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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.
Bootleggers trying to go fast is what gave birth to NASCAR.
No way
How do you think bootleg whiskey got from a backwoods still in Porksister, West Virginia to a speakeasy on the North side of Chicago? Some good ol' boys loaded it up in a souped up Model A that looked outwardly like any other ordinary car, but was capable of outrunning the cops for hundreds of miles on end. Some of these bootleggers got so into building and driving these cars that they made their own sport of it: long distance, high speed endurance racing of ordinary factory built automobiles, or "stock cars." They even organized a league called the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing. NASCAR for short.
That's interesting! Thanks for sharing!
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.
Step 1 - Do not contaminate with yeast.
Also mouldy cheese is not blue cheese, your friend is a heathen. That said, blue cheese is mouldy but it's a specific type of mould that isn't harmful when eaten.
Not just in UK, but literally everywhere in the world. Apart from US.
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.
You are correct, and the "Apple-seed" is confusing. He didn't plant seeds, he started many plant nurseries, and propagated apple trees until the area was established, then moved onto another area. But to the layman, trees come from seeds, hence the name.
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.
The main point - it's alcoholic. Cider in the US is non alcoholic.
Yeah, it does indeed sound unusual that something called cider is just apple juice with no alcohol at all.
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.
Mulled cider/wine/Glogg/hot sake are pretty much the only reason I survive the cold months.
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
This further reinforces Bill Bailey's assertion that the West Country is full of Hobbits.
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.
Strongbow, the Budweiser of ciders 🤢
Yeah, Strongbow and Magners are intensely sweet, like the Kool aid of ciders.
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.
If you can find it, Austin Eastcider is good too!
Blackbird Cider Works in Buffalo, NY makes some good dry & semi-dry ciders. They're in grocery stores all over western New York, but not elsewhere (too small). There are others who make nice ciders elsewhere, but none of the big national chains do.
The cloudiness is what makes it AMERICAN, you Limey bastard!
French cider is also cloudy. And it contains alcohol.
Don't forget Basque cider from Spain!
The more Xs in the name, the better.
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.
And not, yet at least, a beverage from the company known as Apple Macintosh.
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).
Still, I'll neck Henry Westons Vintage throughout the entire Autumn if that's what we're doing now. Absolute tramp fuel, that stuff.
Alcoholic apple juice?? Why that makes about as much sense as alcoholic orange juice which... wait, is actually delicious HMM