Cider has barely changed in its raw material and completely in its decisions. A traditional farmhouse making of apples was whatever the orchard handed over, mixed varieties that had fallen, wild yeast on the skins, a slow ferment in a cold cellar, and nobody in charge of whether the result landed dry or sweet. Modern cider is the reverse, since nearly every variable is chosen on purpose, from the yeast strain to the exact amount of sugar left in the bottle. That one shift explains more about the distance between a Somerset farmyard pint and a cold flavoured can in a Lower Mainland fridge than any amount of talk about heritage.
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Nobody Knows When The First Apple Went Fermented
Apples are ancient and badly documented, which is an irritating combination. Their wild ancestor, Malus sieversii, still grows in the mountains of Central Asia in what is now Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and the fruit moved west along trade routes into western Asia and Europe, being crossed and selected the whole way. Fermented apple juice never needed inventing, since any sweet juice left standing will start working on its own, and Greek and Roman writers describe apple drinks in a way that leaves it unclear whether anybody was making what you would call cider.
That is why two claims repeated in almost every history of cider should be dropped. You will read that apple cultivation began in Egypt around 1300 BCE on archaeological evidence, and that cider is a tradition older than writing. Neither has a source behind it, and the second is simply false, since writing is older. The honest version is shorter: cider appears as a named drink in medieval records, and it was an everyday beverage across the apple countries of north-west Europe long before it became a specialty item anywhere else.
What The Label Has To Mean In Canada
The useful starting point for a Canadian is the legal definition, because it is looser than most people expect. In the federal food regulations cider is the product of the alcoholic fermentation of apple juice, and it has to fall between 2.5 and 13.0 per cent alcohol by volume. Inside that definition a maker may add yeast, concentrated apple juice, sugar or glucose in several forms, fining agents to clear the liquid, brandy or fruit spirit, and oxygen. A separate standard covers champagne cider, which is carbonated under pressure and has to reach at least 7 per cent.
So the word cider on a Canadian label is a promise about the base and the strength rather than a promise about the apples. A cider rebuilt from concentrate with sugar put back is cider, and so is a dry blend from one orchard pressed in October. The other thing to have straight is that cider means something else in a grocery store in autumn, where an unfiltered jug of apple juice goes by that name with no alcohol involved, which is why the fermented kind has kept the North American habit of calling itself hard cider.
Three Traditions, Three Ideas Of What Cider Is For
England's West Country, and Somerset and Herefordshire most of all, is where the tannic end of cider lives. The fruit there is not eating apples but dedicated cider varieties, traditionally sorted into sharps, bittersweets and bittersharps, and the reason anybody bothers with the bittersweet group is tannin, that drying grip you get from strong tea or grape skins. Fermentation runs slowly and often from the fruit's own yeast, the result finishes dry, and it is frequently still or barely sparkling. This is the cider that tastes like an orchard, and it is the one most drinkers here have never tried.
Normandy and Brittany push the other way. The juice there is high in acid, and makers lean on a clarification step called keving, in which the must is held cold so that a gel forms and strips out pectin and some nitrogen before anything ferments. What comes out keeps a good deal of natural sweetness, sits low in alcohol and is often gently sparkling. It is the style that converts people who insist they do not like cider.
Spain's Asturias makes the sharpest of the three. Sidra there is low in alcohol, bone dry, green-apple acidic, bottled young and poured from height at the last second so that it hits the glass hard and picks up air on the way down. That pour has a name, escanciado, and the small amount it lands in the glass is a culín, although you will occasionally see the ritual printed under some other word entirely, which is a mistranslation rather than a regional variant. The Basque Country runs a parallel tradition of cider houses that open through the winter, where drinkers stand under a tap drawn off a vat.
What Went Modern
| Part of the process | Traditional | Modern |
|---|---|---|
| Yeast | Whatever was on the fruit | A selected strain, or a blend of two |
| Fruit | One orchard, blended by variety | Juice or concentrate bought in, sometimes from several countries |
| Clearing | Racking off the sediment, and time | Fining agents and filtration down to brilliance |
| Sweetness | Whatever the ferment happened to leave | Stopped early, sweetened back, or held with keving |
| Sparkle | Bottle conditioning, or nothing | Force carbonation in a tank |
| Flavour | Apple, plus cellar character | Added fruit, honey, spice or hops |
None of those changes is cheating, and a modern cider is not automatically the worse drink. What matters is whether the choices are visible to you at the shelf. A filtered, force carbonated cider sweetened from concentrate can be a very good beverage and simply be a different beverage from the tannic farmhouse bottle the word traditional puts in your head, and a great deal of disappointment in the cider aisle is somebody expecting one and paying for the other.
How To Choose A Bottle
- Read for dryness first, since the words dry, sec or off dry tell you far more than the alcohol figure, which says nothing at all about sweetness.
- Look for a stated percentage of apple juice or the phrase 100 percent apple juice, because a cider built from concentrate with sugar added back is legal, common and still labelled cider.
- Check whether the maker names an orchard, a valley or the varieties that went into the press, which is the cheapest available signal that somebody thought about fruit rather than volume.
- Expect a cider pressed only from eating apples to taste clean, sweet and short, and expect one blended with cider apples to have grip and length, which is what people mean when they call a cider serious.
- Treat added flavouring as a choice rather than a fault, while knowing that honey, cinnamon or berry additions are often there to cover a thin base.
What Cider Does Not Do
The claim that the polyphenols in cider protect you against chronic disease does not survive looking, and it is worth taking out rather than softening. Cider does contain polyphenols because apples do, and how many depends on the fruit, the pressing and how much skin and sediment reached the ferment, but most of the research behind polyphenols is done on apples and on drinks without alcohol in them. Cider arrives with alcohol attached, and that is the larger factor in any health sense. Two smaller points while the subject is open: cider is fermented from fruit rather than barley, so the base liquid carries no gluten, which is worth knowing before you assume it, and the idea that cider is the weak option is out of date, since a dry still English cider can sit at 7 or 8 per cent without saying so loudly on the label.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is cider beer or wine?
In method it is closer to wine, because it is the fermentation of a fruit juice that already carries its own sugars, with no grain and no mash anywhere in the process. Beer starts from an extracted wort, which changes the equipment, the yeast and the whole flavour chemistry. The reason cider gets shelved with beer in a British Columbia liquor store is distribution and cold storage rather than anything chemical.
Why does my homemade cider taste flat?
Usually because nothing put the gas back in. A cider fermented in an open bucket and then packed cold into bottles keeps almost none of the carbon dioxide the yeast produced, so it pours dead and tastes thinner than the same liquid force carbonated. The second common cause is fruit rather than process, since a cider pressed entirely from eating apples has no tannin to create the impression of body, and a well made batch can still land short in the glass.
How long does an opened bottle keep?
Days rather than weeks, because cider behaves like wine once it is open and the air will push what is left toward vinegar. Re-cork it, keep it cold and finish it within a few days. An unopened bottle stored cool and dark holds for months, and a high tannin cider from a good season can improve for a year or two, which is more than you can say for the sweet flavoured cans that fill most of the cold aisle.
Start At The Dry End Of The Range
If everything you have drunk was sweet and very cold, one bottle of dry still cider from England's West Country will reset your idea of what the drink can be, and it costs about what the bottle you normally buy costs. Get that, get a softly sparkling Normandy cider to pour beside it, and drink the two on the same evening. Almost everybody finds out within one sitting which end of that span they want, and after that the cider shelf stops being a guess. That is the practical reason to know how the traditional stuff was made and exactly what the modern version decided to change.
