The Current State of Cider

Let’s move beyond the other category comparisons, sub-level add ons and afterthoughts—cider deserves its own space and place.

WORDS Alexander Peartree

Cider can be many things. It can be a dry, earthy, naturally sparkling pour made from unheard of apples like Ashmead’s Kernel, Yarlington Mill and Redstreak. It can be a delightfully fruity carbonated drink made from familiar­ market finds. It can be a crisp, appley base perked up with flavors of berries, hops, spices or flowers. It can flow from tap lines and be guzzled by the pint at a local bar, sipped from cans while laying poolside, or poured by a sommelier with the same reverence as a bottle of grower Champagne at a trendy urban restaurant. Cider is truly a diverse, wide-reaching and versatile beverage category.

The latest data from NielsenIQ shows that cider revenue from retail sales was $536.5 million in 2022, which is down six percent when compared to 2020. However, this decrease is largely due to a shift in consumer focus within the category. Big cider brands—those that have historically saturated the market on a national scale—are on the decline, dropping about ten percent in sales, while consumer interest in local and regional cider brands has increased by nearly six percent. This is no small feat, as these craft producers account for just over half of the total cider sales.

What does this mean? More and more consumers are open to exploring the little guy. Within this subset of craft producers comes the true breadth of cider­ styles and a whole range of flavors, packaging types, marketing ploys and touch points. Yet does this diversity make it difficult for consumers to pinpoint what cider is? The short answer: Maybe—but it shouldn’t. Let’s get into it.

THE CORE PROBLEM

Making cider is quite straightforward. Mash up some apples, press out the juice and allow it to ferment, bottle it and then—boom—you have cider. Sure, there are a number of stylistic choices that can be made through apple selection, flavor additives, aging treatments, carbonation addition and so on, however at its core, the process is technically the same as wine­making—just swap in apples for grapes. So, in a sense, you can think of all ciders as a wine.

But let’s face it—despite cider’s fermentation link to wine, most consumers put the apple-based drink in the beer camp. But are they really to blame for this inaccurate framing? Of course not.

When cider hit the national stage in the early 2010s, the most common way to get your hands on the stuff was either in a six-pack of 12-ounce bottles or on draught from brands like Angry Orchard and Woodchuck. Alongside that was a seemingly endless barrage of media and brand marketing that billed cider as the gluten-free alternative to beer—essentially contextualizing cider as “the thing you drink if you can’t have beer.”

While the beverage market as a whole has changed over the past decade—­especially with the injection of hard seltzers and RTDs—and the cider­ market has certainly grown, general understanding of cider still lags behind.

“From my perspective, this is not a consumer problem, this is a retailer­ problem,” says Michelle McGrath, Executive Director of the American Cider Association.

Chain retailers like Total Wine & More, Binny’s, BevMo and Spec’s—which represent locales where many Americans get their alcohol—all list cider as a subcategory of beer and/or hard seltzer on their websites. A quick visit into the brick-and-mortar stores and you’re likely to see a similar treatment. With those four chain stores alone, that’s a total of 580-plus locations across the country that flat out perpetuate the miscategorization of cider—and thereby further the consumers’ misunderstanding of a beverage that most assuredly isn’t beer or hard seltzer.

Even the online ordering and delivery­ platform Drizly—a company that came to rise in 2012, right around the same time the cider category took off—has fallen prey to framing cider as a subcategory of beer, despite listing this contradictory and rather inane string of sentences on their website under the ‘All About Cider’ section: “Cider is not really a beer, but an alcoholic drink that results from the fermentation process of apple juice. Since this is exactly how cider is made, it falls in beer’s general scope.” Come on, Drizly. Do better.

McGrath notes that this lack of understanding is not a universal issue­ across all retailers and that many of “the smaller, independent stores get it.” Cider is not beer, cider is not hard seltzer. Cider is its own category and it deserves to be treated as such. 

TURNING THE CORNER

“So what” you may say. How does the miscategorization of cider affect how consumers enjoy it? Well, consumers may not enjoy cider if they don’t fully grasp that it’s a diverse, varied category of beverages. They’ll write it off after one or two not-so-positive experiences of “this is too sweet” or “I didn’t like that one cider I had” and cease to explore the category further.

“People think that cider is a specific flavor and they don’t view cider­ as a category of adult beverage,” says Paige Flori, co-owner of Boutique Wines, Spirits and Ciders in Fishkill, New York. “That is the most interesting stumbling point we have with the customers coming in that are not familiar with the category.”

Not giving cider the space to truly spread its wings on retail shelves or even in search categories on retailer websites is akin to narrowing the whole category of wine to Cabernet Sauvignon or the whole category of beer to IPA. It doesn’t give customers the correct context to understand that ciders can range from bone dry and tannic to crisp and fruity to luscious and sweet. They can be flavored with fruits, hops or any range of spices and flowers, marketed as rosé cider, pink lemonade-flavored or donut-flavored. They can be mass-market drinks made from apple concentrate sourced from who knows where or they can be a tiny production of a thoughtfully crafted drink made from apples that were grown, crushed and fermented all within 100 steps from the cidermaker’s own orchard—and of course there’s a whole gradient of brand size, quality and stylistic choices in between those points.

Ciders can showcase unique textural and flavor attributes of specific apples like the tannic bite of Kingston Black or the grapefruity zip of the Airlie Red Flesh. They can be from—or made in a style that emulates—the traditional cider regions of England, France, Spain and other European countries.

Perhaps the most confusing thing for customers is that cider doesn’t seem to have standard packaging. You can find ciders packaged in 750-milliliter cork-and-cage bottles like sparkling wine, six-packs of 12-ounce bottles or cans like beer—tall boys, kegs, growlers, the list could go on.

Maybe all that variety is too much for the consumer to take in and causes­ too much confusion? That’d be under­standable 10–15 years ago, but in this day in age, well-grasped categories like wine and beer come in a variety­ of packaging. Take wine alone: Consumers can find it in bottles, cans, boxes and kegs and are completely adept at drinking across all the packaging types. “Cider is a category with multiple subcategories and sub-subcategories here just like wine, just like beer, even like whiskey,” says Flori. “And getting people to understand that is definitely the biggest step for us.”

The American Cider Association knows that education is key to converting more drinkers to cider. In 2016, the organization launched the Certified Cider Professional (CCP) Program, which offers two levels of course study that cover the expansive world of how cider is made, the types of apples used, the many styles that exist, the regions that produce it, and how to serve and pair it—not unlike the many equivalent sommelier and cicerone courses available in the wine and beer worlds. Graduates of the second level become Certified Pommeliers.

While the program is open to all cider enthusiasts, McGrath notes that retailers are the real focus of the program since they are on the front lines of educating consumers. To date, there have been 2,297 participants in the CCP program. A graduate of the program, Flori became a Certified Pommelier in 2022, and three members of her staff have completed CCP Level 1.

The coursework has laid the foundation for Flori’s shop to become a cider mecca in the country. It boasts 350-plus bottles and cans of cider from all over the world, as well as 13 tap lines for selling cider by the growler—with a staff armed and ready to guide curious customers.

Drawing in More Drinkers

The benefit of cider’s diversity is that there are many entry points for consumers to start their discovery. If you’re a wine drinker who loves crisp, zippy white wines, then you should check out the range of Spanish ciders. If you’re into­ fruity yet slightly funky pét-nat, seek out deliciously savory bottle-­fermented ciders from the Finger Lakes in New York. If fruity, hoppy IPAs are your jam, then the bevvy of hop-flavored canned ciders from makers across the U.S. will certainly draw you in.

And the data shows that enjoying across categories is becoming common practice for consumers. According to a survey conducted in 2022 by Bump Williams Consulting, of the 300 cider consumers polled, 90 percent indicated they had also consumed hard seltzer within the past year. Wine was a close second, with 85 percent of cider consumers indicating they had consumed wine within the past year.

Some cidermakers, like Alejandro de Peral of Nine Pin Cider Works in Albany, New York, are capitalizing on this shared interest with hard seltzer, and are even one-upping big bev companies by providing low-calorie options that don’t sacrifice on flavor thanks to the naturally fruity base of cider.

“Light Cider was a product that we developed to match our own internal­ desire to have a lower alcohol cider option­ but still produced from New York agricultural products,” says de Peral. “Our Light Cider line utilizes apples and other ingredients that we source directly from New York farms and it provides a low-alcohol and low-calorie option with a local New York farm twist.”

Best of all, unlike hard seltzer, these ciders have a strong agricultural tie that might appeal to a more local-conscious shopper, all while providing the same fruity, fun and utterly crushable vibe as hard seltzer.

This wide crossover appeal is primed to reach drinkers who are looking for something new.

“A 21-year-old today is not drinking the same way a 21-year-old was drinking 20 years ago,” says Beth Demmon, author of The Beer Lover’s Guide to Cider (Mango Publishing, 2023). “And the core craft-beer consumer is starting to hit their forties, and they’re not drinking beer the same way they used to. Maybe they’re a little more aware of the gluten they are putting in their body or not being able to drink a six-pack every weekend or night.”

While the first line in the intro­duction of her book states “Cider is not beer,” Demmon notes that “it really­ seemed the time was right to talk about moving beyond the typical­ craft-beer mindset,” especially as the general drinking population turns more omnibibulous­—the latest term to describe­ cross-category drinkers.

To draw beer drinkers over to the cider world, Demmon lays out general cider categories, such as Introductory Ciders, Hoppy Ciders and Wild, Tart & Sour Ciders, and matches them to beer styles like Pilsners, Pale Ales, IPAs and Lambics, culminating with the chapter “Ciders for the Cider Lover.”

“These have no bridge to anything else but cider,” she says. “So now that you’re here—great. You can continue your journey of cider discovery and stop thinking about it using a beer framework—because that’s the ultimate goal. But everyone has to start somewhere.”

Getting new people interested in cider is the ultimate goal, and the best way to do that is by simply pouring them a taste. With a bit of guidance and understanding of what types of flavors or styles they’re looking for, once the liquid touches their lips, a cider lover is born.