Learning path

History and culture

You can tell the documented history of cider from the legends told about it, and recognise the living traditions behind the main styles.

Who this is for

You want the story: where cider came from, who drank it, and the customs that still survive.

16 pages, each assuming only the ones before it. Every step is an ordinary page on the site; at the foot of each one is the way to the next.

The steps

Where the apple came from · History
Central Asia, long before anyone pressed it.
The Romans · History
The most repeated claim in cider history, and what supports it.
The Normans · History
The second most repeated claim, tested the same way.
The seventeenth-century boom · History
When bottled Herefordshire cider fetched wine’s prices in London.
Cider as wages · History
How a drink became part of farm pay, and how that ended.
Cider and tax · History
From the excise of the 1640s to the duty bands of today: governments deciding what cider is.
The orchards decline · History
Why the trees were lost.
Mass-market cider · History
Concentrate, and the drink most people now know as cider.
Cider in America · History
The ordinary drink of the northern colonies.
Prohibition · History
What actually happened to American cider orchards.
Asturias · History
The tradition with its own pour, glass and house.
The Basque Country · History
Cider from the barrel, at the cider house.
Normandy · History
Keeved cider, calvados and the appellations.
Hesse and Apfelwein · History
Germany’s cider, and the tavern culture around it.
Wassailing · Culture
The orchard custom, as practised and as revived.
Cider now · History
The revival, and the questions it has reopened.

Understand cider — You drink cider, or are curious about it, and have never been told what it actually is.
Make your first cider — You have a demijohn or a fermenting bucket, juice or fruit, and no experience — and you want a sound first batch rather than a lucky one.
Become a better cider maker — You have made a few batches and want them to be good on purpose rather than by luck.
Understand perry — You have heard perry is not pear cider and want to know what it is instead.
Cider science — You want the mechanisms: why cider tastes, smells and behaves as it does.
Orchards and fruit — You want to understand where cider fruit comes from: the tree, the orchard and the year.