Sensory descriptor
Apricot
A concentrated, faintly honeyed stone-fruit note from lactones at higher concentration, common in ice cider and sweet styles.
- Aroma family
- Stone fruit
- Does it indicate a fault?
- No — a normal part of cider and perry aroma
What causes it
Apricot differs from peach in the same lactone family by its higher concentration and by the company it keeps: it is generally perceived where lactones sit alongside residual sugar and mild oxidative development, so that the fruit note carries weight and a faint dried-fruit edge. In ice cider the mechanism is straightforward — freeze concentration raises every non-volatile and many volatile components together, and the resulting product is dense enough for lactones to read as apricot rather than as peach. In table cider it appears with age.
The compounds responsible
Where the molecule is established. Some descriptors in this lexicon name a compound the compound register does not yet hold a record for; those are named in the cause above instead.
Lactones
Cyclic esters that give peach and apricot character, formed from fatty acids and often carried in bound form, which is why stone-fruit notes can appear in a cider months after fermentation.
Fructose
The dominant sugar of apple juice and the sweetest of the common sugars, which is why apple juice tastes sweeter than its total sugar figure implies and why a stuck ferment leaves sweetness behind.
Acetaldehyde
The compound sitting one step short of ethanol, which smells of bruised apple and sherry, binds most of the sulphite added to a cider, and is the chemical signature of oxidation.
What raises it
Processes that increase this character, or preserve it where it would otherwise be lost.
Ice concentration
Freezing pressed juice and drawing off the unfrozen fraction, so that water is removed as ice and everything else in the juice is left behind more concentrated.
Bottle maturation
What happens to a cider after it is sealed in glass — which for most ciders is slow decline rather than improvement, and saying so is more useful than implying otherwise.
Lees ageing
Deliberately holding a cider or perry on its fine yeast deposit so that autolysing cells release material that changes texture and foam behaviour.
Oxidative maturation
Ageing a cider with a deliberate, measured oxygen supply so that tannins polymerise and soften and an aldehydic character develops on purpose, which is not the same thing as the oxidation fault.
Where it is usually met
Fruit and styles this character is recorded in. A record here is where the descriptor is commonly found, not a claim that every example shows it.
About Apricot
Apricot is a listed expectation in ice cider judging frameworks, where it arrives alongside baked apple and caramel as part of the style’s established profile.
In a dry cider it usually signals maturation rather than fruit or ferment, and it should be recorded alongside the honeyed and oxidative notes that accompany it rather than treated as an isolated fruit character.
Others in the stone fruit family
Peach, apricot, nectarine.
Peach
A soft, sweet stone-fruit aroma produced by γ- and δ-lactones formed during fermentation and maturation.
Dried apricot
Concentrated stone fruit with an oxidative edge, from lactones developing alongside acetaldehyde and phenolic oxidation.
Marzipan
A sweet almond note from benzaldehyde, produced when apple or pear pips are crushed during milling.
Plum
Dark, soft stone-fruit weight from heavier ethyl esters combined with polymerised phenolics in matured 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.
- Does cider get better with age — Some does. Tannic, dry, bottle-conditioned ciders and ice ciders can gain for several years. Light, fruit-driven and commercially filtered ciders lose their aroma and do not gain anything in exchange.
- What is ice cider — Ice cider is made by concentrating apple juice by freezing before fermentation, so that the ferment starts from a very high sugar level and stops sweet. It is a Quebec speciality with a protected definition there.
- 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.
- Which sugar is most of the sugar in apple juice — Fructose, by a long way. Apple juice carries roughly twice as much fructose as glucose, with a smaller amount of sucrose, and fructose is the sweetest of the three on the tongue.
- How is ice cider made — Apple juice is frozen and the sugar-rich liquid separated from the ice, either by freezing pressed juice or by leaving fruit on the tree into winter. Fermentation then stops of its own accord well before the concentrated sugar is used up.
- What is acetaldehyde
Where to go next
- The sensory model — The thirteen structural dimensions and the twenty aroma families, in full.
- Compounds — The chemistry behind the words.
- Troubleshooting — When a perception turns out to be a problem, this is where it is diagnosed.
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.
University of Vermont cider research
University of Vermont Extension · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
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.
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.