Protected geographical indication (PGI) · Cider
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.
This record was taken as at 2026-08-23 and describes an instrument administered in England.
- Kind
- Protected geographical indication (PGI)
- Product
- Cider
- Country
- England
- Regions covered
- Herefordshire
- Register
- EU register of geographical indications, file PGI-GB-0292, verified against the register on 2026-08-25. The EU register holds one combined file per county covering both cider and perry — PGI-GB-0292 — while the United Kingdom register lists the two drinks separately. Both descriptions are accurate about their own register.
- Record taken as at
- 2026-08-23
- Registered on
- 1996-06-21
CiderHQ records the structure of a specification: that it defines an area, that it restricts the fruit, that it sets a minimum strength or a sweetness band. Where a figure was not verified against the register itself, this page says a threshold exists and stops there rather than reproducing a number it cannot trace. Knowing that a limit is written down, and where it is written down, is worth more than a plausible figure.
Designation rules change. Specifications are amended, and the amendments do not announce themselves. Anyone relying on this commercially — labelling a product, drafting a claim, buying under the name — must read the current specification on the register itself rather than any summary of it, including this one.
Read the register: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs · European Commission
What the specification requires
Each requirement is recorded as a claim with its jurisdiction, its as-of date and the source it rests on. Requirements that could not carry all three are not shown.
The geographical area is the county of Herefordshire. The specification names it and nothing narrower; there is no delimited district inside the county.
Primary authority United Kingdom (protected geographical indication) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
The specification fixes the finished drink by composition, not by juice content. Actual alcoholic strength must be 4.0–8.5% ABV; specific gravity at 20 °C between 0.996 and 1.022; sugar-free dry extract above 13 g/L; total acidity as malic acid between 40 and 60 mEq/L; and volatile acidity as acetic acid below 1.4 g/L.
Primary authority United Kingdom (protected geographical indication) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
CiderHQ previously described this specification as stating a minimum juice content. Reading it showed that it does not: there is no juice-content figure anywhere in the document. What it controls is the composition of the finished cider, which is a different kind of rule and a weaker guarantee of what went in.
Total sulphur dioxide must be below 200 mg/L and free sulphur dioxide must sit between 40 and 60 mg/L — unusually, a floor as well as a ceiling.
Primary authority United Kingdom (protected geographical indication) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
A minimum free SO2 is a preservation requirement rather than a limit on additives, and it puts this specification out of reach of a maker who works without sulphite at all.
The specification caps four metals and metalloids in the finished drink: iron below 7 mg/kg, copper below 2 mg/kg, arsenic below 0.2 mg/kg and lead below 0.2 mg/kg.
Primary authority United Kingdom (protected geographical indication) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
These are contamination limits inherited from mid-century practice, when iron and copper picked up from equipment were a live cause of hazes and off-flavours in cider.
The drink is fermented from the juice of locally grown cider apples, with or without the addition of up to 25% perry pear juice.
Primary authority United Kingdom (protected geographical indication) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
A quarter of the blend may be the other fruit, so a cider under this name can legitimately contain perry pear juice and a perry can contain cider apple juice.
Chaptalisation is permitted, to bring potential alcohol to about 9.5% ABV before final blending; the method also allows the juice to be concentrated for storage and later reconstituted, and the finished drink to be diluted and sweetened before packaging.
Primary authority United Kingdom (protected geographical indication) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
This is the clause that most separates the Three Counties names from Traditional Welsh Cider and Perry, which forbid added sugar, concentrate and dilution outright. Two UK protected names, two very different promises.
The specification names example cider apples rather than closing a list — it cites varieties "such as" a handful of well-known ones, followed by "etc" — and records that over 99% of the fruit used comes from growers inside the area.
Primary authority United Kingdom (protected geographical indication) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
An open variety list is a real difference from the French appellations, which enumerate permitted fruit exhaustively. Under this name the grower, not the specification, decides what is planted.
Fermentation runs in vats at ambient temperature and, including malolactic fermentation, takes up to about three months; the drink is then racked and matured for up to six months before filtering, centrifuging or fining. Cask conditioning with added sugar and yeast is permitted, producing a pétillant or sparkling drink served from the cask.
Primary authority United Kingdom (protected geographical indication) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
The name was registered under the EU protected food name scheme on 21 June 1996 and entered on the United Kingdom register at 23:00 on 31 December 2020, when the transition period ended. It appears on both registers, which is the intended result of the withdrawal arrangements rather than a duplication.
Primary authority United Kingdom; European Union · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, European Commission
About Herefordshire Cider PGI
Herefordshire is the largest cider county in England by fruit tonnage, and has been the centre of the industrial cider trade for well over a century as well as of a substantial farmhouse one. The protected name was secured under the EU scheme in the 1990s, alongside the equivalent names for Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, at a point when several member states were registering regional food and drink names in bulk.
The specification is not a French-style cahier des charges, and it is a mistake to read it as one. It fixes an area and a composition table — strength, gravity, acidity, sulphur dioxide, four metal limits — and then stops. It does not close the variety list, prescribe a fermentation route, or set a carbonation method, and it states no minimum juice content at all: chaptalisation is permitted to about 9.5% potential alcohol, and juice may be concentrated for storage and reconstituted later. The range of cider that can legitimately carry the name is therefore very wide, from a small unfiltered bottle-conditioned bittersweet blend to a large-volume commercial product built partly from concentrate.
Two things follow, and both are worth saying directly. A PGI is not a quality mark: nothing in registration certifies that a cider is well made, and the scheme contains no tasting assessment of the kind some national systems apply. And a PGI takes nothing away from anyone outside the county — cider made in Somerset, Devon, Kent or Michigan is not disadvantaged by it in any way except that it may not be described as Herefordshire cider.
On registration status, the honest position is that the name now sits on two registers. Names protected under the EU scheme before the end of 2020 kept that protection and were simultaneously entered on the United Kingdom’s own register, so a search of either turns it up.
Styles this designation covers
Categories whose definition or characteristic practice this specification governs.
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.
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.
Where it applies
The areas named by the specification, each described in its own terms.
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.
- Where is cider made in england — Overwhelmingly in the West Country — Somerset, Herefordshire, Devon, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire — with smaller traditions in Kent, Sussex, East Anglia and the north.
- What is herefordshire cider
Where to go next
- All protected designations — Every reserved name on CiderHQ, grouped by country, with what each kind of instrument does.
- Cider and perry in England — How cider is legally defined and taxed in the country administering this name.
- How CiderHQ handles evidence — Why a requirement here states a structure rather than a figure.
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.
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.
eAmbrosia — the EU geographical indications register
European Commission · designation authority · registered as competent for this subject
The single authoritative register of EU PDO, PGI and TSG names, carrying each product specification. Cider and perry designations across France, Spain and elsewhere resolve here.