In the United States, the definition of cider is broader than in Europe. There are two types: one is the traditional fermented product, called hard cider, and the second is sweet or soft cider. However, in some regions, cider is the alcoholic version, whether made from apples or pears, and apple cider is the non-alcoholic version.
Hard cider
The history of cider in the United States is very closely tied to the history of apple growing in the country. Most of the 17th- and 18th-century emigrants to America from the British Isles drank hard cider and its variants. Apples were one of the earliest known crops in the English-speaking New World; ships' manifests show young saplings being planted in barrels and many farmers bringing bags of seed with them, with the first settlers headed to what is now the Southeast. Within thirty-five years of the settlement of Jamestown in 1607, the land was put to plow to grow tobacco, which provided a source of revenue for the colonists and made British settlement a success in the New World after several failed attempts. However, other edible cash crops, like rice, maize, and apples, were grown as they had value in the markets of growing cities like London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Cardiff.
Nine days after the Puritans landed, a man by the name of William Blackstone planted the first apple trees in the New England colonies. The first recorded shipment of honeybees to America, important for the pollination of apples, is recorded in 1622 in Virginia. In New England, John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1632, recorded his tenants paying their rent on Governor's Island in two bushels of apples a year. In 1634 Lord Baltimore instructed settlers of the new colony of Maryland to carry across the sea "kernels of pears and apples, especially of Pipins, Pearemains, and Deesons for making thereafter of Cider and Perry."
There are records of at least one English apple cultivar used for cider and cooking, Catshead, being grown on Berkeley Hundred Plantation in Virginia around this time; later introductions from the UK would have included Foxwhelp, Redstreak, and the extinct Costard. Other records from the Tidewater South show wealthier farmers and plantation owners arranging for the import of French apple varieties, such as Calville Blanc, Pomme d'Api, and Court Pendu Plat, likely in part due to qualities they wanted to improve in the stock available and the difficulty there was in keeping early breed-stock alive. They faced an uphill battle in cultivating many crops, however, because the honeybee is not a native insect to America and knowledge of the husbandry of orchard mason bees would remain limited until three centuries later. In Europe, honeybees were and still are the main means of pollination for apples, cherries, and pears, and thus some of the earliest pleas for new supplies sent home to Britain by Jamestown colonists were for beehives. Only about 20% of apple trees produced from apple seeds will grow a fruit comparable to the parent plant, while about 60% will be passable for consumption and the remaining 20% will be "crab apples", unfit for most human tastes. The records of all the thirteen colonies indicate that the favored method of propagation from 1607 to 1737 was not grafting since this method was expensive and the reserve of the wealthy using crabapple rootstock.
Diseases, pests, and temperature all presented challenges to growing in Eastern America. Tent caterpillars are parasites to Southern crab apple trees, black cherry trees, chokecherries, beach plums, and the sweet crabapple - members of the family Rosaceae, native to the Eastern United States. They made no distinction between these and the European derived young apple, cherry, quince, plum, and pear trees of the colonists, which had evolved no defense mechanism against moth larvae that would destroy the tree by eating the leaves. Fungi like cedar-apple rust destroyed trees' abilities to produce fruit, as it infects their buds and makes them sterile. In the case of the British or French derived apples, it proved disastrous since, unlike native Malus species, it had no immunity and would eventually die.
In 17th century Britain, orchards had been kept in a relatively open area for generations as most of the forest had been already cleared. But in America, leaving the trees without a surrounding fence in the open resulted in attracting nearby populations of black bears, woodchucks, skunks, raccoons, elk, and deer looking for food. The need for apple cultivars which would have a much higher yield of apples at harvest time proved to be paramount so that the entire crop would not be lost to animals, something that is still practiced today but began in colonial times. The climate of the American Southeast also had more extremes, where temperatures would easily exceed 26 °C in summer but fall below 3 °C in winter. Most of the cider, cooking, and dessert apples brought from the oceanic climate of Northwest Europe were not bred for high heat and humidity or late season frosts. Later, in the North, settlers from the British Isles had to adapt many of their husbandry practices as well because winter temperatures were cold with long snowy winters, and the first frost came much earlier. In the South, despite the longer growing season, it was difficult to get apples and pears to live long enough to bear fruit, let alone make cider or perry, and whatever cider they did produce was likely sour and of poor quality.
The earliest known successful orchard in America began in Massachusetts Bay Colony near what is today modern Boston. New England was successful in producing the first viable apples, evidenced by the fact that the oldest known and named apple varieties come from Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth Colony, and Providence Plantation. This includes Roxbury Russet in 1634, High Top Sweet by 1630, and Rhode Island Greening in 1650 - all of which still survive and are still used for cider making and baking of pies. John Endicott, another New Englander, began one of the first known nurseries for apples and pears, and in 1648 he is recorded as selling 500 young trees to a William Trask, for which he received 250 acres of land. Approximately 20 years earlier it is believed that he planted a garden full of fruits selected for alcohol production, near what is present day Salem, Massachusetts of which one pear tree still survives. Later, as his trees matured, he began to sell them to new settlers and their bounty of cider and perry to local taverns, beginning one of the earliest examples of large scale propagation in the New World of apples and cider. By the 1660s regulations on the consumption and distribution of alcohol were being put into place, and court records show fines were being levied for drunkenness on hard cider in Massachusetts Bay Colony, in Maryland, and Virginia, among other places. In 1676, Nicholas Spencer, secretary of the Virginia House of Burgesses, speculated on the cause of the riots of the past two years, "All plantations flowing with syder, soe unripe drank by our licentious inhabitants, that they allow no time for its fermentation but in their brains."
In 1682, Governor Carteret of New Jersey wrote, "At Newark is made great quantities of syder, exceeding any that we have in New England, Rhode Island, or Long Island". A thousand hogsheads (238,481 liters) were filled that year in Newark. Around this time it became a trend to breed versatile apples that would go well with a joint of pork, could be peeled and baked in a pie or rendered into apple butter, but also had enough juice to ferment into alcohol and could be pressed into cider come autumn harvest. Unbeknownst to the British settlers of central colonies and Appalachia, it is likely some of the cultivars brought by Germans and Swedes introduced genetics that were much hardier to cold weather than the stock they possessed. The crossbreeding of these on other settler's lands via pollination introduced genetics that were very valuable to climates like Southern Appalachia. Ultimately the result of the mixed heritage of the Americas was a motley foundation stock from all over Northern Europe, resulting in seedlings and breeds of mixed provenance, such as the Harrison Cider Apple, Rambo, Black Gilliflower, Newtown Pippin, Green Cheese, and Baldwin. Many of these older apples are still used in cookery and in cider making even in the present day.
By the 18th century, apple cider was a staple at every family table; at harvest many apples were pressed into cider, the remainder placed carefully into barrels to store through winter for eating or replenishing supply. Pehr Kalm, a Swedish naturalist, noted in his travels in 1749 that nearly every home on Staten Island had a small orchard attached and in the colonial capital, Albany, apples were being pressed for cider to be exported south to New York City. Settlement along the frontier often included a legal requirement whereby an orchard of mature apple trees bearing fruit within three years of settlement were required before a land title was officially granted. For example, The Ohio Company required settlers to plant not less than fifty apple trees and twenty peach trees within three years. These plantings would guarantee land titles. In 1767, the average New England family was consuming seven barrels of hard cider annually, which equates to about 35-gallons per person. By 1775, one in ten New England families, most of them farmers, had a cider mill on the property. In one of his letters to his wife, Abigail, John Adams complained about the quality of Philadelphia alcohols and of being homesick for her cider. Thomas Jefferson grew several varieties of apple at his home in Virginia and his wife Martha Jefferson oversaw their harvest and brewing while she was mistress of the plantation. Ciderkin, a slightly alcoholic beverage made from cider pomace, could also be found on colonial tables, and was often served for breakfast. Applejack, made in the North, was made in a similar manner to Canadian ice cider every winter as an alternate means to concentrate alcohol when it was far too cold outside to bring out the cider press.
The taste for hard cider continued into the 19th century in pockets of the East Coast, but with the combination of immigration from Central and Eastern Europe, where lager beer is the traditional staple, and the later advent of Prohibition, hard cider manufacturing collapsed and did not recover after the ban on alcohol was lifted. Temperance fanatics burned or uprooted the orchards and wrought havoc on farms to the point that only dessert or cooking apples escaped the axe or torch; only a small number of cider apple trees survived on farmland abandoned before the 1920s and are only now being found by pomologists.
In recent years interest has been revived in hard cider. Surviving heirloom varieties that had a role in the old orchards have been carefully catalogued, and many have been put up for sale at city farmer's markets or sold by the bushel to businesses wanting to make their own labels. On the East Coast, many have been taking cuttings of trees planted a hundred years ago and blending them experimentally into new brews, with California and the Great Lakes States following suit. Though it is currently only one percent of the alcoholic beverage market, it is outselling the craft beer and is projected to keep growing. Larger beer brewing companies, whose profits have declined due to the loss of market share to craft brews and change in public opinion on quality of their product, have bought cider making companies. The company that ferments Bulmers in Ireland purchased Woodchuck Hard Cider in 2012.