Skip to content
CiderHQ
Search

Serving

Decanting cider

Should cider ever be decanted, and does it help?

In short

Decanting a cider does two things at once: it leaves a sediment behind in the bottle, and it puts a considerable quantity of air into the liquid. The first is often useful; the second is only occasionally so, and for a sparkling cider it is actively destructive.

The clearest case for decanting is a still, tannic, unfiltered cider with a heavy deposit, which benefits both from being separated from its lees and from a short period of air.

The clearest case against is any sparkling cider, where decanting simply discards the carbonation, and any delicate aromatic style, where air removes the aroma the maker worked to keep.

The two jobs, separated

Separation is a mechanical operation. Cider is poured off a settled deposit into a second vessel so that the deposit stays behind. Nothing about the liquid changes except that it no longer contains suspended solids. This is worth doing whenever a bottle carries enough sediment that a careful direct pour would not get through the bottle without disturbing it.

Aeration is a chemical operation. Oxygen dissolved into cider reacts with phenolic compounds, with acetaldehyde, and with reduced sulphur compounds. Over minutes this can dissipate a reductive, struck-match or eggy character and soften the perception of hard tannin. Over hours it browns the cider, flattens its fruit and moves it towards a sherried, oxidised character. The line between the two is a matter of tens of minutes for a delicate cider and of an hour or more for a heavily tannic one.

The practical consequence is that "decanting" as a single decision is the wrong frame. The question is whether this particular cider wants separating, wants air, wants both, or wants neither.

When it helps

When it does not

Any carbonated cider loses its carbonation on decanting, and there is no technique that avoids it. The dissolved gas is precisely what the tumbling and splashing of a decant removes. A sparkling cider that needs separating from a deposit should be poured carefully rather than decanted, or disgorged if the setting allows.

Keeved cidre, aromatic modern ciders made with aromatic yeast strains, and light single-varietal ciders generally lose more than they gain. Their character is in volatile aroma, which air removes. Pouring into a wide glass and letting it stand for five minutes achieves any softening that is wanted without stripping the cider.

An oxidised cider cannot be improved by more oxygen. If a cider already smells of bruised apple, sherry or cardboard, decanting will accelerate what has already gone wrong.

How to do it, if you are doing it

Stand the bottle upright long enough for the deposit to compact at the base — hours for a coarse deposit, a day for a fine one. Chill it if it is being served cold, because a decanted cider warms faster in a wide vessel than it does in a bottle.

Pour in one steady, unhurried movement without setting the bottle down, because setting it down and lifting it again rouses the deposit. A light behind the shoulder of the bottle, which is the traditional candle, makes the moment the deposit reaches the neck visible before it reaches the decanter.

Stop with cider still in the bottle. The last thirty to fifty millilitres of a sedimented bottle are where the deposit is, and trying to recover them undoes the whole operation.

Where the aim is separation without aeration, a jug and a slow pour down its inner wall does far less to the cider than a wide-bottomed decanter and a splashing pour. The vessel is the variable that controls how much air the cider gets.

Taste before and afterAeration is reversible in neither direction and its effect varies enormously between ciders. Pouring a small measure before decanting and comparing it with the decanted cider twenty minutes later is the only reliable way to know whether a given bottle benefited.

Also answered on this page

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

Related

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.

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.