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Practical

Practical

Arithmetic, interactions and diagnosis: the parts of CiderHQ you use with something in front of you rather than read through.

Everything in this part of the site answers a question somebody is holding an object while asking. How strong did this turn out. Why does the same bottle taste sharper cold. What the tannin in this glass is doing against the cheese on the plate. Why the caps are bulging, and whether that is dangerous.

The six areas below are built on different data and share one rule: the reasoning is shown, not just the answer. A calculator that returns a number without its formula cannot be checked; a pairing that names no mechanism cannot be argued with; a fault page that offers a remedy without saying how well it works wastes a weekend. Nothing here recommends drinking anything, and where the honest answer is that nothing can be done, that is the answer given.

The six areas

Guides (14)

Ordered paths rather than articles. Making cider, making perry, what to measure and why, how to taste with a method, what to do with a batch that has gone wrong. Each step says what happens, what it decides for everything downstream, and then hands off to the process, compound and fault records underneath it — so a reader can go as deep as they like at the point the question occurs to them rather than reading a compound page to find out when to pick the fruit. Hazards are stated on the step where they arise, not collected into a preamble.

Tools and calculators (30)

Gravity to alcohol, juice yield from a given weight of fruit, priming sugar and the pressure it produces, acid and sulphite arithmetic. Every one of them shows its working and names the formula it used — the two ABV formulas in common circulation disagree above about 1.070, and a calculator that silently picks one is hiding the part that matters. Two of them read what you type rather than being fixed pages: the blend explorer and the fault finder.

Food and cider (136 subjects)

Sensory interaction rather than suggestion. Each subject sets out what happens in the mouth when a particular kind of drink meets it — acid raising salivary flow against a fat film, casein binding condensed tannin, sugar suppressing capsaicin burn — and names the mechanisms the explanation rests on. The mechanisms themselves are graded: some are measured effects in oral physiology, several are craft convention with nothing controlled behind them, and one records a hypothesis that failed when it was tested. The combinations that clash are published as prominently as the ones that work.

Serving (15 records)

Physics before etiquette. Cold suppresses volatility and raises the solubility of carbon dioxide, and sweetness perception falls with temperature while acidity barely moves — which is why the same cider reads as drier straight from the fridge. The rest is pressure: how to open several atmospheres of dissolved gas in a controlled way, and how to leave the deposit in the bottle rather than in the glass.

Storage (13 records)

A question about rates, not about dates. Oxidation continues wherever oxygen reached the bottle and roughly doubles in rate for every 10 °C; light drives reactions that green and clear glass admit far more of than brown; and a bottle-conditioned cider still contains live yeast, so warmth raises pressure as well as speed. The useful distinction is between a cider that has developed and one that has oxidised.

Troubleshooting (52 faults)

What went wrong, why, and what can be done — which, for most cider faults, does not include reversing it. The compound is already formed and no treatment takes it back out, so the value of these pages is in the mechanism and the prevention rather than in a rescue procedure. Faults carrying a real hazard, over-pressurised glass above all, are marked before any chemistry appears. If you do not know what you are looking at, the fault finder takes the signs you can observe and ranks the candidates with what separates them.

Serving: the questions asked most

Each of these answers a question directly at the top of the page, then explains the mechanism underneath it.

Storage: the questions asked most

What changes in a sealed bottle, how fast, and which of those changes is a fault.

Where the practical section stops

CiderHQ gives no additive dosage figures. An addition is a food-safety decision that depends on legal limits, on the juice in front of you and on what you are protecting against, and the right number comes from your supplier’s or regulator’s guidance rather than from a general reference. The tools calculate; they do not prescribe.

Nothing in this section encourages consumption. Serving and storage describe how to handle a drink competently, pairing describes what interacts with what, and the position on alcohol and health is set out separately under alcohol and health, where it follows the World Health Organization rather than the trade.

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