Wassail!! Cider, Cyder, Scrumpy and Perry Demystified

Drive down a Kent country lane and you can smell it in the air. There are food festivals happening all over the place and apples are everywhere, in boxes and baskets by the side of the road and lying on the grass under trees in orchards. They’re talking about it on The Archers (catastrophe! Joe Grundy’s vintage oak screw press has suffered a potentially fatal split in the thread!). You’ve got a sudden hankering for cider and nothing else will do, but it’s got to be the proper stuff.
And therein lies the rub. Will that be real cider? Craft cider? Hand-pressed? Artisan? Still or sparkling? Cider or cyder? Cidre? Scrumpy? Farmhouse? East County or West Country? Then there’s perry, pear cider… it seems we have as many terms for cider as Inuits have for snow. The reason behind the confusion lies in its history and origins.

Cider as wages
Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs have rules on what constitutes cider, in order to determine how much duty is payable on it. From the mid-sixteenth century until the early twentieth-century farm labourers were paid partly in cider. This practice goes as far back as the thirteenth century, and came about as part of the feudal system when farm labourers were classed as ‘villeins’ — unpaid tenants — and it was their Lord and Master’s duty to ensure they had enough food and drink. The rules changed under Elizabeth 1st when agricultural wages began to be more regulated, but the provision of food and drink were still part of the deal.
Back when all but the freshest spring water was considered unsafe, people drank weak ale or cider to stay hydrated, however grain was a valuable commodity. Apples on the other hand were free and relatively easy to grow — they basically get on with the job themselves — so it was cheaper to make cider. Most farms had orchards for that very purpose. Before pasteurisation the only way to keep apple juice was to ferment it into cider, but this was a staple foodstuff and not a saleable commodity, therefore duty was not payable.
Nowadays farm staff are paid an hourly rate, set by the Agricultural Wages Board, and have the same tax and national insurance obligations as everyone else. It is, however, still legal to produce up to seven thousand litres of cider each year without incurring duty, but this is more about preserving the heritage of small-scale cidermaking, rather than encouraging duty-free imbibing.

Q. When is a cider not a cider? A, When it is a ‘made-wine’.
Cider is really just wine made from apples and/or pears, but wine made from any other fruit cannot be classed for duty purposes as cider, even though it is widely labelled as such. For example, we used to produce ‘cherry cider’ in our cidermaking business, but this wasn’t cider made from cherries, it was apple cider flavoured with fresh cherry juice which had to be consumed quickly before the cherry juice in it kicked off the fermentation process off again. HMRC defines cider as being fermented using only apples and/or pears, but they don’t mind something being labelled ‘cider’ as long as the right rate of alcohol duty is being paid on it.
‘Cyder’ is just an old spelling, but there are those who are trying to resurrect the term as a way to differentiate that made by artisans, or ‘craft cider makers’ (so those producing small quantities by hand using 100% fruit, manual labour and small-scale machinery) from the mass-produced drink produced by the likes of Bulmers, Magners et al.
‘Real’ cider can be made in larger quantities but has to be from 100% juice and not imported, reconstituted concentrate. Some of the bigger brand ciders contain only 20% apple (or pear) juice, the rest is carbonated water, sugar, citric acid and flavourings.
Cidre: the Norman word for cider, made the same way but in its true form it is sweeter and less alcoholic than the English version.
Still or sparkling? Real cider, once fully fermented, is no longer ‘active’ and is still. However it can be bottled before it’s completely finished fermenting and which produces a natural fizz, or, like champagne, have further yeast and sugar added to produce in-bottle fermentation. Mass-produced ciders are simply carbonated, for stability and storage purposes.

And perry?
Cider made from mostly pears (at least 75%) has to be defined as pear cider or perry. Purists maintain to be called perry it must be produced using only perry pears, an ancient form of the fruit produced by large, very slow-growing trees. For those reasons not many perry trees are still around. Perry pears are hard and bitter to taste but produce a light, floral-tasting dry wine, where pear cider is made using eating pears. However — purists look away now — the definitions have become blurred and it’s quite normal for pear cider to be called perry and vice versa.

West Country or Eastern Counties?
The purists get wound up about this too. Some say true cider must be made from cider apples. These differ from eating and cooking apples in that they are smaller, more bitter and higher in tannins than dessert fruit and only grown for cider. Cider varieties are mostly grown in the West Country, whereas in the drier, sunnier eastern counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey and East Anglia we mostly grow dessert and cooking apples. Hence a traditional east counties-style cider is made from these varieties. Despite using sweeter apples, East Counties cider will be drier but more alcoholic than a west country one, because more sugar equals more alcohol. A sweet Kentish cider will either have had its fermentation cut short by the addition of chemicals, had artificial sweeteners added, or will have had extra sugar added after fermentation and then been pasteurised to stop further fermentation.
Scrumpy?
Scrumpy is just an old term for cider made from ‘scrumped’ apples, windfalls gathered from under trees, and had more bruising and bits of other micro-organisms stuck to them. It’s perfectly OK to use bruised and pitted fruit (as long as it’s not mouldy) to make cider. This more ‘earthy’ fruit has more yeasts on the skin making the sugars in the fruit turn more quickly to alcohol — the more sugar the stronger the brew. It tended to be sold direct from the farm gate, was often still fermenting therefore had active yeast in it, so got a reputation for being extra strong and …er… producing unpleasant side effects.
These days cider labelled as ‘scrumpy’ is very safe. It never was that ‘unsafe’ to be honest, and probably did more for gut health than anything labelled probiotic nowadays. It is more likely to be labelled ‘farmhouse’, made from cider varieties and probably not filtered too many times, hence ‘cloudy’ scrumpy.
So now you know !! Time to check the web for a local cider festival and give them all a try. Cheers!
