Style
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.
- Family
- Defined by sweetness
- Sweetness
- Sweet
- Carbonation
- Pétillant — a light prickle
- Strength
- 1.5–3.5% ABV
- Serve at
- 7–11 °C
- Where
- France
French law sets the doux, demi-sec, brut and extra-brut tiers by measurement, pairing a density condition with an acquired-alcohol condition. It was a residual-sugar scale until the décret of 20 February 2025 replaced it on 1 July that year. This is a national legal scale and does not apply outside France; it is not equivalent to the voluntary British dry–medium–sweet scale.
What makes it this style
- Density at 20 °C sits at or above 1.024, which is the sugar the French décret requires for the sweet tier, expressed the way the décret now expresses it.
- Acquired alcohol sits below the accompanying ceiling, which is what distinguishes the French scale from sweetness scales elsewhere.
- The sugar is unfermented apple sugar; French cider law does not permit sugar addition as UK practice does.
- The cider is made in France to French cider law, whether or not it also carries an appellation.
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.
- How the fermentation was arrested — keeving, cold, repeated racking, filtration — which changes texture at the same sugar figure.
- Tannin, which is the only thing holding the sweetness in balance and which varies with the fruit.
- Carbonation, from still to firmly sparkling.
- Stability. A doux cider retains fermentable sugar, so it is inherently more vulnerable to refermentation than a brut.
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 | Very sweet | Consistent | |
| Acidity | Low | Consistent | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | Some variation | |
| Tannin | Moderate | Some variation | |
| Astringency | Slight | Consistent | |
| Body | Full | Some variation | |
| Carbonation | Pétillant | Some variation | |
| Alcohol | Very low | Consistent | |
| Freshness | Settled | Some variation | |
| Fruit character | Pronounced | Consistent | |
| 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 doux
The French sweetness scale deserves separate treatment from the English one because it is doing something different. British dry, medium and sweet describe where a cider sits on a taste continuum and are governed by a voluntary trade code. French doux, demi-sec, brut and extra-brut are legal tiers defined by measurement, and the décret pairs density with acquired alcohol so that the two conditions must be satisfied together. It is worth knowing that this basis changed on 1 July 2025: the tiers were residual-sugar bands under the décret of 1953, and the interbranch body’s stated reason for the change was that a producer can place a product with a hydrometer rather than a sugar analysis, and that overlapping bands leave nobody stranded between two categories.
That pairing encodes a physical truth. Sugar that has not been fermented has not become ethanol. A cider with a great deal of residual sugar and a high alcohol is, by arithmetic, a cider that fermented most of its sugar and then had sugar returned to it. By tying the sweet tier to a low alcohol, French law effectively describes a cider whose fermentation genuinely stopped early — which is exactly what the Norman and Breton traditions produce.
The practical effect is a category of drink that has few counterparts elsewhere: a cider around two or three per cent alcohol, sweet, cloudy, lightly sparkling, with real bitterness behind the sugar. English-speaking drinkers meeting one often read the low alcohol as a modern concession to lighter drinking, which reverses the history entirely. The strength is low because the method is old.
What holds it together is tannin. There is very little acid in Norman bittersweet fruit, so acidity cannot balance the sugar. Bitterness does that job instead, and a doux cider made from low-tannin fruit is a much less successful drink than one made from amère cultivars, because the sugar has nothing to push against. This is the reason the sweetness tier and the regional fruit inventory cannot really be discussed separately.
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
- Low alcohol with the sweetness, which the decree effectively requires. Doux is a cider whose fermentation was stopped, not one that was sweetened.
- Whether the sweetness has tannin under it. Norman and Breton bittersweet fruit gives this style a structure a sweetened dessert-fruit cider does not have.
- Natural carbonation, which is common and comes from the same unfinished ferment.
What gets misread
- Reading the low alcohol as watering. It is the sugar that did not become ethanol.
- Expecting a British sweet cider. That is often a dry cider sweetened back, at full strength.
Cold, around 8 °C, and in a small measure. At this density the sweetness is substantial and the alcohol is very low, so cold and carbonation are both doing the work that would otherwise fall to 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.
- Sweet cider — Alcohol at a given sweetness. Doux is capped low; a back-sweetened sweet cider is not.
- Keeved cider — A category against the method usually used to reach it.
- Cidre demi-sec — The next band up in the same decree, defined by measurement.
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.
Juice settling
Letting freshly pressed juice stand cold and undisturbed so that gross solids fall, then racking the cleaner juice off the deposit before pitching.
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.
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.
- Hot Indian curry — The French sweet style combines high residual sugar with low alcohol, which is close to the ideal structure against serious heat — and it is chosen as much for what it lacks: with little phenolic weight there is no astringency to add to the burn.
- Gammon — The French sweet style has low alcohol alongside its sugar, which keeps the combination from becoming heavy.
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.
Gushing
Cider that erupts from the bottle on opening, either because it is over-pressurised or because something in it is nucleating the dissolved gas violently.
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.
Related styles
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.
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.
Keeved cider
Cider clarified before fermentation by a pectin gel that strips nutrients from the juice, producing a slow ferment that stops naturally with sugar still in solution.
Cidre Pays d’Auge
The controlled appellation cider of the Pays d’Auge in Calvados, made by keeving from bitter Norman fruit and bottle-conditioned to a low alcohol and a high residual sugar.
Sweet cider
Cider in which sugar is the leading sensation, whether retained from an arrested fermentation, added after it, or produced by keeving.
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 keeved cider — A cider made naturally sweet by starving the yeast rather than by adding sugar. Keeving strips nutrients out of the juice before fermentation, so the ferment slows and stops with fruit sugar still in it, and nothing has been put back.
- 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.
- 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.
Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité (INAO)
INAO · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24
The Cidre Pays d’Auge cahier des charges was read in full on 2026-08-24, in the version homologated by arrêté of 17 January 2026 and published in the Journal officiel on 21 January. That qualification is not decoration. A revision adopted by the Comité national on 10 September 2025 is currently under the procédure nationale d’opposition, is clearly marked as not prejudging the final text, and specifies carbonation differently from the text in force — as grams of CO2 per litre rather than as a minimum pressure in bar. A summary citing the draft would have put a figure on the page that no producer is held to. CiderHQ records the operative text and says which one it is.