Style
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.
- Family
- Regional tradition
- Sweetness
- Made across the range
- Carbonation
- Still
- Strength
- 4.5–8% ABV
- Serve at
- 10–14 °C
- Where
- England
CAMRA is a consumer campaigning organisation. Its criteria — full juice, no added carbon dioxide at dispense, no pasteurisation or micro-filtration — are influential among drinkers and at festivals, and have no legal standing. Producers are free to disregard them and many do.
What makes it this style
- Dispense is by gravity or by hand pump from a container that is not under applied gas pressure.
- The cider is still, or nearly so, since any carbonation it had has vented.
- It is unpasteurised and not micro-filtered under the criteria most closely associated with the term, so it remains biologically live.
- It has a short service life once opened and is treated as a perishable product.
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.
- Container. Wooden cask, polypin, bag-in-box and plastic keg all count, and each protects the cider from air differently.
- Whether the criteria being applied are CAMRA’s, a festival’s, or a producer’s own.
- Condition, which changes materially over the days a container is on service as oxygen enters.
- Sweetness, since draught cider is often offered as dry, medium and sweet from separate containers of the same base.
- Whether the cider has been diluted, which is common in draught trade and rarely stated.
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 | Moderate | Some variation | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | Highly variable | |
| Tannin | Moderate | Highly variable | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | Some variation | |
| Body | Medium | Some variation | |
| Carbonation | Still | Consistent | |
| Alcohol | Moderate | Consistent | |
| Freshness | Settled | Some variation | |
| Fruit character | Present | Some variation | |
| Phenolic character | Noticeable | Highly variable | |
| Fermentation character | Evident | Highly variable | |
| Oxidative character | Evident | Some variation |
What you are likely to smell and taste
Each descriptor links to what actually produces it.
About Traditional draught cider
Draught is the oldest and most fragile way to serve cider, and it is the form in which the drink’s character is most exposed. A container standing on a bar without gas pressure admits air as it empties, and the cider inside is a live product with yeast still in it. It changes over the days it is on service — brighter and fresher at the start, rounder in the middle, oxidative and eventually acetic at the end. Managing that window is the cellar skill the format requires.
The consumer campaign around the term matters to how it is understood. CAMRA’s criteria for what it calls real cider were written to distinguish traditionally made and dispensed cider from products that are pasteurised, carbonated and served under gas. Those criteria are widely used at festivals and by pubs that promote the category, and they have shaped a genuine market. They are not law and they are not the industry’s own definition; a producer who pasteurises is not doing anything wrong, they are simply outside a voluntary scheme.
The format shapes the cider that suits it. Without carbonation, a draught cider needs body and tannin to give the palate something to work with, which is why the tradition is strongest in the West Country and weakest where the local fruit is thin and acidic. It also rewards ciders that hold up to a little air: a cider with some phenolic structure absorbs oxidative development better than a delicate aromatic one, which will fade.
Bag-in-box, which looks like a modern convenience, has quietly become the most important container in the sector because the collapsing inner bag keeps air off the cider as it empties. That solves the format’s central problem and is the reason a farm can now sell draught cider through a summer without it turning. It is a genuine improvement on the wooden cask and is rarely given credit as 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
- Whether it is still. Traditional draught cider is generally served from a container without added gas, so what carbonation exists is its own.
- Cloudiness and sediment, which are ordinary here.
- Whether the definition behind the term has actually been met, which is a question about juice content and processing rather than about taste.
What gets misread
- Reading the campaigning term as a legal one. It is a consumer-organisation definition, not a statutory category.
- Assuming traditional on a label means the same thing. The word is unregulated; the definition belongs to the organisation that wrote it.
From the container, without gas, and drunk reasonably promptly once broached. An opened bag-in-box or cask oxidises.
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.
- Scrumpy — Whether a definition exists at all. This term has one; scrumpy does not.
- Modern mainstream cider — Juice content, concentrate and added gas, all of which the campaigning definition addresses.
How it is made
The methods that define or commonly produce this style.
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.
Cellar storage
Holding packaged cider in conditions that let it change slowly and predictably, where stability of temperature matters more than the temperature itself.
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.
Shelf-life management
Establishing how long a cider stays acceptable in its package and setting a durability date that reflects evidence rather than convention.
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.
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.
- Ploughman’s — The plate contains everything a cider is good at answering: casein for the tannin, butterfat for the acid, salt to suppress the cider’s bitterness, and pickle to raise the acid floor to a level a traditional cider meets.
- Pork sausages — Salt suppresses the cider’s bitterness, protein takes up its tannin, and the acid clears rendered fat — three mechanisms in the same mouthful, which is why this pairing works better than its unpretentiousness suggests.
- Pork pie — Cold pork fat, lard pastry and a heavy cure make this a salt-and-fat subject at both ends; a traditional draught cider with modest residual sugar and real acidity addresses both, and the salt suppresses its tannin.
- Fish and chips — The everyday British combination, and structurally sound: the salt suppresses the cider’s tannin and the acid does the clearing.
- Chutney — Chutney belongs to the ploughman’s plate, where it sits beside cheese and cold meat; a traditional English cider is answering the whole plate rather than the preserve alone.
What can go wrong
Faults this style is particularly exposed to, given how it is made.
Oxidation
The cumulative effect of oxygen on finished cider: fruit aroma flattens, colour deepens towards amber, and a bruised-apple or sherry-like character replaces the fresh one.
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.
Film yeast growth
A pale, powdery or wrinkled film of aerobic yeast growing on the surface of a standing cider, consuming alcohol and acid and producing acetaldehyde.
Flat and lifeless
A cider with nothing obviously wrong and nothing to say: aroma faded, acidity dulled, finish short — usually the cumulative result of over-processing or slow oxidation.
Vinegar fly contamination
Small flies carrying acetic acid bacteria and spoilage yeasts directly into juice and cider, and depositing them wherever they land.
Related styles
Still cider
Cider with no perceptible dissolved carbon dioxide, presented as a fermented fruit drink whose texture rests on body, acid and tannin alone.
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.
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.
Unfiltered cider
Cider packaged without filtration, retaining suspended yeast and fine solids and the body and aroma that come with them.
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 long does cider last — An unopened commercial cider is usually at its finest within a year of packaging, and filtered, pasteurised products carry a stated date. Strong, tannic, bottle-conditioned ciders can improve for several years.
- 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 scrumpy — Scrumpy is an informal West Country word for strong, still, usually cloudy farmhouse cider. It has no legal definition, so it describes a style expectation rather than a guaranteed method.
- 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.
- How do you blend cider
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.
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.
Cider and perry production technical training material
Peter Mitchell / Cider and Perry Academy · reference work · registered as competent for this subject
Searched again on 2026-08-25 and it remains the one printed source here that a bibliographic check cannot fix, because it is not a published work with an edition. It is course material issued to participants of a training programme, so there is no catalogue record to verify, no ISBN, and no lawful public copy. Its state stays `registered` for that reason rather than through inattention.