I started digging hard cider when I moved to New England where there are a lot of small cider-apple orchards and artisan cider makers. The cider press is a somewhat familiar object out here in rural New England yet.
I planted some hard-cider varieties of apples last year along with the eating apples.
Did you all know that’s what Johnny Appleseed was planting? Cider apples for alcoholic cider. Yep. Not part of the grammar school story that I heard.
So is hard cider and applejack the same thing then ?
i remember the yearly primary school trip to the apple orchard that almost all the kids (the teachers not so much as they had to go back home with a bus of gooey sugared out little kids)looked forward to in the few years I went to school in Indiana …
the farmers (it was a co-op) also had a factory with cider/juice makers caramel/candy apple makers … a pie maker and a pie filling maker … if you made it with apples in the early 80s so did they and we all got samples … (we even tried apple pie yogurt one year … I wasn’t impressed )…
last time I went back I wanted to go to see it again and apparently the co-op merged with one of the big companies after the main growers wanted to retire and they moved everything but the apple trees… i did find a jug with the brand on it and it tasted the same but just wasnt the same experience
Ha! This article on JA I just googled up led back somewhere familiar…
No. Applejack is fermented and then distilled. It’s a lot stronger than cider, which is just fermented.
No, it’s cider that has been further processed by freeze-distilling. (‘Jacking’.)
Ninjad.
Fun fact, alcoholic cider was the booze of choice for much of US history (and rum). It wasn’t until about 150 years ago that beer started growing in popularity. It had to do with labor. Cider requires minimal labor as you plant the trees, collect the apples, then press the apples and let them ferment. Beer requires growing the grain. As mentioned upthread, Johnny Appleseed was about spreading alcoholic cider vs a nice fresh apple.
In Jewish ritual, there is no distinction between grape juice and wine. They are both “fruit of the vine”. And if you leave unfiltered, unpasteurized grape juice around long enough, it will ferment on its own.
I suspect the same of cider, etymologically.
Then, the US banned hard cider, and filtered pasteurized apple juice was popularized. I’ve never heard of what’s called “apple juice” in America fermenting on its own. I suppose if you add yeast it would, but you don’t remove an old bottle from the back of the fridge and notice it’s gone bubbly.
American cider still has its natural yeasts. It routinely ferments if you don’t drink it fast enough. It’s much closer to hard cider than “apple juice” is. In fact, I often drink it after it’s turned. It usually says it’s been pasteurized, but it must be just barely so. (And yeasts are tougher than a lot of other microorganisms.)
I mean, really the issue is that we have this fake beverage called “apple juice” that we need to distinguish from real apple juice. So we call the real stuff cider. Some years ago there was a scandal about apple juice imported from China that turned out to be mostly colored sugar water. And pretty much no one noticed. You couldn’t do something like that with sweet cider, because the stuff tastes strongly of apples. But I also think these sharp distinctions between the fresh and fermented product are somewhat recent inventions, following the age of pasteurization and refrigeration, and previously, everyone recognized there was a continuum.
This all started to change with the coming of the railroads, which made it easier for farmers to get their excess produce to market. Earlier, fruits and grains were fermented/distilled to reduce waste, and the United States was a nation of drunkards who got started around the age of five.
Mind you, they fared better than those who drank water and ended up with cholera.
Question answered so let’s veer off. Applejack Rose drink most commonly known as (but rarely ordered these days); Jack Rose.
Applejack + grenadine + lemon squeeze + dash of bitters + ice in a shaker = A Jack Rose. Shake and strain into a martini glass.
Applejack Sour basically.
I know! It’s what made America great!
I’ve ordered that at bars a few times. Most can’t make it because they don’t have applejack.
There is a non-alcoholic cherry cider; we’ve had it a couple different places.
We always had to be careful about our apple cider consumption. Too much, too fast, and it would clean you out. Too slow, and the plastic jug (typically 1 gallon, sometimes ½ gallon) would start bulging in the fridge. I would say that the cider we would buy from a farm would typically taste a bit different, as it started fermenting quite soon. Normally needs to be a few days old for optimum flavor.
The distinction between sweet cider and hard cider has certainly existed for my entire lifetime. And “sweet cider” has been around for well over 150 years, as attested by Charles Ingalls’ nickname for his daughter Laura.
Perry in general is quite rare around here, though I have run into it occasionally; I’m pretty sure I’ve run into it in both alcoholic and non-alcoholic versions.
In the US, the terminology is all over the place. The general distinction is that cider, on its own, is not an alcoholic drink, and that it is an unfiltered, brown apple juice, as opposed to apple juice, which is clear. But even that nomenclature is not consistent. I buy apple juice for my kids all the time and there are certain brands that label theirs as “cider,” and they are indistinguishable from the clear apple “juice” next to them.
I don’t see a clear line between the two either, but I think most people understand that cider tends to the unfiltered end of the spectrun, juice to the highly filtered end. But it doesn’t have any definite meaning. As far as I know there’s no regulation of these names.
Thanks to crazy timing, I’ve been drinking an unbelievable amount of hard apple cider the past month. Our neighbors work an apple orchard/farm/farm store. A friend who owns and operates a small brewery wanted to make a hard Apple cider to sell. They came to an agreement where the apple orchard supplied a couple hundred gallons of cider (juice) in barter for a percentage of the finished product.
Then COVID19 happened. The brewery will never sell all the hard cider they made, and our neighbors can’t believe the huge volume of hard cider they own. So, every few days I give our neighbors three or four empty growlers and they return my empties full the following day. We’ll get through it all eventually. 
IIRC the last time I toured an orchard (I work in a preschool, and this is a popular field trip), different types of apples are used to make cider and juice. Juice apples are very sugary, and not especially tart. There are usually a lot of red delicious in a batch of juice, as well as Gala and Roma, while cider uses Jonathan, McIntosh, and Golden Delicious.
Another distinction, is that traditionally, cider has been a way of using overripe and bruised apples that are not suitable for market, and if you buy cider from an orchard shop, that’s most certainly what you will get, and it has the most distinctive, least “juice-y” flavor of any cider you can get.
Apple juice, on the other hand, is very bland, and a drink intended for children. In fact, most juices intended for children, whatever they purport to be, are often mixed with apple juice, because it’s sweet, cheap, and therefore allows the label to say “100% juice,” even if the pomegranate juice is 20% pomegranate, and 80% apple-- but it’s actually more palatable to young children that way.
I know many adults who like non-alcoholic cider, but I don’t know any who voluntarily drink apple juice, unless they spend a lot of time with small children, and apple juice may be the only choice of drink.
Wow, what a mentsch you are. Hats off.