June 3: World Cider Day

It's World Cider Day. Here are 10 things you might not know about cider.

1. Nobody knows when or where cider was first made, just that it’s an ancient drink. It was certainly around in the 14^th century, when it’s said people would use it to baptise their children, because it was safer than the Water. The early pilgrims in the USA used to drink it, too, for the same reason.
2. It is, however, the UK where cider is most popular. Brits drink more cider per person than any other country and the UK has the largest cider producing companies in the world. It’s also popular in the Republic of Ireland. While cider production was once important in the US, with most farms having a cider mill, prohibition killed it off. Farmers destroyed their cider apple orchards and production fell by 76%.
3. An early Apple used to make cider was a “costard”. It was first mentioned in writing around the 12^th century. Shakespeare used the word as slang for the head or the Brain, and even named a clown character in Love’s Labour’s Lost after it. The word survived in the word “costermonger”, meaning an apple seller, which was in use as recently as the 1960s.
4. Until the 1800s it was perfectly normal and legal for workers on large estates to be paid part of their wages in cider. Hence a job at an estate which produced great cider would be highly sought after. The Truck Amendment Act of 1887 put paid to that.
5. Americans refer to the drink as “hard cider” while everywhere else, it is simply “cider”. Scrumpy is a cloudy, unfiltered cider associated with the west of England. It comes from “scrump”, a local dialect word for a small, withered apple. Perry is cider made from Pears; cyser is cider made from Honey and Plum jerkum is cider made from plums.
6. Cider is sometimes mixed with other drinks to make cocktails. Cider and Guinness is Black Velvet; cider and Lager is known as snakebite. A dash of blackcurrant cordial added to snakebite makes "snakebite & black", a "diesel", or a "purple nasty", a drink popular in Goth culture. Distilling cider makes Calvados or Applejack.
7. Newton Pippin, Kingston Black, Winter Banana. Northern Spy, Hangdown, Chibble's Wilding, Kentish Fill-Basket, and Glory of the West are all varieties of cider apple. Cider apples are not good to eat. It’s said eating one is like eating teabags.
8. Wassailing is an old English tradition to appease the deities of the apple trees and ensure a healthy crop of cider apples. A jug of cider or some Bread soaked in cider is placed on the largest tree in the orchard. People gather around it, chant and sing, and finish by banging on kettles or Drums and blowing horns to scare away evil spirits.
9. The chemical which causes the tart flavour of cider is malic acid; the astringent or bitter flavours are created by tannins.
10. It takes about 36 apples to produce one gallon of cider.

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