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How to start tasting cider deliberately

How do you taste cider properly?

In short

Pour a small measure into a glass with a bowl, look at it, smell it before you drink anything, take a modest mouthful and hold it for a moment, and then pay attention to what happens after you swallow.

The single most useful discipline is to separate structure from flavour. Sweetness, acidity, bitterness, astringency, body and carbonation are the frame; apple, pear, floral, farmyard and oak are what hangs on it. Most people find the frame harder to describe and more informative.

Nothing here requires a trained palate. It requires slowing down, and it requires tasting things next to each other, because comparison reveals differences that a single sample does not.

Conditions that make a difference

The sequence

Look first. Colour runs from almost colourless through straw and gold to deep amber and occasionally pink; depth of colour usually indicates phenolic content and oxidation rather than age alone. Note whether it is bright or hazy, and whether there is a mousse and how long it lasts.

Smell before you taste, and smell twice — a short sniff and then a longer one, because the nose adapts quickly and the first impression is often the most informative. Ask what family the aroma belongs to before trying to name a specific thing: is it fresh fruit, cooked fruit, floral, farmyard, wood, ferment, vinegar? Naming the family is achievable for anyone; naming the compound is not the point.

Then take a mouthful, not a sip. Let it cover the whole mouth. Sweetness registers almost immediately, acidity a moment later as the sides of the tongue respond, bitterness later still and towards the back. Carbonation makes itself felt as prickle. Body is the weight of the liquid, which is easiest to judge by comparison.

Swallow, and then wait. Astringency reveals itself after swallowing, as the mouth is left drying and rough; it is the sensation that builds rather than fades. The finish is what is still there after ten or twenty seconds, and its length and character are among the most reliable indicators of how a cider was made.

Structure and flavour, kept apart

The site describes cider on thirteen dimensions, and they divide into three groups worth holding separately in mind. The structural ones — sweetness, acidity, bitterness, tannin, alcohol — are tastes. The textural ones — astringency, body, carbonation — are physical sensations. The aromatic ones — freshness, fruit character, phenolic character, fermentation character, oxidative character — are what the nose contributes, including retronasally while the cider is in the mouth.

Beginners almost always reach for the aromatic vocabulary first, because it is the vocabulary that tasting notes use. It is also the hardest to apply reliably. Working the other way round — establishing that a cider is dry, sharp, lightly tannic, medium-bodied and still, before saying anything about what it smells of — produces descriptions that are more accurate and more useful, and it builds the framework that flavour descriptions eventually hang on.

A related discipline is to separate what is there from whether you like it. Those are different judgements, they are made by different means, and running them together is why so many tasting notes describe a preference while appearing to describe a drink.

Building the vocabulary

Aroma vocabulary is learned by association, not by reading. Smelling a bruised apple, a cut apple, a pear drop, a wet stone, a damp cellar, a struck match and a sticking plaster deliberately, and attaching the words to the sensations, does more than any list.

It is also worth knowing that people differ genuinely in what they can detect. Sensitivity to specific compounds varies widely between individuals for reasons that are partly genetic, and bitterness sensitivity in particular differs by a large margin. Two people disagreeing about how bitter a cider is may both be reporting accurately.

Tasting notes are records, not verdictsThe value of writing something down is that it forces attention and lets you compare a cider with your own earlier impression of it. A note that says "dry, sharp, light tannin, apple skin, short" is more useful six months later than one that says "very good".

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