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What does "dry" mean on this label?
Dry, medium, sweet, brut, doux, demi-sec, seco, halbtrocken — what each word means, in the system that defines it. There is no single sweetness ladder, and this explains why the words contradict each other across borders.
Sweetness decoder
There is no single sweetness ladder
Six systems, six sets of words, and no reliable correspondence between them. This is why a bottle labelled brut and one labelled dry can be nothing alike.
The positions below are positions within each system. They are deliberately not aligned across systems, because aligning them would assert a correspondence that does not exist. *Brut* is not French for dry; it is a defined band inside a French instrument.
United Kingdom
Industry convention, not law · Industry convention, supported by a voluntary labelling code rather than by legislation.
UK cider sweetness terms are not defined in law. A producer choosing to call a cider "medium" is following a widely shared convention, not meeting a threshold, and two ciders both labelled medium can differ substantially. The convention is nonetheless real and reasonably consistent among larger producers.
Dry
Little or no perceptible sweetness. Fermented out, or close to it.
Medium dry
A trace of sweetness, mostly noticeable as softness rather than as sugar.
Medium
Clearly sweet but not markedly so. The commonest UK category.
Medium sweet
Sweetness is a principal characteristic.
Sweet
Sweetness dominates.
France
Defined in law · Décret n° 2025-162 of 20 February 2025, in force from 1 July 2025, with tighter rules again inside each AOP specification.
French sweetness terms are legal categories, and since 1 July 2025 they are defined on acquired alcoholic strength together with density at 20 °C rather than on residual sugar. The décret of 2025 repealed the 1953 instrument that set the old sugar bands, so any source quoting brut as “below 28 g/L” is quoting a repealed rule. The categories deliberately overlap, which means a cider can satisfy more than one of them and a producer near a boundary does not fall through it. Note also that the same words on a sparkling wine label belong to a different scheme with different thresholds — brut on a bottle of Champagne and brut on a bottle of cidre are not the same band.
Extra dry · Extra-brut
The driest category: acquired strength at least 5% vol and density below 1.013 at 20 °C.
New in the 2025 décret. It did not exist in French national law before, though Cidre Cotentin had already defined an extra-brut mention inside its own appellation specification, on different criteria again.
Dry · Brut
Acquired strength at least 3.5% vol and density no greater than 1.016 at 20 °C.
Under the repealed 1953 décret this was a residual-sugar band below 28 g/L. It is now a strength-and-density condition, which a producer can check with a hydrometer.
Medium dry · Demi-sec
Acquired strength above 3% vol and density above 1.016 at 20 °C.
Overlaps brut deliberately: a cider at exactly 1.016 and 3.6% satisfies the brut condition, and one just above that density with the same strength satisfies demi-sec.
Sweet · Doux
Acquired strength no greater than 3% vol and density at least 1.024 at 20 °C.
A doux is weaker than a brut from the same juice, and the new definition makes that explicit rather than incidental: the category has a strength ceiling written into it. The sugar that would have become alcohol is still there.
Spain
Set by a protected designation · The protected designations, and Spanish practice more broadly.
Sidra natural carries no sweetness statement at all, because the category is defined by method rather than by sugar: it is fermented out, unfiltered and uncarbonated, and it is dry as a consequence. Sweetness terms appear on sidra espumosa — the sparkling category — where they follow a sparkling-wine pattern.
Bone dry · Sidra natural
Not a sweetness term but a category. Fully fermented, and dry because that is what the method produces.
Dry · Brut
The dry category for sparkling sidra.
Medium dry · Semiseco
Perceptibly sweetened.
Sweet · Dulce
Sweet.
German-speaking Europe
Industry convention, not law · German fruit-wine labelling convention, following the pattern used for wine.
Apfelwein terminology borrows the German wine sweetness ladder. In practice the overwhelming majority of traditional Frankfurt Apfelwein is at the dry end, and the sweeter terms are met more often on commercial fruit wines than in an Apfelweinwirtschaft.
Dry · Trocken
Dry.
Medium dry · Halbtrocken
Off-dry.
Medium sweet · Lieblich
Noticeably sweet.
Sweet · Süß
Sweet.
United States
Industry convention, not law · Industry framework from the American Cider Association; not a federal labelling standard.
US sweetness terms are an industry framework rather than a regulated one. The federal definition of hard cider bounds strength and carbonation, not sugar. The framework is nonetheless useful because it is written down and widely used, and because it has to work across a category that includes both farmhouse cider and mass-market fruit cider.
Dry
No perceptible sweetness.
Semi-dry
A trace.
Semi-sweet
Clearly sweet.
Sweet
Sweetness dominates.
Competition judging (BJCP)
A competition framework · The Beer Judge Certification Program, for competition purposes.
A judging construct, and the only scheme here that ties its terms to specific gravity ranges. That precision is a property of competitions needing a boundary, not evidence that the categories are more real than the others. It binds no producer and has no legal standing.
Dry
Judged as having no residual sweetness; the specification places it at the lowest finishing gravities.
Semi-dry / off-dry
A defined band above dry.
Medium
The middle band.
Sweet
The highest band, at the top of the finishing-gravity range.
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