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What to notice, in order

What should I actually be noticing when I taste a cider, and in what order?

In short

The useful order follows the physiology: appearance arrives instantly, aroma over the first few seconds, taste and texture on contact, and finish over the following minute — so the checklist runs in that sequence rather than in order of importance.

Within each stage, the discipline is to record what is present before deciding whether it is good, and to distinguish observations that are commonly conflated: sweetness from fruitiness, bitterness from astringency, carbonation from acidity.

Anything you cannot name is still worth writing down. "Something savoury I cannot place" is a real observation; a borrowed descriptor is not.

The sequence

What to notice, when, and what it usually indicates
StageObservationWhat it may point to
AppearanceHue and depth of colourFruit used, oxidative handling, ageing vessel, added colour
AppearanceClarity: brilliant, clear, hazy, cloudyFiltration, fining, deliberate unfiltered style, or a haze fault
AppearanceBubble size and mousse persistenceCarbonation method — and the cleanliness of the glass
Aroma, still glassMost volatile compounds; any sulphurous noteReduction, young ferment character, light esters
Aroma, after swirlingFruit family, floral, spice, phenolic, oak, oxidativeCultivar character, yeast, wood, age
AromaAnything sharp, solventy, mousy or medicinalA fault: ethyl acetate, volatile acidity, mousiness, cork taint
Taste, on contactSweetness — actual sugar, not fruit aromaResidual sugar, back-sweetening, keeving, sorbitol in perry
Taste, on contactAcidity: how sharp, and how quickly it arrivesMalic acid level, malolactic conversion, cultivar acid class
Taste, mid-palateBitterness, perceived on the tongueSmaller phenolic molecules; bittersweet and bittersharp fruit
Texture, mid-palateAstringency: drying, roughening of the mouth surfacesLarger procyanidins binding salivary protein
TextureBody and viscosityAlcohol, residual sugar, glycerol, polysaccharide, lees contact
TextureCarbonation: prickle, foam, stingCarbonation method and level; sharpens the perception of acidity
TextureWarmth at the back of the mouthAlcohol above roughly 7 per cent
FinishLength: ten seconds, thirty, a minutePhenolic weight and extract; a short finish is not a fault
FinishWhat is last to leaveThe structural element the cider is built on
FinishAnything that appears only at the endLate-appearing bitterness, sorbate off-flavour, metallic taint

The three distinctions worth practising

Sweetness against fruitiness. Sugar is tasted on the tongue; fruit is smelled, both through the nose and retronasally from the back of the mouth. The test is to hold the nose closed and taste: what remains is sweetness, acidity, bitterness and texture, and the fruit disappears almost entirely. Doing this once on a dry, aromatic cider is more instructive than any amount of reading.

Bitterness against astringency. Bitterness is a taste and it has a location and an onset. Astringency is a mechanical sensation — the mouth feels rougher, the tongue sticks slightly to the palate — and it builds over repeated sips rather than arriving at once. English bittersweet fruit gives both; some cultivars give markedly more of one than the other, which is exactly the distinction the Long Ashton classification was built to record.

Acidity against carbonation. Dissolved carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid, and it also stimulates the trigeminal nerve directly, so a highly carbonated cider tastes sharper than the same cider still. Where both are present it is worth asking whether the sharpness is arriving as a taste that lingers, which is acid, or as a prickle that stops when the bubbles do.

Faults, and how to hold them

A fault is not an aroma that someone dislikes. It is a character produced by something having gone wrong or gone too far, and the useful question is always what caused it. Volatile acidity smells of vinegar and comes from Acetobacter and oxygen. Ethyl acetate smells of solvent, nail varnish or pear drops at higher concentration. Mousiness is not detectable on the nose at all and appears as a retronasal aftertaste of stale grain or rodent cage, some seconds after swallowing.

Several characters sit on a spectrum from feature to fault. Brettanomyces character — barnyard, sticking plaster, spice — is a fault in one style and a defining feature in another. Oxidation is a defect in a fresh modern cider and a deliberate objective in some traditional ones. A low level of acetic acid contributes lift to a cider that would otherwise be flat; a high level makes vinegar. Recording the level, not just the presence, is what makes the note useful.

Some people cannot detect some faults. Sensitivity to trichloroanisole, to mousiness and to certain sulphur compounds varies enormously between individuals, and a taster who cannot smell a compound is not thereby a worse taster. It does mean that a single palate is not a reliable instrument, which is the argument for tasting in company.

Descriptor vocabularies are tools, not truthThe published cider lexicons — the trained-panel vocabularies developed by university sensory programmes, and the descriptor sets used in competition judging — are useful because they are shared, not because they are correct. They were built by particular panels on particular ciders, and a descriptor that is not in the list is not thereby absent from the glass.

Recording it so it is worth reading later

Note the conditions alongside the cider: temperature, glass, how long the bottle had been open, whether anything was eaten. A note without conditions cannot be compared with another note.

Prefer intensity plus descriptor to descriptor alone. "Moderate astringency, drying on the finish" is usable; "tannic" is not, because it could mean any of four things.

Record what changed as the glass warmed, and record the second impression separately from the first rather than overwriting it. The most common error in tasting notes is that they compress twenty minutes of a changing drink into a single verdict.

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