Wales

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.

• The Welsh tradition is a border one. Monmouthshire, eastern Powys and the country running up to Herefordshire share fruit, practice and vocabulary with the English side, and the boundary means nothing agriculturally.
• Perry is disproportionately important. The Welsh side of the border carries a share of the perry pear belt, including cultivars found nowhere else, and Welsh producers treat perry as a distinct drink rather than a variant of cider.
• Farmhouse production for the household and for farm labour was the historic form, and commercial cider making in Wales is largely a modern development.
• The current sector is small, craft-scale, and built substantially on replanted orchards and on cultivars identified and propagated since the 1980s.
• Welsh-language naming — seidr for cider, perai for perry — is used publicly and is part of how the revival presents itself.

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.

• Wales is inside the United Kingdom excise regime, so the definition of cider by juice content and strength, the strength-banded duty structure and the small producer and draught reliefs all apply identically to those in England.
• Licensing and public health measures are partly devolved: Wales legislates separately on minimum unit pricing for alcohol, which affects the retail price floor for cider by strength and volume rather than its production.
• Protected geographical names for Welsh cider and perry are held on the United Kingdom register and set out an area and specification.
• Labelling requirements follow the general United Kingdom food information rules; there is no Welsh cider-specific code.
• As in England, there is no legal minimum juice content for marketing a drink as cider beyond the excise threshold, so the word covers a very wide range of products in Welsh retail as it does elsewhere in Britain.

Cider and perry in Wales

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.

• Sir Gaerfyrddin

  Carmarthenshire

  A wet, pastoral county in south-west Wales where orchards were a small component of a dairy and livestock economy and cider making was domestic rather than commercial.

• Morgannwg

  Glamorgan

  A south Welsh county whose fertile coastal vale carried a working farm cider tradition until industrialisation and the ending of payment in drink removed the economy that sustained it.

• Sir Fynwy

  Monmouthshire

  The Welsh end of the border perry pear belt, where a farmhouse cider and perry tradition came close to extinction in the twentieth century and was deliberately reconstructed from surviving trees and surviving practitioners.

• Region

  Powys

  A large upland county in mid Wales where orcharding is confined to the valley floors of the Wye and Usk, and where border cultivar recovery has found varieties surviving in hedgerows and abandoned plots.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Medium cider

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

• Single-varietal cider

  Cider made wholly or overwhelmingly from one apple cultivar, presented so that the fruit’s own character is the subject of the drink.

• 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.

• 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.

• Seidr Cymreig

  Welsh cider

  Cider from Wales, rebuilt over recent decades from a nearly lost tradition, with protected names for traditional Welsh cider and perry and a fruit inventory shared with the English border counties.

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

  Traditional Welsh Cider PGI

  The protected geographical indication for cider made in Wales by traditional whole-juice methods, secured decades after the English county names and written to a tighter specification.

• PGI

  Traditional Welsh Perry PGI

  The protected geographical indication for perry made in Wales from whole pear juice by traditional methods, the companion registration to Traditional Welsh 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 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 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.
• Is single variety cider better than a blend — Neither is inherently better and CiderHQ does not rank them. A single varietal shows one cultivar’s character and depends entirely on that fruit being balanced; a blend is how most makers reach balance deliberately.
• What is a medium dry cider
• What is bottle conditioned perry
• What is still perry

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.

• Welsh Perry and Cider Society

  WPCS · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24

  Documents Welsh cider and perry traditions and has done substantial work identifying and conserving Welsh perry pear cultivars that were close to being lost.

• 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.

• UK protected geographical food and drink names register

  Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs · government · passage verified 2026-08-25

  The register itself is an index; the substance is in the product specification attached to each entry as a PDF. Eight cider and perry specifications were downloaded and read on 2026-08-24 — the six Three Counties names and the two Welsh ones. Reading them settled a question CiderHQ had previously described in the abstract and got wrong: the Three Counties specifications state a composition table, not a minimum juice content. The Traditional Welsh Perry specification was re-read on 2026-08-25 for the comparison with Austrian fruit-wine law, and its prohibition list transcribed in full: the two instruments turn out to regulate opposite things, one composition and one technique.

• Marcher Apple Network

  Marcher Apple Network · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24

  Has rediscovered and DNA-fingerprinted a number of lost Welsh border cultivars. Cited for identity work on cultivars the national collections do not hold.