England

The tradition

What cider making here is, on its own terms — the fruit it uses, the shape of the drink, and the part it plays.

• Two quite separate industries share the word. One is a large national drinks business making consistent, filtered, carbonated cider, much of it from concentrate and much of it sold as a long drink over ice; the other is a farmhouse and craft sector making still, unfiltered, dry cider from whole fruit.
• The West Country tradition is built on bittersweet apples — low in acid, high in tannin, inedible raw and grown for no purpose but fermentation. This is a genuinely unusual agricultural specialisation and is what gives English cider its characteristic grip.
• The eastern counties tradition is quite different: sharp, low-tannin cider from dessert and culinary fruit, lighter in body and more often bottled than drawn.
• Perry, made from tannic perry pears rather than dessert pears, survives in the border counties as a distinct drink with its own fruit, its own problems and its own conservation dependency.
• Draught service by the pint in pubs is the dominant retail context, which shapes the strength, sweetness and carbonation of what is made for that market.
• Cider was for centuries part of agricultural wages in the West Country, drunk in the field, and the historic scale of production reflects that labour arrangement as much as any national taste.

How cider is defined and taxed here

A legal definition is not a description of good practice. It sets the floor a drink must clear to be sold under the word, and the floor is in a different place in every country — which is why the same label term can mean two quite different things either side of a border.

• Cider and perry are defined for excise purposes by juice content and by alcoholic strength: a drink must be made from a minimum proportion of apple or pear juice, and above a strength ceiling it ceases to be cider and is taxed as made-wine instead. The consequence is that the legal boundary of English cider is a revenue line, not a description of a drink.
• Since the reform of the alcohol duty regime, drinks are taxed in bands according to alcoholic strength rather than by a single rate per category, so a producer’s duty position depends on where the finished ABV falls.
• A relief for small producers reduces the burden on low-volume makers on a sliding scale, and a separate relief applies to qualifying draught products sold in large containers — both of which materially affect what a small cidermaker chooses to package and how.
• There is no legal minimum juice content for a drink to be described as cider in marketing beyond the excise threshold, which is why a product can be lawfully sold as cider while containing a modest proportion of apple.
• Labelling — allergen and sulphite declaration, ABV statement, ingredient information — follows the general food and drink rules rather than any cider-specific code, supplemented by a voluntary industry labelling code.
• Protected geographical names exist for certain regional ciders and cider spirits and are held on the national register; they define an area and a specification rather than the category as a whole.

Cider and perry in England

The state it belongs to

The cider tradition here is this country’s own. The excise definition, the duty bands and the protected-name register are not — they operate at state level, and apply identically across the state.

• Sovereign state

  United Kingdom

  The state whose law defines what may be called cider in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the level at which duty, labelling and protected-name rules operate — while the cider traditions themselves belong to the four countries beneath it.

  GB

Regions

The cider-making areas recorded within this country. Where an area has sub-regions, they are named on its card.

• Kernow

  Cornwall

  The western end of the West Country cider country, where a small, wind-exposed orchard landscape and a strong local variety tradition support a modest and largely craft-scale sector.

• Region

  Devon

  A West Country cider county with its own cultivars and a lighter, softer style than Somerset’s, and the place where cider’s most serious historic public health problem was identified and explained.

• Region

  Dorset

  A quietly persistent cider county on the eastern edge of the West Country tradition, where farm production in the western vales continued at small scale without ever becoming an industry.

• Region

  East Anglia

  The eastern counties tradition: dry, sharp, low-tannin cider made from dessert and culinary fruit in the driest part of Britain, and the clearest evidence that English cider is not one thing.

• Region

  Gloucestershire

  The centre of English perry: a county whose orchard identity rests less on apples than on a population of enormous, long-lived perry pear trees concentrated in the Severn Vale and the country around May Hill.

• Region

  Herefordshire

  The English county where cider was first treated as a subject for study rather than a farm by-product, and which now supplies more cider fruit than anywhere else in the United Kingdom.

• Region

  Kent

  England’s principal dessert and culinary fruit county, where cider is made from eating and cooking apples rather than from purpose-grown cider fruit, and where the modern rootstock science that reshaped world orcharding was developed.

• Region

  Shropshire

  The northern edge of the border perry and cider country, where the Clee Hills and Corvedale carry an orchard tradition continuous with Herefordshire’s and a strong local variety conservation effort.

• Region

  Somerset

  The county most closely identified with English farmhouse cider, where a wet maritime climate, heavy grazing land and a labour system that paid part of a wage in drink produced a tradition of strong, dry, tannic cider made on the farm.

• Region

  Sussex

  A south-eastern county with a long orchard history and a short cider one, where most current production dates from the modern craft period and works with dessert and culinary fruit.

• Region

  Worcestershire

  The third of the three counties: a mixed fruit-growing county where cider and perry sat alongside plums, hops and market-garden produce rather than dominating the farm economy.

• Region

  Yorkshire

  A northern county at the climatic edge of English orcharding, where cider making is small, recent and dependent on bought-in fruit as much as on local orchards.

How fruit is classified here

One scheme among several. It was built for this country's fruit and answers this country's question about it.

• Long Ashton classification

  The English four-way split of cider apples by acid and tannin: sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp. The scheme most English-language cider writing uses, and the one most often mistaken for a universal standard.

Styles made here

Categories whose definition or characteristic practice belongs to this country.

• Dry cider

  Cider fermented out or finished so that little fermentable sugar remains, leaving acid, tannin and alcohol to carry the palate.

• Modern mainstream cider

  The industrially produced, consistent, carbonated cider that accounts for most of what is sold worldwide, generally made partly from concentrate and finished to a fixed specification.

• Perry

  The fermented drink of pears, a tradition parallel to cider rather than derived from it, in which unfermentable sorbitol leaves a sweetness the maker never chose.

• West Country farmhouse cider

  Cider made on the farm from tannic bittersweet fruit, wild-fermented in wood and sold still and unfiltered, in a tradition whose variability is one of its defining features.

• Bottle-conditioned perry

  Perry that completes its fermentation in the sealed bottle, generating carbonation and lees character while the fruit’s sorbitol keeps a sweetness the yeast cannot remove.

• Herefordshire cider

  Cider from the county with England’s largest cider orchard area, protected as a geographical indication and spanning farmhouse practice, bottle-fermented cider and industrial-scale production.

• Medium cider

  Cider carrying enough residual or added sugar to be perceptible without dominating, the commonest sweetness level in British retail.

• Somerset cider

  Cider from the Somerset levels and the surrounding hills, built on a locally selected bittersweet fruit population and a tradition of full-bodied, tannic, still cider.

• Sparkling perry

  Perry carrying a persistent bubble, a presentation that suits pear’s aromatics and residual sorbitol and has a documented history going back to the seventeenth century.

• Still perry

  Perry without carbonation, in which the fruit’s sorbitol sweetness and its texture carry a drink that has no bubble to lean on.

• Sweet cider

  Cider in which sugar is the leading sensation, whether retained from an arrested fermentation, added after it, or produced by keeving.

• Three Counties cider

  The shared cider and perry tradition of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, defined by a common fruit inventory and by the perry pear orchards that survive nowhere else in comparable numbers.

• Traditional draught cider

  Cider dispensed from cask, bag-in-box or gravity without added gas, in the form that British cider has historically been drunk in pubs and at the farm gate.

• Eastern counties cider

  Cider from eastern and south-eastern England made largely from dessert and culinary apples, giving a lighter, sharper and less tannic drink than the West Country tradition.

• Scrumpy

  A colloquial West Country word for rough farm cider that has never had a fixed definition and now carries as much marketing weight as descriptive meaning.

Protected designations and national definitions

Names the law reserves, and the instruments that reserve them. Each page carries the date the record was taken.

• PGI

  Gloucestershire Perry PGI

  The protected geographical indication for perry from Gloucestershire, the county that holds the densest surviving population of perry pear varieties in England.

• PGI

  Herefordshire Cider PGI

  The protected geographical indication for cider from Herefordshire, one of the three counties whose cider and perry names were registered under the EU scheme and transferred to the UK register after EU exit.

• PGI

  Herefordshire Perry PGI

  The protected geographical indication for perry from Herefordshire, the companion registration to the county’s cider name and one of the few legal protections perry holds anywhere.

• PGI

  Gloucestershire Cider PGI

  The protected geographical indication for cider from Gloucestershire, registered under the EU scheme alongside the county’s perry name and now held on the UK register as well.

• geographical-indication

  Somerset Cider Brandy

  The protected name for apple spirit distilled in Somerset from Somerset cider and matured in oak, the English structural counterpart to Calvados.

• PGI

  Worcestershire Cider PGI

  The protected geographical indication for cider from Worcestershire, the third of the Three Counties names and the smallest of them by production.

• PGI

  Worcestershire Perry PGI

  The protected geographical indication for perry from Worcestershire, completing the six Three Counties registrations for cider and perry.

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.

• What is perry — Perry is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting the juice of pears, traditionally of specific perry pear cultivars rather than eating pears. It is to pears what cider is to apples, and has its own history in the three counties of England and in Normandy.
• What is scrumpy — Scrumpy is an informal West Country word for strong, still, usually cloudy farmhouse cider. It has no legal definition, so it describes a style expectation rather than a guaranteed method.
• What is sweet cider in america — In the United States and Canada, sweet cider means fresh, unfermented, usually unfiltered apple juice, with no alcohol in it. In Britain the same phrase means a fermented cider with residual sugar.
• What is traditional draught cider — Still or lightly conditioned cider served from a cask or a bag-in-box rather than under gas pressure, so whatever sparkle it has came from its own fermentation. It is the format most West Country farmhouse cider is sold in.
• How is supermarket cider made
• What are the three counties in cider — Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire — the block of country where England’s cider and, above all, its perry have historically concentrated.

Where to go next

• All cider regions and countries — The other traditions, grouped by the family each belongs to.
• Protected designations — Every reserved name on CiderHQ, grouped by country.
• Styles — What defines each category, and what legitimately varies inside it.

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.

• Alcoholic products duty rates and the Alcohol Duty regime

  HM Revenue & Customs · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24

  The UK alcohol duty system was reformed in August 2023 onto a strength-based footing, with draught relief and small producer relief alongside it. The rate table was read on 2026-08-24 and carries an effective date of 1 February 2026. CiderHQ records the band *structure* — which is stable and explains why producers make the strengths they do — and states rates only with that effective date attached, because a rate with no date on it becomes permanent and wrong.

• National Association of Cider Makers

  NACM · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24

  The UK trade association. Useful for industry-agreed definitions and for the voluntary labelling standards its members work to. A trade body has an interest in how its product is described, so CiderHQ cites it for what the industry says about itself rather than for neutral scientific claims.

• Long Ashton Research Station cider fruit analyses

  National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol · research institute · registered as competent for this subject · covers 1903–2003

  The foundational body of cider-fruit science in English. Long Ashton produced the acid-and-tannin classification that divides cider apples into sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp, and analysed hundreds of cultivars grown at its Somerset site. Its figures are historic measurements of specific fruit at a specific place, not universal constants — a distinction CiderHQ preserves in every measurement record that cites it.

• CAMRA cider and perry standards

  Campaign for Real Ale · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24

  Opened on 2026-08-24. Registered for the consumer-campaigning vocabulary — "real cider", "full juice" — which is advocacy language rather than legal definition, and is recorded as such wherever CiderHQ uses it.