Beer is made with malted barley, while cider is made with fermented apple juice. There are several beers that contain fruit and other ingredients, but the core is always malted barley. No real cider contains malted grains. We can't tell you how many times someone has asked us how to prepare cider.
It's a question that used to get on our nerves. Unlike beer, you don't need to heat anything to extract sugar from the raw material. You make cider by adding yeast to apple juice, whose sugars are fully fermentable. Because it's fermented fruit juice, cider is considered a wine for tax purposes, and the production process shares much more with wine than beer.
Although both beverages are made through a fermentation process, their flavors are very different. Cider, for example, is made from fermented apple juice, which gives it a sweeter flavor and a lighter color than beer. You could say it tastes like a combination of apple juice mixed with white wine. If you've been to a party lately, you've probably seen a lot more people than before strolling around with hard cider.
All of this is practically what you would expect so far: just as the growth of craft beer led macros to launch their own craft options, the growth of the cider industry is creating a market in which macros want to participate. Dry ciders allow yeast to feed on natural sugars to create a less sweet and higher alcohol content. Hard cider is a popular beverage and a refreshing alternative to the bitter and hoppy taste profiles of many types of beer. In most English-speaking countries, cider is synonymous with alcoholic apple fermented products and apple juice encapsulates all other varieties of non-alcoholic apple beverages.
Sugar is not used after fermentation to sweeten beer, whereas with cider it can be used before or after filtering to balance acidity or mouthfeel. Some congressmen are working to simplify this, but from now on, it's a difficult situation for cider producers to get around. Some may say that people who don't drink beer should start with ciders and get to beer. Dry ciders ferment more slowly than regular hard cider, which causes yeast to reduce the amount of sugar found in hard cider, so it contains much less sugar.
It's certainly possible that there hasn't been shady business here, but it's easy to see why cider makers and small breweries would raise an eyebrow. In addition, most cider bottles and cans can be stored upright or on their side without affecting their flavor. Beer and cider have a similar alcohol content, but in the United States cider can be both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. When it comes to sugar content, cider usually has 23 grams per serving, which is actually quite high for a drink.
Be careful not to allow the cider to freeze, as this will kill the yeast and alter the flavor of your drink. It allows breweries to produce cider, but not the other way around, and the only breweries it helps are those that are already quite large distributors.
