Hm. Strange. That makes me think of some of the things you see after your body has finished digesting the excellent golden apple products…
Oh dear, oh dear. I do feel pity on our dear Cousins in the Old Colonies. From an European point of view, this is a fairly clear matter. It looks like you need our guidence and wisdom again.
To us here in Denmark, ‘Apple Juice’ is crushed, squashed and bled-to-death apples, with anything but the liquid filtered away and sold to the fake-food industry. Very nice, but only useable for breakfast, or, for re-hydrating after a bad hangover (Hint: it tastes roughly the same both ways. Only Apricot juice is better.)
The stuff first reaches its true potential, after it has been fermented for a while, filtered, filled into bottles or cans, and has a name change to ‘Cider’. Along with the name change comes an alcohol percentage between 4.5% to about 10.5%.
Sold in six-packs or even crates holding 24 identical cider twins, this brings joy and entertainment to the teeming millions. If old Karl Marx had lived in a region with better apple cider, he’d never come up with ‘Religion is Opium for the masses’.
Personally i can vouch for the effects of this stuff, typing with my left hand, my right clamped solidly around a half-liter tin of… ehhh… there is a problem with the printing process… on the 5th or 6th tin, the printing always become strangely blurred… just like on my keyboard?
Never mind. Don’t waste time on this fruitless discussion. Grab the cans of 10% Cider. And take no prisoners!
Actually, I don’t believe Applejack is distilled in the regular sense that you boil off the alcohol and then recondence it. Someone who makes the stuff told me to make Applejack, you freeze the cider then poor off the remaining liquid which is almost pure alcohol.
Maybe he did it that way, so he didn’t have to have a still.
What is the difference between Apple Juice and Cider?
Martinelli’s apple juice and cider are the same; the only difference is the label. Both are 100% pure juice from U.S. grown fresh apples. We continue to offer the cider label since some consumers simply prefer the traditional name for apple juice.
You’ll also notice they sell “unfiltered” apple juice.
Martinelli is a California company, and I understand that Massachusetts does have regulations that differentiate between cider and juice, but USDA regulations almost require all juice (including cider) being sold commercially be pasteurized. You don’t have to use heat pasteurization, but almost all the big commercial operations do.
That may be how Martinelli’s chooses to market their juice, but if you walk into any grocery store in my state, buy a jug of fresh (pasteurized, unflitered) cider and a bottle of apple juice and taste them side by side, you will notice a difference in color, clarity and flavor. A marked difference. And if you drive out to the orchard down the highway and get a jug of the unpasteurized stuff, you will notice an even greater difference.
It already makes sense. We don’t get confused by the terms nits just that most of us don’t understand how the twomdifferent kinds of apple drinks are made. Your explanation of the difference isn’t accurate, either.
No need for concern. Magner’s and Strongbow and other brands of hard cider are available in many bars and packies in the US. The thing is, only kids drink it here and I believe in Europe it’s only for skinheads (another word for kids).
Lots of answers here on cider, but our friends in the US have not seen (or tasted) anything until they go to the true home of cider in the UK; Somerset! If you don’t know your cider down here you’re not allowed to say you’re from Somerset. There are so many beautiful variants brewed here, far too many to be listed. Surely those from the West Country are the experts here, should Cecil not have even mentioned the South West of the UK in his answer? (am I committing a faux pas here?!)
Cecil wrote his column in 1986, when his only readers were Americans; if he’d written it today he probably would have mentioned the Old World definition, so don’t feel bad.
Is the brown, cloudy, yummy stuff sold in the US only sold fresh in the year it’s produced? Does it have a sell-by date on it? I assume the answer to both of those questions is ‘yes’ otherwise how do you keep the cider from fermenting? Some traditional cider producers in the UK don’t add any yeast, it’s the naturally occurring yeast on the skins of the apples that does the work.
Good cider is not only sold in the year its produced, it’s sold that week. One of my kids goes to school in western NY. On a visit two weeks ago, we stopped at an old fashioned farmer’s market. He was selling jugs of cider with two different color tops. I asked him what the difference was, and he replied, “The yellow caps mean I made it last week, the blue means I made it yesterday.” My daughter said that when she drank the last of it, two days ago, it was already fermenting.
BTW, there was an “upscale” hard cider farm in the area. It had samplings and various types of hard cider, even brut. Nothing as cloyingly sweet as Strongbow.
While I understand why Cecil, writing in the eighties in an American newspaper, didn’t mention the international definitions of cider, I think it’s important enough to add an addendum to the column.
I doubt many US visitors would be stupid enough to not realise that any cider they order here, no matter how innocuous-looking or tasting, is alcoholic (sometimes very alcoholic), but I guess it could happen and the Straight Dope is supposed to be an authoritative resource to turn to. I have also seen a couple of writers mess it up and have their character order a cider in England because they didn’t want to drink alcohol. :smack:
Skinheads doesn’t mean kids. Where’d you pick that up from? It means people with a shaven head. These days it’s mostly used in a neutral way (note: mostly) but in the seventies and eighties it was a pejorative term associated with violent, often racist people. Not all skinheads then were violent or racist, but that was the connotation of the term.
Really strong white cider is generally drunk by kids and alcoholics but other ciders are drunk by anyone. It’s an extremely popular drink.
It is VERY cheap for the alcohol content; the last Labour govt wanted to reclassify cider to charge more tax on it, because most of the brands are so strong, but they got talked out of it.
Part of the problem here is that people are confusing legaldefinitions with dictionarydefinitions. American law concerning alcoholic beverage terminology is pathetic, largely due to Prohibition and the organisations which engendered it (the Anti-Saloon League was organised in 1826). That’s why it’s legal to call a mixture of alcohol, water, flavourings and CO2 “Champagne”· “Cider” is to apple juice as “wine” is to grape juice. It’s that simple.****
No, my friend, it’s not that simple. Aside from the fact that I’m not sure what your point is (how can terminology be “pathetic”?), the fact is there seems to be little agreement here on whether apple juice can be cider and vice versa. But I think we’ve nailed the cider/hard cider debate - like it or not, when you say the word “cider”, most Americans (and Canadians?) think of something sweet and non-alcoholic, family-friendly and vitamin-C loaded, while most Europeans (well, Britons anyway since the word is English - I guess they call it “cideur” or something in France) think pubs and football pitches and “puttin’-a boot in”. You may think one is more manly than the other, but there’s no universal definition that holds true for everyone, and that’s just how it is - it’s THAT simple.