Style
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.
Known locally as Cidre défécqué.
- Family
- Defined by how it is made
- Sweetness
- Sweet
- Carbonation
- Pétillant — a light prickle
- Strength
- 2.5–5.5% ABV
- Serve at
- 8–12 °C
- Where
- Made in several countries
Keeving is not itself a protected term; it is a technique. Several French cider appellations require or assume it in their specifications, which is why the method and the geography are so often discussed together, but keeved cider is made well outside France and carries no designation there.
What makes it this style
- The juice is held cool and undisturbed until a brown gelatinous cap — the chapeau brun — rises and a clear juice can be drawn from beneath it.
- That gel is formed by pectin de-esterified by the fruit’s own pectin methylesterase and cross-linked by calcium, and it carries yeast, solids and nitrogen out of the juice with it.
- The resulting fermentation is slow and nutrient-limited, and is expected to stop before the sugar is exhausted.
- Sweetness in the finished cider is therefore the fruit’s own, not added; the method and the sweetness are the same fact.
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.
- Whether the keeve is spontaneous or assisted with added calcium salts and enzyme, which changes reliability but not the mechanism.
- How completely it works. A partial keeve leaves more nitrogen and ferments further, producing a drier cider than intended.
- The finishing route: some keeved ciders are bottled with their remaining sugar and condition in glass, others are held still.
- Tannin, which depends entirely on the fruit. Keeving is a clarification technique and imposes no fruit profile of its own.
- Whether the word is being used accurately. It is applied loosely to any naturally sweet cider, including ones sweetened by other means.
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 | Sweet | Some variation | |
| Acidity | Low | Consistent | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | Some variation | |
| Tannin | Moderate | Some variation | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | Some variation | |
| Body | Full | Some variation | |
| Carbonation | Pétillant | Some variation | |
| Alcohol | Low | Some variation | |
| 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 Keeved cider
Keeving is the technique that makes northern French cider what it is, and it is most usefully understood as deliberate malnutrition. Fresh juice, held cold and left alone, will separate: a firm brown cap rises to the top, a compacted lees falls to the bottom, and a bright juice sits in between. That cap is a pectin gel. The fruit’s own pectin methylesterase strips methyl groups from the pectin chains, exposing carboxyl groups that calcium ions bridge, and the resulting network traps solids and floats on carbon dioxide from the first stirrings of fermentation.
The important consequence is not the clarity. It is that the gel takes the juice’s assimilable nitrogen with it. Yeast needs nitrogen as much as it needs sugar, and a juice that has been keeved is a juice on which yeast can work only slowly and cannot work to completion. The fermentation crawls for months at cellar temperature and then stops with a substantial part of the original sugar unconverted. The maker has arranged for the cider to be sweet by arranging for the yeast to run out of something other than sugar.
This is a fundamentally different idea of sweetness from the one that dominates British and American production, where a cider is fermented dry and sugar is returned to it. In a keeved cider the sugar was never removed. It sits alongside the glycerol, the unfermented pectin fragments and the fruit’s full aromatic complement, and the texture that results — soft, rounded, faintly viscous — cannot be reproduced by adding sucrose to a dry cider. It is also why keeved ciders are characteristically low in alcohol: the sugar that would have become ethanol is still sugar.
The method demands particular fruit and particular conditions. High-pectin, low-nitrogen bittersweet fruit keeves readily; nitrogen-rich juice from well-fertilised orchards resists. Cold is essential, since a warm juice ferments before it can gel. Many makers assist the process with added calcium and a de-esterifying enzyme, which is a legitimate and widespread practice and does not change the mechanism. A keeve that fails leaves the maker with a normally fermenting juice and a decision to make.
What a drinker meets is a cider of low strength, evident sweetness, a fine light bubble and — where the fruit was tannic — a bitterness that keeps the sugar from cloying. The balance between residual sugar and bitter phenolics is the whole architecture of the style, and it is the reason a well-made keeved cider does not read as a sweet drink so much as a rich one.
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
- The relationship between sweetness and alcohol, which is the signature. A keeved cider is sweet and low in alcohol at the same time, because both are consequences of the same arrested ferment.
- The texture, which is rounder and softer than a back-sweetened cider at the same sugar. What produced the sweetness also removed the solids and much of the nitrogen.
- Clarity. A properly keeved juice is drawn bright from beneath the cap, so a keeved cider is often naturally clear without having been filtered.
What gets misread
- Reading the low alcohol as dilution or as a weak ferment. It is the point: the sugar that did not become alcohol is the sugar you are tasting.
- Reading a stalled ferment as a keeve. A keeve is a deliberate nitrogen removal with a visible brown cap; a cider that merely stuck has none of that and none of the texture.
Cellar temperature, around 10–12 °C, in a glass with a bowl. The sweetness here was bought at the cost of alcohol, and chilling it away leaves a low-strength cider with nothing much in its place.
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.
- Back-sweetened sweet cider — Alcohol at a given sweetness. A keeved cider is sweet and weak; a back-sweetened one is sweet at the strength of the dry cider underneath it.
- A stuck fermentation — Whether a cap formed. Keeving produces a chapeau brun and a bright juice drawn from underneath; a stuck ferment produces neither.
- Cidre doux — These overlap heavily and are not the same claim. Doux is a sweetness category with a legal strength cap; keeving is the method most often used to reach it.
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.
Maceration
Holding milled pomace before pressing so that phenolics, aroma precursors and pectin have time to move out of the solid tissue and into the juice.
Pectinase treatment
Adding pectin-degrading enzyme preparations to juice so that haze-forming and viscosity-forming pectin is broken down before fermentation.
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
Protected designations
Cidre du Pays d’Auge
The strictest French cider appellation: a closed area, a closed variety list, a mandated blend balance, compulsory maceration and pectic settling, and a sparkle that may only come from fermentation finishing in the bottle.
Cidre du Cotentin
The appellation of origin for cider from the Cotentin peninsula, built on a small group of local bitter varieties and the most recently recognised of the Norman cider appellations.
Poiré Domfront
France’s appellation of origin for perry, covering the Domfrontais in southern Normandy and requiring a substantial proportion of the local Plant de Blanc pear from tall-stem trees.
Food
Interactions rather than suggestions. Each explains the mechanism, so you can extend it to a dish that is not listed.
- Brie — The complementary route. Low alcohol, retained natural sweetness and a soft profile continue the cheese’s richness rather than cutting through it, which suits a small portion of a young, mild brie.
- Roast turkey — Retained natural sweetness with low alcohol matches a lean, delicate meat without adding weight, and answers the sweetness of the accompaniments.
- Scallops — Retained natural sweetness runs alongside the scallop’s own, which is unusually pronounced for shellfish.
- Custard tart — Retained natural sweetness at low alcohol suits a dessert whose interest is delicacy rather than intensity.
- Fresh curd cheese — A keeved cider’s low alcohol and retained natural sweetness meet fresh curd’s lactic acidity without correcting it out of existence.
- Roast squash — Low alcohol and retained natural sweetness match both the squash’s sugar and its gentleness.
What can go wrong
Faults this style is particularly exposed to, given how it is made.
Stuck fermentation
A fermentation that has stopped before the sugar is gone and will not restart, leaving a sweet, low-alcohol cider that is vulnerable to everything.
Unwanted refermentation
Fermentation restarting in a sealed container, generating carbon dioxide that was not planned for and pressure that a bottle may not withstand.
Pectin haze
A persistent, slightly viscous haze that will not settle, caused by pectin from the fruit remaining in solution as a colloid.
Nitrogen deficiency character
The set of characters a nitrogen-starved fermentation produces together — sulphide, a stalled or dragging ferment, harsh higher alcohols and a thin, hard cider.
Related styles
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.
Cidre de Normandie
Protected Normandy cider made from the region’s bitter and bittersweet fruit, characteristically low in alcohol, sweet-edged and lightly sparkling.
Sweet cider
Cider in which sugar is the leading sensation, whether retained from an arrested fermentation, added after it, or produced by keeving.
Poiré Domfront
The controlled appellation perry of the Domfrontais in southern Normandy, made predominantly from the Plant de Blanc pear on high-standard trees and finished sweet, low in alcohol and bottle-conditioned.
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.
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.
- Why did my cider stop fermenting — The usual causes are a shortage of yeast-available nitrogen, a temperature that has dropped, too much sulphite at the start, or a yeast that has reached its alcohol limit. Check the gravity before assuming anything is wrong: many ciders simply finish.
- 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.
- 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.
- What is dabinett — The most widely planted English cider apple: a late bittersweet with soft, full tannin that ferments into a cider needing very little added to it. Long Ashton measured it at 0.18 per cent acid and 0.29 per cent tannin.
- How do i clear a cloudy cider
- How is sparkling cider made
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.
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.
The Science of Cidermaking and associated technical writing
Andrew Lea · reference work · passage verified 2026-08-24
Written by a food chemist who worked at Long Ashton on apple phenolics. Unusual among specialist cider writing in that it is primary-research-adjacent: the author is describing work he did, and cites the literature. This is why it is registered at tier 1 for chemistry while a general cider book is not.
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.
The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.