Style
Cidre demi-sec
The middle tier of the French cider scale, sitting between doux and brut on density and forming the commercial centre of ground for much French cider.
- Family
- Defined by sweetness
- Sweetness
- Medium
- Carbonation
- Pétillant — a light prickle
- Strength
- 3–5% ABV
- Serve at
- 8–11 °C
- Where
- France
A measured tier between the sweet and dry limits. As with the other French tiers, it is a legal classification set by analysis rather than a description of how the cider was made or how it will taste.
What makes it this style
- Density at 20 °C sits above 1.016 with an acquired strength above 3% vol, which places the cider between the doux and brut conditions as the French décret now defines them. Because the bands overlap by design, a cider close to a boundary may satisfy two of them.
- The cider is pure apple juice, so the sugar is retained rather than added.
- It is generally the most commercially available tier, made by both farm and large-scale producers.
- Balance is the point of the tier: enough sugar to soften the tannin, not enough to lead the palate.
What varies inside the category
Every style covers a range. This is what legitimately differs between two examples that are both correctly called by this name.
- Where within a comparatively wide band the cider actually sits, which affects it more than the tier name suggests.
- Whether the sugar was retained by keeving or by intervention such as filtration at a chosen gravity.
- Fruit and therefore tannin, which spans the full French range.
- The producer’s intent: for some this is a house style, for others simply where a ferment happened to stop.
Sensory profile
Scored as bands rather than points, because the category genuinely covers a range and a single figure would claim a precision it does not have.
| Dimension | Typical | Range | Variation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweetness | Medium | Consistent | |
| Acidity | Low | Consistent | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | Some variation | |
| Tannin | Moderate | Some variation | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | Some variation | |
| Body | Medium | Consistent | |
| Carbonation | Pétillant | Some variation | |
| Alcohol | Low | Consistent | |
| Freshness | Settled | Some variation | |
| Fruit character | Pronounced | Some variation | |
| Phenolic character | Noticeable | Some variation | |
| Fermentation character | Evident | Some variation | |
| Oxidative character | Trace | Some variation |
What you are likely to smell and taste
Each descriptor links to what actually produces it.
About Cidre demi-sec
Demi-sec is the tier that most French cider is actually sold in, and it exists because the extremes of the scale are both demanding. A doux at very low alcohol is a specialised drink that requires a successful keeve and tannic fruit to avoid being merely sweet. A brut from low-acid Norman fruit exposes tannin that many drinkers find severe. The middle tier is where the fruit’s bitterness and a moderate sugar meet on comfortable terms.
It is also the tier where the difference between farm and factory practice is least visible. A farm producer arrives here because a keeved fermentation slowed to a halt at a convenient point; an industrial producer arrives here by fermenting and then filtering or blending to a specification. The analytical result can be the same and the texture usually is not — retained sugar in an unfiltered cider brings glycerol and colloidal material with it, and the difference registers as weight rather than as sweetness.
For a reader comparing across borders, the useful observation is that a French demi-sec and a British medium are not the same position. The French tier is a legal condition on strength and density; the British word is a producer judgement against a voluntary scale. They overlap but they are not translations of each other, and a bottle described as medium in Britain may fall into any of the four French tiers depending on where it actually sits.
The style is served cold, often in the same bolée used for the drier Breton ciders, and the sweetness makes it more forgiving of that service temperature than a brut, whose tannin closes up when the cider is too cold.
Tasting it
What to attend to here specifically, and what is routinely misread. The second list is the more useful one.
What to look for
- A middle position that is defined rather than judged. The French decree sets it by measurement, unlike the British medium.
- Whether the residual sugar is integrated. In French practice it usually is, because it was never removed.
- Tannin, which distinguishes this from most medium ciders elsewhere.
What gets misread
- Reading it as a translation of medium. One sits inside a legal instrument and the other on a voluntary trade scale, and they do not map.
- Expecting the sweetness of a doux. This is the middle band, not the sweet one.
Around 9–10 °C. The middle tier is the one most easily unbalanced by temperature in either direction — too cold and it reads dry, too warm and the sweetness dominates the modest acid.
What it is mistaken for, and how to tell
One observation per pair, chosen because it separates them. Several of these are not styles at all — a commercial term, a legal category, or a fault wearing the same description.
- Medium cider — Whether a measurement stands behind the word.
- Cidre doux — Adjacent bands in the same decree. Doux is sweeter and weaker.
- Cidre brut — The dry band in the same decree. All three French sweetness terms are set by measured density and acquired strength, which is what distinguishes them from the British scale.
How it is made
The methods that define or commonly produce this style.
Keeving
Forming a floating pectin gel that lifts nutrients and solids out of the juice, so that the ferment starves before it finishes and leaves natural sweetness behind.
Arrested fermentation
Deliberately halting a ferment while sugar remains, to obtain natural sweetness from the fruit rather than from an addition — and accepting the instability that follows.
Racking
Moving cider off the sediment it has thrown, which both cleans the liquid and — by taking yeast and nitrogen away with the deposit — slows what is left of the ferment.
Blending
Combining separate lots of cider or perry into one, which in cider is the historically normal way of making the drink rather than a remedy applied when single lots disappoint.
Bottle conditioning
Carbonating cider by letting a second fermentation finish inside the sealed bottle, so the gas is generated where it is going to stay.
Fruit it is made from
Where it is made
Food
Interactions rather than suggestions. Each explains the mechanism, so you can extend it to a dish that is not listed.
- Chicken liver pâté — Liver’s slightly bitter, iron-tinged savour is softened by a little residual sugar in the same way a fruit chutney softens it on the plate, while the acid clears a preparation that is largely butter by weight.
- Ham — The French off-dry styles were made for exactly this balance, and ham with cider is long-established practice in both Normandy and Brittany.
- Neufchâtel — Neufchâtel is saltier than most bloomy rinds, and a little retained sugar suppresses that salinity while continuing the cheese’s soft texture.
What can go wrong
Faults this style is particularly exposed to, given how it is made.
Unwanted refermentation
Fermentation restarting in a sealed container, generating carbon dioxide that was not planned for and pressure that a bottle may not withstand.
Low acidity
A cider without enough acid to give it definition, tasting soft, heavy and dull — and sitting at a pH that leaves it exposed to spoilage organisms.
Sorbate off-flavour
A faint plastic, candle-wax or celery-like note from sorbic acid used as a preservative, distinct from the geranium taint that bacteria produce from it.
Related styles
Cidre doux
The sweet tier of the French cider scale, defined since 2025 by a density at or above 1.024 together with an acquired strength no greater than 3% vol, so that the sweetness is demonstrably unfermented juice sugar.
Cidre brut
The dry tier of the French cider scale, defined since 2025 by a density no greater than 1.016 with an acquired strength of at least 3.5% vol — correspondingly more of the juice’s sugar converted to alcohol.
Medium cider
Cider carrying enough residual or added sugar to be perceptible without dominating, the commonest sweetness level in British retail.
Cidre de Normandie
Protected Normandy cider made from the region’s bitter and bittersweet fruit, characteristically low in alcohol, sweet-edged and lightly sparkling.
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.
- What does brut mean on a cider — On a French cidre, *brut* means dry, and in practice it also implies a higher alcohol than *doux* because more of the sugar has fermented. Its French thresholds are not the same as champagne’s.
- What is the difference between french cidre and english cider — French cidre is usually sweeter, weaker and more carbonated, because fermentation is arrested while sugar remains. English cider is more often fermented dry and finished still or lightly sparkling, and is stronger for it.
- How do you blend cider
- How do you stop cider from fermenting — By removing the yeast, by chilling, by filtering it out, by pasteurising, or by a combination — and in practice a home maker cannot reliably stop a ferment mid-way with chemicals alone. Sorbate prevents yeast multiplying but will not stop an active ferment.
- How is sparkling cider made
- What is keeving — Keeving is a technique for starving a ferment of nitrogen so that it stops before all the sugar is gone, leaving a naturally sweet cider. Pectin is made to gel and float as a brown cap, carrying nutrients and yeast out of the juice with it.
Where to go next
- All styles — The full range, grouped by what defines each one.
- Sweetness decoder — What the word on the label means, in the system that defines it.
- Serving — Temperature, glass and how to open it without losing half of it.
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.
Légifrance, JORF texte n° JORFTEXT000051223792 · legislation · retrieved 2026-08-24 · covers In force from 1 July 2025; “artisanal” and “rosé” from 1 January 2026
Opened on 2026-08-24, and it turned out that the entry CiderHQ had was describing a repealed instrument. The décret of 20 February 2025 replaces the 1953 décret and the 1987 one that amended it, and it changes the thing this site had been repeating: the doux, demi-sec and brut categories are no longer residual-sugar bands. They are now defined on acquired alcoholic strength together with density at 20 °C, an extra-brut tier has been added, and the four bands deliberately overlap so that a producer can place a product with a hydrometer rather than a sugar analysis. The pages that said otherwise have been corrected. What could not be done is a verbatim read: legifrance.gouv.fr returns HTTP 403 to retrieval, so the text was read through a summarising fetch and every operative figure was then checked independently against the UNICID interbranch briefing, which reproduces the table. The two agree.
Révision du décret cidre : le nouveau décret entre en vigueur au 1er juillet 2025
Union Nationale Interprofessionnelle Cidricole (UNICID), Jean-Louis Benassi · specialist organisation · passage verified 2026-08-24
The French cider interbranch organisation’s own briefing on the 2025 décret, read in full on 2026-08-24. It is registered because the primary text could not be retrieved verbatim and this one reproduces the operative sweetness table, and it is registered at tier 2 rather than tier 1 because an interbranch body explaining a decree is not the decree. Where it is cited, it is cited for what the instrument says, alongside the instrument.
Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC)
IFPC · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The French technical institute for cider production. The authority for the French cultivar classification families, for keeving as an industrial process, and for the pectin and nitrogen chemistry that keeving depends on.
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24