(We Love Cider) A Bushel and A Peck
Let’s talk about apples. How do you like dem? In mid-July? Baked in Pie? Or maybe you’re more of a cider-type guy (or gal) - regardless of your baking skills or rhyming abilities, there are few things more ‘seasonally appropriate’ than a pint of cider in October in New England.
Long before Sunday afternoon brewery visits with your dogs and the Napa Valley Wine Train, there were coonskin caps and Johnny Appleseed (and before that Greeks, Romans, and Gauls - but let’s not go there, guys and dolls.) Cider was a most common and accessible drink in colonial America due to the ease of planting apple trees versus the barley needed for beer production.
Apples are basically as old as dirt and have a mind-boggling amount of variation throughout time (see: heterozygosity). The kinds of apples best utilized for keeping the doctor away are different from the kinds with which you would want to make applesauce and certainly different from those used to produce a delicious hard cider. We have our stubborn, religious folk hero Johnny to thank for not believing in grafting rootstock from mature European apple trees and instead planting seeds all over the frontier to grow new apple trees that bore fruit far better for cider than presenting to your first grade teacher (unless maayybe you didn’t like that teacher).
With all this genetic variation in apples, it tracks that the types used for cider and where they are grown will impart a variety of different characteristics into finished product. This is a great jumping on point for hop heads who love comparing alpha-acids levels between hop varietals and wine aficionados who prefer their merlot grown in clay rather than gravel - but what about those who just want to dip their toes into the cider still? Let’s move the discussion to (relative) sweetness.
Sweetness in cider is a tricky topic. Apples don’t naturally contain much sugar (far less than grapes, if you can believe it) but our ‘collective palate’ has been conditioned towards thinking of cider as the sugar-added, artificially carbonated, gluten-free alternative to beer (especially after all those cider-specific apple trees were destroyed during prohibition). The officially recognized scale (by the American Cider Association, anyway) breaks the categories down into dry, semi-dry, semi-sweet, and sweet, but this stratification is based solely on residual sugar and does not take into account acid and tannin. This unfortunately can cause some misunderstanding when comparing back-labels of different ciders on the shelf.
Sidebar:
Here’s one streamlined iteration of the dryness scale with round, easy to remember numbers:
Dry 1% or less residual sugar
Semi-Dry 1.1 - 2% RS
Semi-Sweet 2.1 - 3% RS
Sweet 3% or more RS
Many drinks enthusiasts turned off by cloying ciders they’ve had in the past may be inclined to reach for the most clearly marked ‘bone-dry’ option they see. This, however, will not always get you where you want to go if you are still looking for a dry option that still tastes like a bushel and a peck of apples - remember, ‘dry’ is referring to residual sugar, and apples (especially cider varietals) don’t contain much sugar to begin with. A more acidic cider may taste drier than its RS suggests and likewise a dry but tannic and fruity cider may taste sweeter than its RS may convey.
Sidebar: One categorization of cider apples by tannin and acidity is the British system. I find these terms to also be helpful in understanding what kind of cider you are buying:
Bittersweet - high tannin, low acid
Bittersharp - high tannin, high acid
Sharp - low tannin, high acid
Sweet - low tannin, low acid (notice we’re not talking about sugar here!)
There may be inherent confusion in how we talk about cider until we codify a uniform lexicon, but I propose - and it may seem strange - an embrace and exploration of the semi-dry and semi-sweet styles you see on the shelf and figure out where your tastes lie for yourself. From there you can branch out to traditional styles from the Basque and Normandy regions of Spain and France that are more driven by yeast and terroir, but as a country with a lost cider heritage, there is plenty of ground to cover and regain close to home.