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What cider is

What is cider?

In short

Cider is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting apple juice. Yeast converts the sugar in the juice into alcohol and carbon dioxide, and what comes out the other end is usually somewhere between about 3% and 8.5% alcohol by volume.

Everything past that sentence varies. Cider can be dry or sweet, still or sparkling, pale gold or deep amber, clear or thoroughly cloudy, and all of those are ordinary rather than exceptional.

The word itself is not stable either. Each cider-making country defines it in law slightly differently, and in the United States and Canada "cider" on its own commonly means unfermented apple juice, with the fermented drink called hard cider.

The short definition and where it runs out

Apples contain sugar — mostly fructose, with glucose and sucrose alongside it — dissolved in water, along with acid, tannin and a large number of aroma compounds. Crush the fruit, press the juice out, and yeast will consume the sugar and produce ethanol and carbon dioxide. That is cider, and the process needs no equipment more sophisticated than something to crush with, something to press with and something to hold the juice.

The definition runs out almost immediately, because it does not say which apples, how much of the juice has to be apple juice, whether anything may be added, or how far the fermentation must go. Those are exactly the questions that separate a Somerset farmhouse cider from a Normandy cidre doux from an Asturian sidra natural from a mass-market British can, and they are also the questions that different legal systems answer differently.

It is worth being blunt about this at the outset: there is no international definition of cider. There is a British one, a French one, a Spanish set of designation rules, a German fruit-wine framework and an American tax class, and they do not agree. A page that tells you what cider "really" is, without saying whose law it is quoting, is telling you about one country.

What the law requires, by jurisdiction

The table below is the shape of the disagreement rather than a complete statement of any one system. Each entry is a summary of what the relevant authority requires; the detail sits on the individual country and designation pages.

How five jurisdictions define the product. Summaries, not full specifications.
Jurisdiction	What it must be made from	Strength	The word used
United Kingdom	Apple or pear juice making up at least 35% of the liquid before fermentation; water and sugar may be added within the rules	Above 1.2% and not more than 8.5% ABV to be charged as cider; anything stronger is charged as another fermented product	Cider, perry
France	Must obtained from apples, or from apples and pears; a cidre pur jus carries no added water	Minimum strengths are set by the protected-designation specifications rather than by a single national ceiling	Cidre, poiré
Spain	Sidra natural is fermented apple juice with no added sugar and no added carbon dioxide; protected designations name the permitted varieties	Minimum strengths set by designation specification	Sidra, sagardoa
Germany	Fermented apple juice, handled within the German fruit-wine framework; the Hessian protected name adds its own requirements	No separate cider tax band of the British kind; the drink is usually fermented out	Apfelwein, Most, Viez
United States	For the hard cider tax rate: derived primarily from apples or pears, or from their juice concentrate and water, with no other fruit	Less than 8.5% ABV, and carbonation not above 0.64 grams of carbon dioxide per 100 millilitres, to qualify for that rate	Hard cider

These are tax and designation rules, not quality rulesEvery entry above exists to answer an administrative question — what duty is owed, what may carry a protected name. None of them was written to describe what a good cider is, and none of them should be read as doing so.

Why the American usage is not a mistake

In British and Irish English, cider is alcoholic and needs no qualifier. In much of the United States and Canada, cider means fresh, unfiltered, unfermented apple juice, sold cloudy and often seasonally, and the alcoholic drink is distinguished as hard cider. Neither usage is a corruption of the other; they are two surviving branches of an older, looser use of the word.

The practical consequence is only that the qualifier matters when the audience is mixed. American producers and retailers use hard cider on the label because their customers need it, and the same producers routinely drop the word when talking to each other. On this site the drink is called cider throughout, and where the unfermented product is meant it is called apple juice.

What cider is not

It is not a beer. There is no grain, no malting, no mash and no boil; the sugar arrives already dissolved in the fruit.
It is not a wine in the legal sense in most countries, though it is made the same way and several jurisdictions file it under fruit wine.
It is not necessarily sweet. A cider fermented to completion has no sugar left in it at all, and much of the world drinks it that way.
It is not necessarily fizzy. Still cider is the older form and remains the norm in several traditions.
It is not always made from apples grown for the purpose — a great deal of cider is made from dessert and culinary fruit, and from concentrate.

Also answered on this page

Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.

Is cider made from apples?
What is the difference between cider and hard cider?
Is cider a beer or a wine?
Is all cider sweet?
Does cider have to be made from cider apples?

What people ask next

Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.

How does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
How many calories are in cider — Roughly 40 to 60 kcal per 100 ml for most ciders, so a UK pint falls somewhere around 200 to 250 kcal. Alcohol contributes about 7 kcal per gram and residual sugar about 4, so both strength and sweetness matter.
What does everything on a cider label mean — Every cider label carries a strength figure and a volume, and almost all carry an allergen statement where sulphites are present above the declarable threshold. Beyond that, what a label must say — and what it is permitted to say — differs sharply between jurisdictions.
What is cider — Cider is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting the juice of apples. In Britain, Ireland and most of Europe the word on its own means the fermented drink; in the United States it usually means unfermented apple juice, and the fermented drink is called hard cider.
What is the difference between cider and apple juice — In Britain, cider is fermented and apple juice is not. In the United States the distinction is different again: "cider" there usually means fresh, cloudy, unfiltered juice, while "apple juice" means the filtered, pasteurised kind.
What is the difference between cider and hard cider — None, once you know which country you are in. In the United States "cider" means unfermented juice and "hard cider" means the alcoholic drink; in Britain and Ireland "cider" alone means the alcoholic drink and there is no separate word for the juice.

Sources

What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.

Alcoholic Products Technical Guide, section 2 — alcoholic products (formerly Excise Notice 162)
HM Revenue & Customs · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24
What may be called cider or perry for UK duty purposes. The substantive text now lives in section 2 of the Alcoholic Products Technical Guide rather than in the notice itself, and the passages below were read there. The widely repeated "35% juice" figure checks out — but note two things the figure alone hides: it is a tax threshold rather than a quality standard, and concentrate and dilution both count towards it.
Décret n° 2025-162 du 20 février 2025 portant application de l’article L. 412-1 du code de la consommation en ce qui concerne les cidres et poirés
Légifrance, JORF texte n° JORFTEXT000051223792 · legislation · retrieved 2026-08-24 · covers In force from 1 July 2025; “artisanal” and “rosé” from 1 January 2026
Opened on 2026-08-24, and it turned out that the entry CiderHQ had was describing a repealed instrument. The décret of 20 February 2025 replaces the 1953 décret and the 1987 one that amended it, and it changes the thing this site had been repeating: the doux, demi-sec and brut categories are no longer residual-sugar bands. They are now defined on acquired alcoholic strength together with density at 20 °C, an extra-brut tier has been added, and the four bands deliberately overlap so that a producer can place a product with a hydrometer rather than a sugar analysis. The pages that said otherwise have been corrected. What could not be done is a verbatim read: legifrance.gouv.fr returns HTTP 403 to retrieval, so the text was read through a summarising fetch and every operative figure was then checked independently against the UNICID interbranch briefing, which reproduces the table. The two agree.
Denominación de Origen Protegida Sidra de Asturias
Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias · designation authority · passage verified 2026-08-24
The regulating council for Asturian cider. Read on 2026-08-24, and it turned out to carry far more than a permitted-variety list: an agronomic and technological characterisation of each admitted variety, with total acidity, total polyphenols, vigour, flowering, ripening, cropping and susceptibility to fungal disease. The characterisation is credited to SERIDA’s fruit-research programme. Two things it settles are corrections to what CiderHQ previously held: Asturias sorts cider fruit into nine technological blocks rather than five, and it publishes acidity as sulphuric acid rather than malic. The figures are transcribed into `data/trials/serida-asturias.ts` and cite this source, because this is where they were read.
Hard cider tax class and labelling requirements
Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) · regulator · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24. The address CiderHQ had registered — ttb.gov/wine/hard-cider — now returns 404; the bureau publishes its cider material at ttb.gov/cider/cider-resources, and the record has been corrected. The substantive hard cider definition is in 27 CFR §§24.10 and 24.331, which CiderHQ cites directly and has verified to the passage; this page is the regulator’s own gateway and its industry circular pointer, not the operative text.
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24

Where to go next

Learn about cider — The rest of the introductory material, grouped by the question it answers.
Glossary — Any word on this page you did not recognise, defined in one or two sentences.
Comparisons — What separates cider from the drinks it is most often confused with.