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Dry cider

Cider, perry and meadObserved typical

Apple juice fermented out. Simple to make and hard to make well, because a cider has nowhere to hide and the apples decide almost everything.

The numbers

Each bar drawn against all 30 styles

Alcohol

5-8.5%

5% - 8.5%

Titratable acidity

4-7 g/L

4 - 7

pH

3.3-3.8

3.3 - 3.8

Residual sugar

0-5 g/L

0 - 5

Serve at

8-12 C

Worth opening after

3 months

and it keeps improving to roughly 2 years

Sulphite at pH 3.55

45 mg/L

free SO2, for 0.8 mg/L molecular

What goes wrong

Dessert apples only. Eating apples have sugar and acid but no tannin, and a cider without tannin is apple wine. Blend in bittersweet varieties or add tannin.

No legal definition sets these figures. They are typical published analyses of commercial examples, compiled as a planning aid.

Make it

A recipe on this site made to this style

Every figure below is computed from the ingredients and checked against the ranges above before the page is built.