Style
Scrumpy
A colloquial West Country word for rough farm cider that has never had a fixed definition and now carries as much marketing weight as descriptive meaning.
- Family
- Regional tradition
- Sweetness
- Made across the range
- Carbonation
- Still
- Strength
- 5–8.5% ABV
- Serve at
- 10–14 °C
- Where
- England
No regulator, trade body or competition defines scrumpy. It is not a protected term, has no compositional requirement, and its use on a label is unconstrained. Anyone stating what scrumpy is is reporting a usage, not a standard.
What makes it this style
- Nothing, formally. The word is a colloquialism and this record exists to say so plainly rather than to invent a specification for it.
- In common West Country usage it refers to still, cloudy, unfiltered farm cider, usually dry and usually strong.
- The etymology points to scrump, a dialect word for a small or withered apple and, as a verb, for taking fruit from someone else’s trees.
- Any consistent meaning it carries is about presentation and context — sold from the farm, from a barrel, unpackaged — rather than about composition.
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.
- Everything a specification would normally fix: juice content, strength, sweetness, fruit, method and quality.
- Whether the word is being used descriptively by a farm or commercially by a brand, which are different acts.
- The connotation, which runs from affectionate to pejorative depending on who is speaking.
- Whether the cider so labelled is farm-made at all. Industrially produced ciders are sold under the word.
- Quality, which has no floor: the word has been applied to excellent cider and to cider that was frankly spoiled.
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 | Dry | Highly variable | |
| Acidity | Low | Highly variable | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | Highly variable | |
| Tannin | Firm | Highly variable | |
| Astringency | Drying | Highly variable | |
| Body | Medium | Highly variable | |
| Carbonation | Still | Consistent | |
| Alcohol | High | Some variation | |
| Freshness | Aged | Some variation | |
| Fruit character | Faint | Highly variable | |
| Phenolic character | Noticeable | Highly variable | |
| Fermentation character | Strong | Some variation | |
| Oxidative character | Evident | Highly variable |
What you are likely to smell and taste
Each descriptor links to what actually produces it.
About Scrumpy
Scrumpy is a word before it is a style, and treating it as a style is the error this record is written to prevent. It belongs to West Country dialect, it entered general English through the tourist trade and through the marketing of the mid-twentieth century, and at no point in that journey did anyone attach conditions to it. There is no minimum juice content behind it, no strength, no method and no origin requirement.
What people usually mean by it is fairly consistent: cider from a farm, still, cloudy, unfiltered, dry, strong and rough-edged. That is a real thing and it is described properly under farmhouse cider, which has the advantage of being a description of practice rather than a nickname. The word adds a register — informality, rusticity, a hint of danger — that the technical description does not carry, and that register is precisely what makes it commercially useful.
Its commercial use has therefore run ahead of its descriptive use. Ciders produced at industrial scale, filtered, carbonated or made partly from concentrate have been sold under the word, and nothing prevents that. A drinker who reads scrumpy on a label and infers small-scale farm production is making an inference the label does not support. This is not a scandal; it is simply what happens to an undefined word that sells.
The honest position for a reference work is to record the usage, decline to fix it, and point the reader at the categories that do carry meaning. If what is wanted is unfiltered still farm cider, the useful words are unfiltered, still, full juice and the name of a region. If what is wanted is the drink the word evokes, the West Country farmhouse tradition is where to look.
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
- Whatever is actually there, because the word predicts nothing. Scrumpy has no definition and covers carefully made farmhouse cider and rough cider from a barrel equally.
- Cloudiness, strength and a rough edge, which are what the word connotes rather than what it requires.
- Whether the roughness is tannin or is a fault. These are different findings that the register of the word encourages running together.
What gets misread
- Treating the word as a category. It is a register — informal, West Country, unpolished — rather than a specification.
- Excusing a fault because the cider is called scrumpy. Vinegar and mousiness are faults under any name.
Cellar temperature, in whatever it is offered in, and with the expectation that it will be variable. The word describes a circumstance of production rather than a specification, and the range between two examples is wider than for any defined style.
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.
- West Country farmhouse cider — One is a description of practice; the other is a word for how a cider is perceived. Many ciders are both and the second does not imply the first.
- Traditional draught cider — Whether a definition exists. The campaigning term has one; scrumpy does not.
How it is made
The methods that define or commonly produce this style.
Windfall management
Deciding which fruit that has reached the orchard floor can be used, and getting the rest out of the crop before it becomes a patulin problem.
Wild fermentation
Letting the microflora already present on the fruit and in the press house carry the ferment, in a succession rather than as a single organism.
Barrel ageing
Holding cider in wood — which may mean an old neutral vat used simply as a vessel, or fresh or spirit-seasoned oak used as a source of flavour, and the two are not the same operation.
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.
Bag-in-box
A collapsing laminate bladder in a card outer, the standard farmgate and draught format, which keeps air out during dispense but lets oxygen through the film over weeks.
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.
- Crackling — Pork scratchings and rough farmhouse cider is an established pub-trade combination, and the salt does real work in taming the cider’s astringency.
- Wensleydale — A rough, tannic, often oxidative farmhouse cider is at the far end of the intensity scale from a mild young cheese, and the tannin has little casein-driven softening to gain from so lean and moist a curd.
- Gorgonzola — Rough tannin and volatile acidity against a soft blue produce two competing sharpnesses with no sugar to mediate; the cheese’s salt does not suppress enough of the cider’s bitterness to rescue it.
- Mozzarella — Tannin, volatile acidity and oxidative weight against a delicate fresh curd is a one-sided contest; the cheese is not perceived at all after the first mouthful.
- Guinea fowl — Rough tannin and oxidative volatility overwhelm a bird whose interest lies in a restrained savoury delicacy, and the lean meat gives astringency little fat to be buffered by.
What can go wrong
Faults this style is particularly exposed to, given how it is made.
Volatile acidity
The measurable fraction of acidity that can be steam-distilled off, dominated by acetic acid and read as vinegar sharpness in the nose and a hard, hot finish.
Acetification
The active conversion of a cider’s ethanol into acetic acid by acetic acid bacteria at an air interface — the process, running in the vessel, that produces volatile acidity.
Brettanomyces character
Farmyard, horse-blanket, smoky and sticking-plaster aromas from *Brettanomyces* yeast converting hydroxycinnamic acids into volatile phenols.
Mousiness
A retronasal taint of mouse cage, stale popcorn or crackers that appears only after swallowing — and that a substantial fraction of people cannot detect at all.
Excessive sediment
More deposit in the bottle or vessel than the presentation intends, ranging from a normal conditioning yeast layer to a loose sludge that clouds every pour.
Related styles
West Country farmhouse cider
Cider made on the farm from tannic bittersweet fruit, wild-fermented in wood and sold still and unfiltered, in a tradition whose variability is one of its defining features.
Traditional draught cider
Cider dispensed from cask, bag-in-box or gravity without added gas, in the form that British cider has historically been drunk in pubs and at the farm gate.
Unfiltered cider
Cider packaged without filtration, retaining suspended yeast and fine solids and the body and aroma that come with them.
Still cider
Cider with no perceptible dissolved carbon dioxide, presented as a fermented fruit drink whose texture rests on body, acid and tannin alone.
Somerset cider
Cider from the Somerset levels and the surrounding hills, built on a locally selected bittersweet fruit population and a tradition of full-bodied, tannic, still cider.
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.
- How does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
- Why does my cider taste like vinegar — Acetic acid bacteria have reached the cider and, given air, are converting its alcohol into acetic acid. The cause is almost always oxygen — an unfilled vessel, a leaking bung, or a slow transfer.
- What is traditional draught cider — Still or lightly conditioned cider served from a cask or a bag-in-box rather than under gas pressure, so whatever sparkle it has came from its own fermentation. It is the format most West Country farmhouse cider is sold in.
- 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.
- Can you fix a cider that has gone vinegary — Not really. Volatile acidity cannot be removed at small scale, and blending it away only dilutes it. The realistic options are to accept it, to blend a lightly affected batch into a much larger sound one, or to let it finish becoming vinegar.
- What is mousiness in cider — Mousiness is a fault caused by tetrahydropyridines produced by *Brettanomyces* and some lactic acid bacteria. It tastes of stale grain or a mouse cage and appears in the aftertaste rather than in the aroma.
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.
CAMRA cider and perry standards
Campaign for Real Ale · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24. Registered for the consumer-campaigning vocabulary — "real cider", "full juice" — which is advocacy language rather than legal definition, and is recorded as such wherever CiderHQ uses it.
Somerset Rural Life Museum — cider collections
South West Heritage Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24
National Association of Cider Makers
NACM · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
The UK trade association. Useful for industry-agreed definitions and for the voluntary labelling standards its members work to. A trade body has an interest in how its product is described, so CiderHQ cites it for what the industry says about itself rather than for neutral scientific claims.
Hereford Museum of Cider collections and interpretation
Hereford Cider Museum Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24