This video is sponsored by Squarespace. In most of the English-speaking world, this delightful,
relatively low-alcohol fizzy drink made from apples is known as cider. Here in the United
States we call this cider. This is also made from apples but it has no alcohol at all and
it is not fizzy. We have the fizzy boozy stuff here in the United States too. In fact, it's
actually been the fastest growing segment of our alcohol market now for over a decade,
but we do not call it cider. Instead we call it hard cider. This we call cider. And this
we call apple juice. And when it comes to food and drink, this is one of the most divergent
features of United Statesian English. No other anglophones anywhere else in the world distinguish
between these three products in the same way that we do, with the possible exception of
a few confused Canadians under our dubious influence.
Why do we call this hard cider? What exactly is hard about it? And what is even the difference
between American apple cider and apple juice? Come, friends — let us seek these answers
together. Historically, even apple hasn't always meant apple — not in English, not
in lots of Indo-European languages. The word we use for apples today was once a generic
word for pretty much any fruit. And in this sense, fruit is a generic word for any edible
bulbous growth on a plant, not just the ones that meet the strict botanical definition
of fruit. All of this is to explain why the French still use their word for apple to describe
potatoes — pomme de terre, apple of the earth. That's what they call potatoes in French.
And because French is generally regarded as high class within anglophone society, English-speaking
chefs will often list mashed potatoes on their menu as pomme puree.
And I've always wondered why pomme puree describes mashed potatoes and not apple sauce. And now
I know. Anyway, in English they used the word apple to describe any fruit as recently as
the 17th century. This is despite the fact that Malus domestica here had been very popular
in Britain since at least Roman times. The wild ancestor of the apple is native to central
Asia. Alma is the Kazakh word for apple, hence Almaty — apple town. But the Romans spread
domesticated varieties all over their empire. Subsequent Germanic settlers in England loved
apples. And then the French-speaking Normans brought even more varieties to Britain following
their conquest of 1066. Indeed, apples were referred to as pome in English well into the
modern period — apples and pears. And apples loved Britain — perfect climate there for
the trees.
And the Brits grew so-called dessert apples for eating like this, it's a dessert apple
— one you just eat. And they also grew cider apples for juicing. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary here, cider and its etymological ancestors have basically always referred to
some kind of alcoholic beverage going back to the Hebrew word shekar. Leviticus 10:8,
"And the Lord spake unto Aaron saying, 'Do not drink wine nor strong drink [when you
go into the tabernacle.]'" Strong drink or intoxicant in Hebrew was shekar. Latin Christians
translated that to sicera which became sidro in Italian and sidra in Spanish and cidre
or something in old French. And then the Normans brought that to England where it became cider.
The OED's first record of the term apple juice is from early modern English. I can't find
any Middle English term to describe the non-alcoholic product.
And maybe there's a reason for that — apple juice wants to become alcoholic. That is arguably
its natural state. Where I grew up in central Pennsylvania, there was an orchard down the
way from us that sold unfiltered apple juice pressed from late season apples. This is what
we call cider in the United States. Unfiltered or cloudy apple juice. And because the stuff
we got from that orchard was also unpasteurized — it had not been heated to the point of
killing all the microorganisms in here — my older brother, Tony, would just take these
jugs and he'd put them into his bedroom closet and let them ferment. You did nothing to them
— just held them there at room temperature in his closet. And after a few weeks, the
tops would start to kind of buckle from all of the CO2 pressure building up in here, and
then he would drink it. It was probably a relatively low-alcohol sparkly cider.
For the record, kids, I don't recommend that. There's also a lot of bacteria that could
propagate in there. But anyway, apples are naturally covered in yeast. If you take unwashed
apples off the tree and you smash them into juice and don't boil it or do anything else
to it, within a couple of weeks it'll probably be a weak alcoholic beverage. And historically
people would've allowed that to happen to make this a safer drink. Like we said, there's
also potentially some bad bacteria on the apples and the alcohol can help control those.
The result is a nutritious, tasty drink that may be safer than the average peasant's local
water supply, and that has a low enough alcohol content that you can give it to children,
which they did.
All this is to say is that, until very recently, cider has always been a word that meant apple
beer. Well technically I guess it's closer to wine than it is to beer. Though most stuff
on the market is carbonated and maybe 5% to 10% alcohol like beer, so I think in effect
it's closer to beer. Over here at Maryville College, the beer brewing chemistry professor
Dr. Nathan Duncan is making his first hard cider, as we Americans would call it — hard
cider. He's got pasteurized apple juice there.
"This is from honey 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 at the processing plant to kill any microorganisms including the yeast,
so he's got to add yeast back in.
"So for this one, I am going to use a British ale yeast that I also read online that some
people say makes really good ciders that are well rounded. 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 clarify over time. The sediment
down here, that's yeast, some of it. It's also — some of it is just pulp because,
like I said, it's unfiltered apple juice."
Which again is what we Americans call cider — unfiltered apple juice. Though thanks
to the yeast, this has now become what the rest of the anglophone world would call cider.
"Now, with this, it's running a little bit below — it's like 1.008."
He's talking about the sugar content. Dr. Duncan can inductively reason that sugar is
now alcohol, and so this is probably about 5% alcohol. Yes, brewing pendants, he knows
that's a very rough estimate.
"It is in fact a very bland cider. It doesn't have a lot of flavor to it. I'm going to see
if I can get this..."
"It smells great."
"It does, yeah. I think it needs a little more time."
Indeed. It smells way better than it tastes. Alcoholic ciders are generally made with apples
that are not very good for eating. They may be very harsh, very astringent from their
high tannin content, but those qualities give depth and body to the fermented cider. And
when English colonists arrived here in the land they called New England, they found a
climate very hospitable to orchards, and they planted both dessert apples and cider apples.
It's a true story that when the Pilgrims sailed to the "New World," they braced a broken beam
on the Mayflower using an iron screw from their cider press. They knew what they planned
to do with their new orchards. Alcoholic apple cider — which of course would have been
a redundant term to them — alcoholic apple cider became a staple of the typical Anglo-American
colonial homestead.
Later waves of German immigrants — they brought beer. That was their thing. But for
the English Americans, cider was where it was at. They gave it to their kids, they used
it to make apple cider vinegar, which was an essential product for food preservation
and for cleaning. And they converted it into much stiffer drinks. Sure, you can distill
cider into brandy, but why bother during a frigid New England winter when you can just
leave your cider outside?
"If you really want to freeze it, it takes liquid-nitrogen temperatures to freeze ethanol.
However the water freezes at zero degrees. And the liquid that remains unfrozen is going
to have a higher concentration of ethanol, because the ethanol doesn't freeze very well
in the water ice."
The resulting high-alcohol hooch is called applejack, and boy did they love that in New
England and the parts of the Midwest where New Englanders resettled. But it was among
those same people, those descendants of English Puritans, where the Temperance Movement was
most fervent. And that movement eventually led to Prohibition — the period in the early
20th century when alcoholic beverages were banned all across these United States. Beer
managed to stumble through prohibition and the industry emerged alive on the other side.
Maybe it's because the German immigrants didn't have the same English puritanical juju in
their culture. I don't know. But for reasons that historians still really, really argue
about, the hard cider industry did not survive prohibition. It was completely wiped out by
it. It was dead on the other side.
From its ashes, though, came a new product — sweet cider. Unfermented apple juice.
And then the industrialization of America's 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 cloudy equivalent cider to distinguish it. As I understand it, you Brits have both
of these, don't you? You've got what you call clear apple juice and cloudy apple juice.
Here we call this apple juice and we just call this cider, because by the time these
products really emerged in competition with each other, there really was no alcoholic
cider on the market here in the United States. Though I'm sure that people with orchards
still made it themselves at home. And when we Americas inevitably remembered how great
alcoholic cider is and we started making it again at a commercial scale, then we started
calling it hard cider to distinguish it from sweet or soft cider which we by then were
just calling 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/soft convention going back to the colonial period. I would
guess it's descended from an older feature of British English where they described harsh-tasting
drinks as being hard. Alcohol itself has a harsh taste, so maybe that's why Americans
started calling boozy drinks "hard" drinks, maybe because the alcohol they were producing
was less refined, less smooth.
And there you go. There's the pretty straightforward explanation as to why we Americans call this
cider, and we call this hard cider. Just because something is simple and straightforward doesn't
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you, Squarespace. And thank you, Johnny Appleseed — the mytho-historical figure who planted
apples all across this continent where, of course, they are not native. Did he do that
so that future generations could eat, or did he do it so that future generations could
get sauced on applejack? That is a historical debate for another day.