Why Americans and Brits say 'cider' to mean very different things

This video is sponsored by Squarespace in most of the English-speaking world. This delicious, relatively low-alcohol soft drink made from apples is known as

cider

. Here in the United States we call it

cider

. It is also made from apples, but has no alcohol. and it's not carbonated, we also have carbonated drinks here in the United States. In fact, it's been the fastest growing segment of our alcohol market for over a decade, but we don't call it cider, we call it hard cider. we call cider and we call this apple juice and when it comes to food and drink this is one of the most divergent features of American English; no other anglophone anywhere else in the world distinguishes between these three products in the same way we do with the possible exception of a few Canadians confused under our dubious influence why do we call this hard cider what exactly is so difficult about it and what even is the difference between American apple cider and apple juice?

Friends, let's look for these answers together historically, even the apple has not done so. It always

mean

t apple, not in English, not in many Indo-European languages, the word we use today for apples was once a generic word for virtually any fruit, and in this sense, fruit is a generic word for any edible bulbous growth on a plant. that not only those that meet the strict botanical definition of fruit, all of this is to explain why the French still use their word apple to describe potatoes palm de terre apple of the earth, that's what they call potatoes in French and because they generally French is considered upper class within anglophone society, English speaking chefs often include mashed potatoes on their menu as mashed palm and I have always wondered why mashed palm describes mashed potatoes and not mashed potatoes. apple and now I know that in English anyway they used the word apple to describe any fruit as recently as the 17th century, this despite the fact that malus domestica here had been

very

popular in Britain since at least Roman times the ancestor wild apple is native to central Asia alma is the Kazakh word for apple, hence almaty appletown, but the Romans spread domesticated varieties throughout their empire, later Germanic settlers in England loved apples and then the French-speaking Normans They brought even more varieties to Britain after their conquest of 1066.

In fact, apples were known as palm in English well into the modern period. Apples and pears and apples loved Britain, the perfect climate there for the trees. and the British grew so-called dessert apples to eat like this, it is a dessert apple that is simply eaten and they also grew cider apples to make juice according to the Oxford English Dictionary here cider and its etymological ancestors are basically always have referred to some type of alcoholic beverage, going back to the Hebrew word shekhar Leviticus 10 8 and the Lord spoke to Aaron saying that do not drink wine or strong drink when you enter the tabernacle strong or intoxicating drink in Hebrew was shekhar Latin Christians translated it to sikara, which became cedar in Italian and sidra in Spanish or something like that in Old French and then the Normans brought it to England, where it became cider.

The first oed record of the term apple juice comes from early modern english. I can't find any middle term in English to describe the non-alcoholic product and maybe there is a reason why apple juice wants to become alcoholic, which is possibly its natural state. Where I grew up in central Pennsylvania, there was an orchard near us that was for sale. unfiltered apple juice squeezed from late apples, this is what we call cider in the United States unfiltered or cloudy apple juice and because what we got from that orchard was also unpasteurized, it had not been heated to the point of killing all the microorganisms here. my older brother Tony would just take these jars and put them in the closet in his room and let them ferment.

You didn't do anything to them, you just kept them there at room temperature in his closet and after a few weeks the lids would start to fall apart. he would bend over from all the CO2 pressure that was building up here and then he would drink it. It was probably a relatively low alcohol sparkling cider for the record kids. I don't recommend that there is also a lot of bacteria that could spread there, but apples anyway. They are naturally covered in yeast, if you take unwashed apples from the tree and mash them to make juice and don't boil them or do anything else to them for a couple of weeks, it will probably be a weak alcoholic beverage and historically people would have allowed that to happen to making this a safer drink, as we said, there are also potentially some bad bacteria on apples and alcohol can help control them.

The result is a nutritious and tasty drink that may be safer than the average farmer's local water supply and has an alcohol content low enough to give to children, which they did, all of which is to say that until

very

recently bit, cider has always been a word

mean

ing apple beer, technically I guess it's closer to wine than beer, although most

things

on the market are carbonated and maybe five to ten percent alcohol, like beer, so I think it is indeed closer to beer here at Maryville College, brewing chemistry professor Dr. Nathan Duncan is making his first hard cider as we Americans would call it. cider, has pasteurized apple juice, this is from crisp apples, not from concentrate.

I read online that this is a good way to make cider if you're making it for the first time, they heated it in the processing plant to kill any microorganisms including yeast so you have to add yeast back in so for this one I'm going to use a British brewer's yeast that I also read online that some people say makes really good, full ciders, so I don't know, it's just an experiment. and here it is, a few weeks later, this is just fermented apple juice, it's starting to clear up over time, the sediment down here is yeast, some of it is also just pulp because like I said, it's unfiltered apple juice, which again It is what Americans call cider unfiltered apple juice, although thanks to yeast it has now become what the rest of the English-speaking world would call cider.

Now it's running a little bit lower, it's like 1.008. You're talking about the sugar content. Dr. Duncan can reason inductively that sugar is now alcohol, so it's probably about five percent alcohol. Yes, he makes pet ants. He knows that's a very rough estimate. In fact, it is a very smooth cider. It doesn't have much. It doesn't have much flavor. I'm going to see if I can get it, it smells good, yes I think it needs a little more time, in fact it smells much better than it tastes. Alcoholic ciders are usually made from apples which are not very good to eat, they can be very harsh, very astringent due to their high tannin content, but those qualities give depth and body to the fermented cider and when the English settlers came here To the land they called New England, they found a climate very hospitable to orchards and planted both dessert apples and cider apples. a true story that when the pilgrims sailed to the new world they fastened a broken beam on the mayflower using an iron screw from their cider press, they knew what they planned to do with the alcoholic apple cider from their new orchards, which of course would have been redundant. term for them, alcoholic apple cider became a staple of the typical Anglo-American colonial farm.

Later, waves of German immigrants brought beer, which was their thing, but for English Americans, cider was where it was at, they gave it to their children and used it to make apple cider vinegar, which was an essential product for the food preservation and for cleaning, and turned it into much thicker drinks. Sure you can distill cider into brandy, but why bother during a frigid New England winter when you can leave the cider out if you really want to? If you want to freeze it, liquid nitrogen temperatures are needed to freeze ethanol, however, water freezes at zero degrees and the liquid that remains unfrozen will have a higher concentration of ethanol because ethanol does not freeze very well in water. the alcohol is called applejack and, boy, they loved that in New England and the parts of the Midwest where the New English resettled, but it was among those same people, the descendants of the English Puritans, where the temperance movement was more fervent and that movement eventually led to prohibition.

The period in the early 20th century when alcoholic beverages were banned throughout the United States, beer made it through prohibition and the industry emerged alive on the other side, perhaps it's because German immigrants didn't have the same puritanical juju English in their culture. I don't know, but for reasons that historians still argue about the hard cider industry did not survive prohibition, it was completely wiped out by it, it died on the other side of its ashes, although a new product emerged: sweet cider, unfermented apple juice. and then the industrialization of the American food system gave us another new product, highly filtered and refined cider, which came to be marketed as apple juice and so people called the equivalent cloudy cider to distinguish it, as I understand it, the British have both , no You have what you call clear apple juice and cloudy apple juice.

Here we call it apple juice and we just call it cider because when these products really came up in competition with each other, there really was no alcoholic cider on the market here. in the states, although I'm sure people with gardens still made it themselves at home and when we Americans inevitably remembered how great alcoholic cider is and started making it again on a commercial scale, then we started calling it difficult to distinguish cider. from sweet or soft cider, which by then we simply call cider, alcoholic beverages, of course, are hard and non-alcoholic beverages are soft according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

This is a unique feature of American English. They have examples of that hard and soft convention. Going back to the colonial period, I suppose it descends from an older feature of British English where they described strongly flavored drinks as hard. Alcohol itself has a strong flavor, so maybe that's why Americans started calling alcoholic drinks hard drinks, maybe because of the alcohol they were. produce was less refined, less fluid and there you have it, there's the pretty simple explanation for why we Americans call this cider and call it hard cider just because something is simple and straightforward doesn't mean it's not also valuable, right?

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That will turn the screw on your cider press and mine regucia to save 10. Thanks Squarespace and thanks Johnny. Appleseed, the mythohistorical figure who planted apples all over this continent where, of course, they are not native. Did he make it so that future generations could eat it or did he make it so that future generations could be stir-fried with brandy? That's a historical debate for another day.