reads as bitterness and mouth-drying in a mouthful of fruit.
Why a perry pear’s name does not identify it
Nineteen names in the National Perry Pear Collection’s register belong to more than one variety at once. “Longland” is three different trees, “Huffcap” is two, and the Collection has separated them by DNA — so a pear offered under a bare name has not been identified.
Reading the label
The words on a bottle are a mixture of legal terms, regulated claims and marketing. Which is which differs by country.
How to read a cider label
What the words and figures on a cider container mean in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, the United States and Germany — five labelling systems that answer different questions and require different things.
What "dry" means on a cider label
Dry means little or no residual sugar — but it is not a fixed point. In the UK and US no law defines it, France defines its bands on alcoholic strength, and how sweet a given sugar level tastes depends on acid, tannin and carbonation.
What "craft" and "traditional" mean
Neither word has a legal definition for cider in the UK, the US or the EU. They describe an intended positioning, and the only reliable information on a label is the specific, checkable claim: juice content, fruit, method, designation.
What concentrate is and what it changes
Concentrate is apple juice with most of its water evaporated off, stored and shipped as a syrup and reconstituted before fermentation. It solves storage and logistics, and it costs aroma, some phenolic character and the link to a particular orchard and season.
What the juice percentage means
The juice figure states how much of the liquid before fermentation was apple juice rather than water, sugar syrup and other additions. The UK minimum for a product to be charged as cider is 35%.
Why the same sweetness word means different things
Five cider-making countries use five sweetness vocabularies, cut on different axes and backed by different degrees of legal force. Translating between them word-for-word produces confident errors.
Strength
Cider covers a wider strength range than almost any other everyday drink.
How strong cider is
Most cider sits between about 3% and 8.5% alcohol by volume, with mainstream products clustering around 4–5.5% and traditional West Country and Spanish ciders higher. Ice ciders and apple wines go well beyond that range.
Why cider strength varies so much
Strength is decided by how much sugar was in the juice and how much of it the yeast was allowed to consume. Both vary enormously — by variety, season, orchard, method and deliberate intervention.
Blends, single varietals and farmhouse cider
Why most cider is a blend, what a single-varietal cider is trying to show, and what separates a farm cider from a commercial one.
Farmhouse cider and commercial cider
The difference is scale, and what scale makes necessary. Farmhouse cider is made from a specific orchard, ferments on its own timetable and varies between batches; commercial cider is made to a specification and must not vary.
What a single-varietal cider is
A cider made from one apple variety alone. It is the clearest way to learn what a variety tastes like, and it is harder to make well than a blend because there is nothing to correct an imbalance with.
What blending is for
Blending combines batches to reach a balance no single batch has. It corrects acid and tannin, fills gaps in aroma, evens out the season, and lets a producer hit a target strength and sweetness precisely.
Why most cider is blended
Because most cider fruit is a contributor rather than a soloist, because seasons vary, and because a product sold as the same thing every time has to be assembled rather than found. Blending is the norm in every cider tradition.
Everything else
From orchard to bottle
The whole production sequence as one path, with what is measured at each stage, what goes wrong there, and which decisions can still be reversed afterwards.
Building a sense of what you like
Preference is discovered by structured comparison rather than by reading. Vary one thing at a time — sweetness, tannin, acidity, carbonation, tradition — and keep a record, because memory for taste is poor.
How to start tasting cider deliberately
A method for paying attention: look, smell before tasting, take a small mouthful and register structure separately from flavour, and wait for the finish. The point is to notice what is there rather than to reach a verdict.
The cider words that do not translate
Most, cidre, sidra, sagardo, Apfelwein, Viez, Zider: a small vocabulary that looks translatable and is not. Some of these words are legally defined, some mean opposite things a hundred kilometres apart, and one of them means the juice on one side of a border and the drink on the other.
What bottle conditioning is
Fermenting the cider a second time inside the sealed bottle, so the carbon dioxide it produces has nowhere to go. It carbonates the cider, leaves a yeast sediment, and changes the flavour over time.
What keeving is
A traditional French technique that strips nutrients out of the juice before fermentation, so the yeast runs out of food before it runs out of sugar. The result is a naturally sweet, low-alcohol cider that was never sweetened.
What makes cider fizzy
Dissolved carbon dioxide, arriving by one of three routes: retained from the original fermentation, generated by a second fermentation in a sealed container, or dissolved in under pressure. The route affects the texture as well as the amount.
What wild fermentation is
Fermentation by the yeasts already present on the fruit and in the building, rather than by a strain added deliberately. It produces a wider range of compounds and a wider range of outcomes, and it is neither inherently better nor inherently worse.
Where the beginner mistakes are
The common errors are not about taste but about assumption: that cider means one thing, that a foreign word translates, that cloudy means faulty, that strength is obvious, and that a first impression settles anything.
Why some cider is cloudy
Cloudiness is suspended material — yeast, fruit solids, pectin, protein or starch — that has not been removed. Most of it is a consequence of not filtering, and only some kinds of haze indicate anything wrong.
Whether cloudy cider is a fault
Usually not. Cloudiness in an unfiltered cider is expected; cloudiness that appears in a cider that was clear when packaged is the case worth investigating, and it is identified by smell and taste rather than by appearance.
The rest of the Learn section
Four different shapes of answer, for four different kinds of question.
422 terms
Glossary
Every word cider uses that is not ordinary English, defined once and linked to the page that explains it properly.
68 comparisons
Comparisons
What separates cider from beer, perry from pear cider, a bittersweet from a bittersharp. Difference, not superiority.
History
The history of cider
How a drink made everywhere apples grow became a regional speciality, and how much of the popular account survives the record.
Culture
Cider culture
The cider house, the sidrería and the Apfelwein house; wassailing, the long pour, and what people drink out of.
1608 questions
Questions readers ask
The question index, with the page that answers each one. CiderHQ does not build a page per question.
Alcohol and health
Cider is an alcoholic drink, and the pages that deal with that are kept together and written plainly.
Alcohol and health covers units and strength, what is actually in a glass, and what current guidance from national health authorities says. CiderHQ publishes no health benefits for alcohol, and nothing on this site encourages drinking. For advice about your own drinking, speak to your national health service.