Uncle Cecil’s cider column has me in a stew, has given me the pip and has shaken me to the core … OK, enough of that.
When Americans say “cider”, do they mean something completely different to the nectar we Brits call by the same name? The Master says:
“The store-bought stuff is juice, the homemade stuff is cider. (Source: East Coast conglomerate; also, the old edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.) The product you buy from roadside stands usually has not been pasteurized. Consequently, it ferments over time, giving it a mildly alcoholic kick. What you buy in the store, in contrast, is pasteurized soon after crushing, preventing fermentation and resulting in a pleasant but kickless taste. The manufacturers call their product cider in the fall for marketing purposes.”
Over here, cider is always alcoholic and often packs quite a punch … whereas apple juice is just, well, juice!
We have unpastuerized cider, stuff that merely looks like unpastuerized cider and apple juice. The stuff that merely looks like cider is really juice because it can’t ferment.
Also, apple juice here in the states is typically has the apple pulp removed resulting in a clearer-looking product.
Cider in Australia, New Zealand, UK (and the rest of the civilised world) is an alcoholic drink made from fermented apple juice. Apple Juice in contrast, is not normally alcoholic. Whether it is cloudy or not, is irrelevant. All of the Cider I’ve ever seen on sale is invariably clear. It usually seems to be about 4 or 5% alcohol, about the same strength as most beers.
Living as I do in Herefordshire UK, one of the cider producing counties, and being an enthusiastic consumer of the same, I can say that there is a vast variety in cider. There are clear ciders, often mass-produced and conforming to the 4-5% alcohol Tony quotes. There are cloudy ciders sometimes known as “scrumpy”. Often these are local brews with highly variable alcoholic content (although usually bloody high). As the second stage of cider fermentation is bacterial and/or fungal (other than Sacchromyces) the alcohol is often supplemented with various mycotoxins that contribute to both the intoxication and the subsequent hangover.
The cider apple is virtually inedible due to the fibrous consistency of the flesh, selected to hold together in the press and not release too much pulp into the juice. They have lovely names like foxwhelp, redstreak and kingson black and come in varieties classed according to the sugar, tannin and acid content. These are blended before fermentation to give a balanced drink. There are some single variety ciders being produced as well. These may be supplemented with herbs (sage is popular in Herefordshire) or distilled to apple brandy (Calvados being the supreme example of this).
Not a simple business, and that’s without mentioning the equivalent pear drink, Perry.
From having made both cider and juice, I feel the difference is really the level of filtration. Cider is generally only coarsely filters to remove the really big bits after you pulverize the apple, and thus is quite perishable. Juice is very well filtered, and has a longer shelf-life because of it.
I did some research on this before making some hard cider, and the difference seems to be mostly in what the manufacturers want to call it. If you catch them bottling it right after pressing it, they call it juice. If you wait a couple days, they call it cider. No fermentation necessary. I have also found clear & cloudy cider & juice, and clear & cloudy hard cider.
Then there’s another huge difference. In upstate New York, home to a million different apple varieties - many of them created by the Cornell University Agricultural Experimental Stations - ciders are made from edible apple types. Some may be blends, but others are from single apple types. Every type (what is the right word for the difference between a foxwhelp or redstreak? my mind just went blank) is also sold as an eating, baking, or pie apple as well, often in bags on the farmstand next to the cider.
I’m from upstate New York, too, and love the cider here. I could give it to my kids right away (they usually drank it up within the day), or stash a jug somewhere for a day or two (longer, and the lid would blow off!), and get pleasantly tipsy while my breath smelled only of apples, heh-heh-heh.
I have noticed that so-called “organic” apple juice is always scrumpy. Kids seem to go for the clearer look, but the cloudy stuff tastes SO much better!
You ask for a cider in an ersatz British pub, which we have a plenty of, and which serve “cider” in your sense. You might also find it in a more upscale bar of the sort which is informal, but caters to a collegiate or professional crowd. “cider” ordered in a bar will generally be alcoholic, and it will be likely that you can order “pear cider” if so inclined. More blue-collar bars probably won’t have it - not a beverage commonly consumed by working class Americans.
Or, as somebody else noted, if you are in someplace where you can buy locally made cider which hasn’t had stabilizers added to it, you set it in the closet for a day or so. It’s amazing how fast and reliably fermentation happens to that stuff.
It has rather an image in the States of being a beverage suited only to the barefoot, cousin-lovin’, feudin’, thirteen-toed residents of South Armpit, Missitucky.
Actively working cider is always cloudy. Finished cider may clarify as the yeast settles out. If there was a lot of pectin in the wort, then it may not.
I’m in the US. Cider means alcoholic. Sweet cider is an abomination to sell unpasteurized juice. The term is a fairly recent invention.
For some reason cider in the US kind of died out. In colonial times most apples were growm for cider. Jefferson, Madison, and Washington all had cider apple orchards. Everybody drank the stuff.
Bewildebeest, how recent would you say the term “sweet cider” is? My recollection is that a 19th century American president (William Henry Harrison, maybe) ran on a “log cabin and hard cider” campaign, so I assume that the “hard cider” was being distinguished from something.
) and the great cider of Somerset!