In the UK, there’s no such term as “hard” cider, for the same reason as there’s no such thing as hard beer or hard wine: cider is an alcoholic drink. It’s not just the UK - I’ve visited quite a few Normandy cider farms and the story is the same.
If it’s been squeezed out of apples, it’s apple juice. It might be cloudy apple juice, it might be freshly pressed apple juice, it might be apple juice from concentrate, but if it’s not been fermented, it’s not cider.
So…in the US, I know there is apple juice, I know there is hard cider, but there is also something called “cider”, which ain’t booze, as far as I know. What is cider then? What stops it being apple juice? And do any other fruits enjoy this mysterious additional category? Is there orange cider? Watermelon cider?
Too distinguish it from the different drink, apple juice. Cider looks different and to my taste, tastes different. Its tangier and more complex than juice.
It’s often used differently, too. I mull cider all the time and drink it warm, but I’d never think to mull Apple juice.
I have always understood apple cider to be unfiltered apple juice. It’s brown and cloudy. As far as I know, there are no (soft) ciders other than apple.
Personally, I have a strong association between apple cider and a local place (in Placerville, CA) called Apple Hill. It’s a sort of rural family activity center associated with apple orchards. We’d usually come back with a few jugs of cider. But it’s not that common outside of these kinds of special occasions. You can find it, but filtered apple juice is far more common. I suspect the cider we got was unpasteurized, too, which would make it unsuitable for supermarkets.
But it is juice. Freshly squeezed orange juice isn’t orange cider. Freshly squeezed, unfiltered, unpasteurised something-else juice isn’t something-else cider, as far as I know. And fermented cider is an ancient idea, so I wondered why its name has come to mean a variety of apple juice when that form of juice from any other fruit would be called juice.
Cider already meant something else, and has done for centuries. It’s derived from a word meaning “strong drink”. It has always meant booze. So, the idea that it was co-opted to describe something which could be called “unfiltered apple juice” simply for the sake of clarity seems a bit unlikely.
When I think of apple juice, I think of a clearish, yellow-brown liquid that is most often drunk at breakfast (like other juices). When I think of apple cider, I think of a cloudy brown liquid that is most often drunk in the fall.
As was tempted to say that they’re as different as jelly and jam, but I’m not sure that would translate. They’re maybe as different as lager and ale, though not really in the same way.
No, but the difference between orange juice with and without the pulp isn’t as large as the difference between filtered and unfiltered apple juice. Orange juice with pulp tastes like orange juice with stuff in it. Unfiltered apple juice though is quite different from the stuff in kid’s juice boxes.
I mean, I don’t give a shit what names different cultures want to give the two drinks but filtered and unfiltered apple juice deserves two distinct names in my opinion. We went with “cider” for one of them.
That was my entry into this particular rabbit hole. For many years, cider enjoyed a reputation as being the choice of the gate-leaning rural bumpkin, the ditch-sleeping vagrant and the anarcho-chaotic squat-dwelling urban nutcase.
Booze. Unmistakably boozy booze. Fighting juice for the dropout who’s not interested in your la-di-da MD 20/20. It’s had its makeover into artisanal heritage product now, of course, but it’s still booze.
So why the hell was Ned all about it? Ah. Because, somehow, it’s fruit juice.
Reading a little, apparently Prohibition effectively killed the US hard cider market until fairly recently. It wasn’t a huge contender before that (an influx of German and related immigrants helped beer push cider to the margins) but Prohibition caused its practical end. Prior to that, “cider” was the alcoholic stuff but, afterward, apple orchards began using the term to describe unfiltered but nonalcoholic juice. Many hard cider orchards were cut down because the apples used for alcohol aren’t very tasty in other applications which meant that, once Prohibition was repealed, cider couldn’t make a swift comeback.
By the time hard cider came back into fashion in the last decade or so, everyone already knew “cider” was the seasonal tart apple juice so producers needed a new name to let people know this was different. “Hard cider” it was.
This. The difference between sweet cider (sweet in the sense of non-alcoholic, while there’s sugars in it it’s generally pretty tangy though it depends on the apples) and what in the USA is called apple juice is huge. The difference between pulpy and non-pulpy orange juice is only that one has bits in it and the other doesn’t. The difference between sweet cider and apple juice, at least as “apple juice” is sold in the United States, is that they taste like entirely different things; as little alike as, say, beef liver and beef steak, which are both beef. And, similarly, some people like both, but some people like one and hate the other.
As far as I know, “cider” only applies to things made from apples. The equivalent made from pears is called perry. The equivalent made from other things is called juice; though there may be something else with its own species-specific name that I either don’t know about or am not thinking of right now.
I couldn’t really buy the idea that different styles of the same fruit’s juice needed distinguishing by pinching a well-established name that already meant something else. A bit like calling unsweetened grape juice with the skins left in “wine” so everyone would know it wasn’t regular grape juice.
I’m not sure I agree that apple cider tastes completely different than apple juice. I consider apple cider to be the stronger of the two, with more concentrated apple flavor, and it will be tangier. In fact, I’ve encountered fake cider which was just more concentrated apple juice with added citric acid. It doesn’t quite taste the same, but it’s close. The main difference was the lack of pulp and that it tasted like they used slightly different apple varieties.
Of course, I’m talking unmulled/unspiced apple cider. Hot spiced cider tastes quite different than cold, unspiced apple juice. That said, when I’ve had a craving for the stuff and didn’t have cider, I’ve heated apple juice and added the spices, and it was close enough to handle the craving.
“beef liver” and “beef steak”? So they’re both called “beef” then, but with a qualifying extra descriptor so everybody can avoid the nasty one…
Perry is traditionally booze too (though the popularity of cider has led to it’s being called “pear cider” in many cases). Is there a non-alcoholic perry as well?