Cider science

The sensory model CiderHQ uses

How does CiderHQ describe what a cider tastes like?

In short

On thirteen dimensions, each scored from 1 to 5 as a band with a minimum, a maximum and a typical value. Five are structural tastes, three are textural sensations and five are aromatic characters.

The band matters more than the number. A category such as West Country farmhouse cider genuinely covers a wide range of tannin, and recording it as a single figure would be a false statement dressed as data. The band records the range and marks where inside it most examples fall.

Every dimension carries a stated mechanism — what physically produces the sensation — so a score is traceable to a compound or a process rather than resting on adjective alone.

Every aroma family CiderHQ classifies descriptors into, in the order the sensory model lists them. Representative descriptors for each are given below.

Described in full

Shape: Twenty equal sectors round a hub, read clockwise from the top. Sectors alternate in tone so the divisions are visible, and the two families that usually indicate a fault carry a filled marker at the rim as well as their own tone.
Apple and pear, sectors one to four: Fresh apple, for crisp just-cut apple and apple skin; ripe apple, for full orchard fruit; cooked and baked apple, for apple pie, stewed fruit and caramelised apple; and pear, for fresh pear, pear drop and pear skin.
Other fruit, sectors five to eight: Citrus, for lemon, grapefruit peel and lime zest; stone fruit, for peach, apricot and nectarine; tropical fruit, for pineapple, mango, banana and passion fruit; and berry, for strawberry, raspberry and red-fruit notes.
Floral and sweet, sectors nine and ten: Floral covers blossom, rose, elderflower and hawthorn — the rose note is 2-phenylethanol, a yeast product. Honeyed covers honey, beeswax and nectar, and rises with age and mild oxidation.
Spice, herbal and earthy, sectors eleven to thirteen: Spice: clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper. Herbal and vegetal: hay, grass, hedgerow, green leaf. Earthy: farmyard, wet stone, damp cellar, mushroom — welcome in traditional farmhouse cider and out of place in a clean modern one.
Wood and phenolic, sectors fourteen and fifteen: Woody covers oak, vanilla, toast, cedar and smoke, all from barrel contact. Phenolic covers leather, smoke, sticking plaster, horse and medicinal notes from ethylphenols — a traditional signature at low levels and a fault above them.
Ferment-derived, sectors sixteen to eighteen: Fermentation-derived: solvent, nail varnish, bread, yeast. Dairy and lactic: butter, butterscotch, yoghurt, cream, from diacetyl. Oxidative: sherry, walnut, bruised apple, cardboard.
The two fault families, sectors nineteen and twenty: Sulphur covers rotten egg, struck match, drains, rubber and cooked cabbage. Volatile and fault-related covers vinegar, glue and mousiness. Both are marked because encountering them usually indicates a problem rather than a style.
Why the families are not simply good or bad: Most sit in the middle: the same molecule is traditional in one style and a fault in another. Only the last two families are classed as usually a fault, and even they have thresholds below which nobody notices.

The thirteen dimensions

The CiderHQ sensory dimensions, by family.
Family	Dimension	What it is	Physically driven by
Structural	Sweetness	How sweet the drink tastes, which is not the same as how much sugar it contains	Residual glucose and fructose, sorbitol in perry, and back-sweetening
Structural	Acidity	The sharp, mouth-watering quality that makes a cider taste fresh	Malic acid chiefly, with lactic where malolactic conversion has run
Structural	Bitterness	A taste sensed towards the back of the tongue	Shorter procyanidin oligomers and other polyphenols binding bitter receptors
Structural	Tannin	The phenolic material giving structure, grip and ageing capacity	Condensed tannins extracted from skin and flesh during milling and maceration
Structural	Alcohol	The warming, faintly sweet presence of ethanol	Ethanol from the fermented sugar
Textural	Astringency	The drying, rough sensation left after swallowing	Long-chain tannins precipitating salivary proteins
Textural	Body	How much weight and viscosity the drink has in the mouth	Residual sugar, glycerol, polysaccharides and alcohol
Textural	Carbonation	How much dissolved carbon dioxide it carries	Retained fermentation gas, conditioning, or injection
Aromatic	Freshness	Whether it smells of live fruit or of time and air	Surviving fruit esters against accumulating oxidation products
Aromatic	Fruit character	How strongly it smells of apple, pear and fruit generally	Fruit-derived aldehydes and alcohols plus fermentation esters
Aromatic	Phenolic character	Smoky, spicy, leathery or medicinal aromas apart from fruit	Volatile phenols from Brettanomyces or certain lactic bacteria
Aromatic	Fermentation character	Aromas made by the ferment rather than carried in from the fruit	Higher alcohols, acetate and ethyl esters, diacetyl-family compounds
Aromatic	Oxidative character	Nutty, bruised-apple, sherry-like or cardboard notes	Acetaldehyde and phenolic oxidation products

Why bands rather than points

A style is a population, not a specimen. Somerset farmhouse cider made by twenty producers in three seasons spans a genuine range on every dimension, and any single number chosen to represent it would be an average that describes none of them. The band records the range the category actually covers and marks the typical value inside it.

This also makes the width of a band informative in its own right. A category with a narrow band on sweetness is one where the production method constrains the outcome tightly — a fully fermented, unsweetened style, for instance. A wide band signals that the category permits variation, and a reader is better served by being told that than by being given a false midpoint.

The band has a further use in the site’s comparison and finder engines. Two categories whose bands overlap on a dimension are not reliably distinguishable on it, and the engines are built to say so rather than to report a difference between two typical values that lies inside the noise.

Distinctions the model insists on

Bitterness and tannin are separate dimensions, and astringency is separate from both. Tannin is the material; bitterness is one taste it produces; astringency is a tactile sensation it produces by a different mechanism. A cider can be high in tannin and read as mostly bitter, or as mostly drying, depending on chain length.

Acidity and freshness are separate. Acidity is a taste; freshness is an overall impression to which acidity contributes alongside carbonation, low oxidation and surviving fruit aroma. A cider can be sharp and stale at the same time.

Sweetness and fruit character are separate, and this is the confusion the model is most often used to unpick. A pronounced ripe-apple aroma is read as sweetness by most drinkers, so a fully dry cider with a fruity nose is regularly described as sweet. Recording the two on different axes lets the site say what is happening.

What the model is not

It is not a measurement. A 1–5 band is the resolution the underlying evidence supports, and it is never rendered as though it were an analytical figure.
It is not a quality scale. A high score on any dimension is neither good nor bad; it describes intensity, and the scale words are chosen to be non-comparative.
It is not a substitute for tasting. It describes what a category tends to be, and any individual example may sit outside the band.
It does not predict preference. What a drinker likes is a separate question that a descriptive model cannot answer.
It does not apply uniformly. Carbonation is not a meaningful dimension for a still category, and dimensions that do not apply are hidden rather than scored as low.

Also answered on this page

Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.

Why does CiderHQ use ranges instead of scores?
What is the difference between tannin and astringency here?
Is a higher score better?
Why are bitterness and tannin separate?

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.

How do you taste cider systematically rather than just drinking it — Systematic tasting is a matter of doing the same things in the same order every time, so that differences between ciders show up as differences in the notes rather than as differences in how the ciders happened to be approached.
Is a farmyard character in cider a fault — The composite animal-and-straw note of volatile phenols with short-chain fatty acids, central to traditional farmhouse character.
What is the difference between bitterness and astringency in cider — Bitterness is a taste, detected by receptors on the tongue. Astringency is not a taste at all: it is a mechanical sensation caused by tannins binding and precipitating the proline-rich proteins in saliva, which strips away the lubricating film in the mouth.
What are the standard aroma categories for cider
What does balance mean in cider
What is mouthfeel

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.

Washington State University cider research programme
Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center · university · passage verified 2026-08-24
The single most useful open cider dataset CiderHQ has found. The programme’s cultivar performance database gives juice chemistry, orchard behaviour, bloom and harvest timing and cider-maker tasting notes for 73 cultivars grown at one maritime site over fifteen years, and — unusually — publishes its classification thresholds alongside its figures, so the classification can be checked rather than taken on trust. It also states outright that its results diverge from the English ones. Read in full on 2026-08-24 and transcribed into `data/trials/wsu-mount-vernon.ts`; four published figures were found to be impossible and are withheld there with their reasons.
Peer-reviewed literature on apple phenolics and cider sensory perception
Various journals · peer-reviewed literature · registered as competent for this subject
Registered as a class rather than as one paper, because the mechanisms CiderHQ describes — tannin chain length driving the split between bitterness and astringency, salivary protein precipitation, enzymatic browning — are established across many studies rather than resting on any single one. Individual papers are cited where a specific number is quoted.
BJCP Beer Style Guidelines — cider and perry categories
Beer Judge Certification Program · classification framework · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24, and the edition matters. CiderHQ registered the 2015 cider guidelines; BJCP has since published a 2025 cider edition, and the old URL now redirects into the current guidelines index. A competition style guide is a dated framework rather than a standing definition, and citing the wrong edition of one is the same class of error as citing a superseded specification. CiderHQ treats BJCP as one competition framework among several and never as the universal cider taxonomy.
The Science of Cidermaking and associated technical writing
Andrew Lea · reference work · passage verified 2026-08-24
Written by a food chemist who worked at Long Ashton on apple phenolics. Unusual among specialist cider writing in that it is primary-research-adjacent: the author is describing work he did, and cites the literature. This is why it is registered at tier 1 for chemistry while a general cider book is not.