Country
Hungary
A significant apple producer whose crop goes overwhelmingly to juice concentrate, and where cider is a recent commercial category rather than an inherited drink.
Magyarország.
- ISO country code
- HU
- Level
- Sovereign state
- Native name
- Magyarország
- Regions recorded
- None recorded separately
- Protected designations
- None recorded
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.
- Hungarian apple growing is concentrated in the north-east of the country and is oriented very heavily towards processing, above all to juice concentrate for export.
- The national drink culture is a wine culture with a strong fruit-spirit tradition alongside it; pálinka is the established use for surplus orchard fruit.
- The traditional Hungarian term for a fermented apple drink is almabor, apple wine, framing it as German and Dutch do rather than as a separate category.
- Cider as a marketed category is recent, industrially produced, sweet and carbonated, and belongs to the modern commercial expansion.
- A small craft layer exists but is young and has no inherited practice behind it.
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 is treated as an EU fermented beverage other than wine, carrying that category’s requirements for strength statement, allergens and sulphite declaration.
- Hungarian excise distinguishes wine, beer and other fermented drinks, with cider in the last category and defined principally by strength.
- Pálinka has its own protected legal definition and a substantial regulatory framework, which reflects its far greater traditional importance than cider’s.
- There is no Hungarian production standard specifying varieties or method for cider.
- CiderHQ holds no Hungarian national source, so this record describes the structure at a general level only.
Definitions, minimum juice contents and duty bands are amended, and CiderHQ records the structure of a rule rather than reproducing figures it has not verified against the instrument itself. Anyone making a commercial decision should read the current legislation or the revenue authority’s own guidance. The sources at the foot of this page are where to start.
Cider and perry in Hungary
Hungary’s place in the world cider industry is real but almost invisible, because it is upstream. The country grows a large apple crop in its north-eastern counties and sends much of it to juice concentrate, a great deal of which is exported. Concentrate from Hungary and Poland has been an input to cider industries across Europe for decades, so Hungarian apples appear in other countries’ ciders far more often than in Hungary’s own.
Domestically the traditional use for orchard fruit is distillation. Pálinka has legal protection, a substantial regulatory framework and a social role that no fermented apple drink here has ever held, and it competes for the same crop.
Cider as a marketed category in Hungary is recent, industrial, sweet and carbonated, and almabor — apple wine — is the older term for a fermented apple drink. CiderHQ holds no Hungarian national source, and this record is short because the evidence supports nothing longer.
Regions
The cider-making areas recorded within this country. Where an area has sub-regions, they are named on its card.
Cider making in Hungary is recorded at national level rather than broken into regions. That is a statement about the record, not about the country: where the tradition is genuinely regional, the regions are given pages of their own.
Styles made here
Categories whose definition or characteristic practice belongs to this country.
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.
Fruit cider
Cider with other fruit added as juice, purée or flavouring, a category that now accounts for a large share of the global market and spans a very wide range of practice.
Medium cider
Cider carrying enough residual or added sugar to be perceptible without dominating, the commonest sweetness level in British retail.
Sweet cider
Cider in which sugar is the leading sensation, whether retained from an arrested fermentation, added after it, or produced by keeving.
Apple wine
A fermented apple drink made to wine strength, usually by raising the starting gravity, and presented and taxed as a wine rather than as a cider.
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 fruit cider — Fruit cider is cider flavoured with another fruit, either as juice, purée or flavouring, added after fermentation. How much apple has to remain varies by jurisdiction, and in some markets very little does.
- 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.
- How is supermarket cider made
- What is a medium dry cider
- What is the difference between cider and apple wine
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.
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
European Union · legislation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 on the provision of food information to consumers
European Union · legislation · passage verified 2026-08-24
The instrument behind the "contains sulphites" declaration and the alcoholic-strength labelling rule. Read on 2026-08-24 in the assimilated text maintained on legislation.gov.uk, which is the version in force for Great Britain and keeps the EU numbering. Two provisions matter to cider and both are widely misquoted: the sulphite threshold is 10 mg/L rather than a percentage, and a labelled cider strength carries a tolerance of a full percentage point either way — twice what still grape wine is allowed.
Country and region records describe practice and tradition. How CiderHQ handles evidence.