Author: Siddhi Lama / Source: Atlas Obscura
25 years ago, Barry Topp, owner of the New Forest Cider Company, drove trucks filled with apple cider to sell at festivals all over the United Kingdom. There’s one festival in particular he reminisces about with great fondness: at the Royal Air Force Lakenheath base, which hosts American military personnel.
Everyone was excited to see him arrive with his truck full of cider. “You weren’t meant to take alcohol onto the army bases,” Todd says, but the American airmen told Topp to sneak it through simply by calling the contents of his truck “apple cider.” This made Topp realize: “In America, apple cider is like our apple juice!” Using the linguistic confusion to dodge detection, Topp and his truck full of boozy British apple cider made their way into the base, much to the delight of all.These days, the public is no longer allowed on military bases for security reasons. However, the confusion between American and British apple cider has continued. In fact, if you were to try the same trick today, chances are you’d get away with it. Today, the United Kingdom and United States are the biggest producers of cider in the world. Yet, at some point in the last few hundred years, the words “apple cider” have evolved to mean different things in these two nations.
In the American state of New Hampshire, the state beverage of apple cider is like unfiltered apple juice. Usually, mulled spices are added, turning it into a spiced, piping hot drink. But in the famed cider-growing region of Britain’s West Country, cider is a fermented, alcoholic beverage. Look further across Europe and you’ll find that America’s version of apple cider is the outlier—cidre in France and sidra in Spain are both akin to British hard cider, rather than the American mulled beverage. So, how did Americans end up with such a unique form of apple cider?
People have been making cider for thousands of years. Wild apples, Malus sylvestris, grew naturally in the ancient British Isles. The Romans encouraged apple cultivation for cider, and when Christian monks established monasteries, they also made the beverage. When European settlers traveled to North America, they took cider with them.
In the American colonial era, there was only one form of apple cider: cyder. This type of beverage, a fermented product usually between 4-6% ABV, was brought onto the continent by colonists in the 17th century. Unlike barley and grapes, apples grew in New England with ease. New England residents in the 18th century consumed cider generously: an estimated 15 to 54 gallons per year.
Cyder was the most commonly produced drink in colonial America—the beverage of choice for most Americans at a time when imbibing water was questionable. Not only was it easy to obtain and affordable to produce, but the fermentation process guaranteed it would be free from disease-causing pathogens, writes Amy Stewart in The Drunken Botanist. Even as Puritans…
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