Because “sweet,” non-alcoholic apple cider is very perishable, for thousands of years most apple cider was fermented into “hard” cider. Colonial New Englanders loved hard cider. New England even had a child’s version – “applekin.” Mid-19th century German immigrants to the United States, however, had a taste for beer. Fertile Midwest farm fields proved far more amenable to growing the grain needed for beer than stony New England, and hard cider’s fate was sealed when manufacturers realized beer was quicker to make than hard cider. As a result, hard cider more or less disappeared from the American table. It reappeared around in the beginning of the 21st century, when “craft cider” became part of the local food movement.
