We should point out that Apple cider is an alcoholic beverage with sparkle in UK/Ireland, but just cloudy apple juice in the US.
Down to prohibition. For a time you couldn’t legally sell alcohol so apple juice was sold under the name cider. Sometimes with handy instructions on how not to store it to avoid it fermenting into alcohol. Then, by the time restrictions were lifted, cider just meant apple juice as far as America was concerned.
(Allegedly)
Yep. Prohibition was also the reason for Americans to be so into fast cars.
Huh, how is that connected? I don’t remember that in high school history.
Ot can’t have been very strong. You need yeast really to make it formant, and I can’t imagine that that was present in the drink.
I used to have a mate that would do this sort of thing, but he also used to argue that if you let cheese go mouldy it’s blue cheese. So I never really used to taste his products.
Nah, US too.
Johnny Appleseed wasn’t planting edible apples, he was sowing seeds for a variety that tasted absolutely terrible, but was the best for alcoholic cider. What other country has a folk hero whose mission in life was making sure the next generation never ran out of alcoholic cider?
sowing seeds for a variety that tasted absolutely terrible
Is it even possible to predict the variety of apple tree grown from seed? I was under the impression that growing apples from seed was essentially a lottery, and all “good” apple varieties are propagated by cloning (cutting and grafting) an original plant that happened to produce tasty apples.
Not quite.
As I expanded on in an post higher up, here in Portugal cider is mainly sweetened apple juice with a little bit of alcohol: basically an alchopop.
It’s probably due to how the local taste in many things tends a lot toward the sweet side (even though coffee here is usually a tiny cup of expresso, it comes with 10g packets of sugar, and unsurprisingly 10% of the population has Type II diabetes) and no tradition at all of brewing cider.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in other countries without a tradition of brewing cider the thing also tends towards being some kind of alcoholic apple juice.
As a Frenchman from Normandie, and an uncle producing alcoholic cider, I was always very confused when ordering cider at restaurants. Hard cider is the booze one.
I envy you your access to real cider. About 10 years ago we could get it in Denmark, there would be a selection of ciders, next to craft beer in most supermarkets. Now the only cider you can get is the sweet 0.5% alcohol crap that the swedes make or carbonated vodka with fruit flavor.
I can’t even find a can of Strongbow anymore.
But, in this sense, she’s almost certainly referring to mulled cider, which is pretty much exclusively made with the hard stuff, with the some additional flavors and spices, and likely spiked as well.
My personal favorite recipe involves hard cider, cranberry juice, spices, and then spiked with rum.
It’s much more fall feeling and alcoholic than either cider alone.
The entire West Country is fuming at both the notion of cider being merely an autumn drink and also it being compared to pumpkin spice
Yeah, you’ll usually see that referred to as “hard cider” here. Though, it’s worth pointing out that even American hard ciders are sickeningly sweet. There’s a pub near me that has Strongbow, and I’ve become a big fan.
Strongbow is basically a piss in the UK. Sorry for you, guys, that you don’t have proper cider over there.
Yeah most of the popular brands you see are way too sweet. I do love me a nice dry/crisp hard ciderr though. My all time favorite is Woodchuck’s Granny Smith flavor.
I’ve also had a pear cider which was super light and crisp. I think it was Wyders on draft.
I lived in the UK for over a decade and really miss the proper British cider, made with the right kind of apple and without added crap.
Were I am now (Portugal) cider is basically an alchopop made of a little bit of fermented apple juice, plain apple juice, water and sugar - so sweet with a bit of alcohol - that that’s including all the international brands like Strongbow (which in their local version are the same crap alcoholic fruit juice as the rest).
Only good cider I can buy around here is french organic cider (the cider from the Asturias in Spain is also the proper stuff, but you can’t really find it here).
Yea, I was going to ask about this. I’d heard people mention cider on US TV and it didn’t seem like it was alcoholic, with kids drinking it etc. The non alcoholic version sounds shit tbh.
The kind that’s just heated apple juice is gross but if you throw unfiltered apple juice into a crock pot, toss in half an orange spiked with cloves, and a cinnamon stick or two it becomes delicious pretty quickly. You can always add a shot of rum if you need it to be alcoholic. The citrus really makes it. Pineapple juice is a great addition too.
Hmm. I’ll have to mull this one over.
Buy a juicer, put a whole-ass bag of apples through that fucker, plus a knob of ginger. Simmer that shit in a pot with a few cinnamon sticks and whole cloves.
You can thank me later.
Also if you do actually do this and its your first experience juicing: clean your juicer immediately! Im serious, clean that shit while the cider is simmering. If you let it sit out 'til the next day you WILL regret it.
Apple cider is seasonal because it relies on apple harvesting, but there is no reason to not have pumpkin spice any time of year except for artificial scarcity. The same with eggnog except people don’t like eggnog much to begin with.
Eggnog is delicious, but if I drank it year round I’d put on a hundred pounds
Actual eggnog is an affront in the fact of god, but the carton of custard flavored milkshake that Southern Comfort sells every year is pretty excellent. I’m led to believe you can even put booze in it.
Those, sir, are fighting words. Eggnog is one of the best parts of the season, and I am willing to die on this hill!
Man your holiday seasons must suck worse than an eye infection if you think eggnog is one of the best parts. Do you need rescue?
Take the nutmeg out of it, that’s what no one likes about it. That’s basically what custard is, and it’s fucking good.
It’s like a drinkable pudding.
What, boo. Nutmeg is great. My experience with people not liking eggnog is that they don’t like the stuff labeled eggnog you get at the supermarket.
The real stuff, made with egg yolks, with lots of booze, left to age a month or two, excellent.
Apple cider can keep for a long time as well. In fact in the 18th century Americans drank it all year round and favoured it over beer.
Asterisk: The beverage you’re talking about (cider) is effectively apple wine and can be stored and maintained in pretty much the exact way any other wine can.
When you hear most modern Americans say “apple cider” they mean unfiltered, unclarified fresh apple juice, which is sold fresh in the mid-fall, kept refrigerated because it isn’t shelf stable, and often served hot and spiced.
You can thank the temperance movement for the confusion.
This may just be me being a pedantic little bitch, but I hate when people call it “apple cider” Cider is made from apples, the apple is redundant!
Cider can be made from all kinds of good fruits (maybe things other than fruits can count as cider, I’m cideroligist)
The type of fruit that you use dictates what you’ve made. There’s no such thing as grape cider.
