Cider Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Opening The Bottle

The non alcoholic market is exploding. Supermarket shelves are being swapped from alcoholic to non alcoholic with sales rocketing. However, many are still very new to this new wave in drinks. They have questions and one of the most common i see is just how much alcohol is in them and how many non alcoholic ciders equals one cider? If you can have an idea in your head of how many non alcoholic or alcohol free ciders equals one cider then you can decide how many you want to drink or if you can function after a certain amount. How many non alcoholic ciders equals one cider? It might be difficult to describe just what a standard cider is to compare against. Cider and beer are very similar in alcohol by volume stakes so we can use a standard beer as a proxy. The USDA describe a standard beer as having 5% alcohol by volume, so let's assume a standard cider is 5% ABV too. If we compare this to a standard non alcoholic cider of 0.5% alcohol by volume, you would need 10 non alcoholic ciders to equal one alcoholic cider. The volume of a standard cider is 12fl oz or 355ml. In reality, non alcoholic ciders can range from 0.2% to 0.5% so the actual ratio might be much higher. Similarly, some ciders have a lot lower or higher alcohol percentage than 5% so that can effect the ratio. How many alcohol free ciders equals one cider? An alcohol free cider should have less than 0.05% ABV by definition. If we use 0.05% and calculate it against a 5% standard cider, you can see it would take 100 alcohol free ciders to equal one standard cider. How much alcohol is in a standard cider? Is there such a thing? Cider can come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. Much like the diversity in the beer market, you can have a 2% cider right up to a 12% cider. To try and quantify how many ciders it will take to get drunk we need to have a standard cider to work from. The USDA have devised a list of “standard” alcoholic drinks. Each one contains the exact same amount of alcohol – 14g of alcohol (0.6 ounces). Below is a list of the standard drinks, volumes and ABV that all give 14g of alcohol. Drink and volumeAlcohol content12fl oz Beer5%8fl oz Malt Liquor 7%5fl oz Wine12%1.5fl oz Spirit40%Standard Drinks They don’t specifically have a cider category but i think there is enough similarity in the beer world to cider, that we can adopt the standard beer model for cider. How much alcohol is in an alcohol free cider? Alcohol free cider is still called cider and it has 0.0% or less than 0.05% of alcohol by volume on the bottle, so just how much alcohol is in alcohol cider. You probably only see an alcohol percentage on a food or drink if there is alcohol in it so we are programmed to think if a product displays it then there must be alcohol. There are lots of different labelling and names in the non alcoholic cider world. Ive written a full article on what all the names mean and how to navigate your way around it, you can read it here. A non alcoholic cider has an ABV of 0.5% or less. An alcohol free cider will have an ABV of less than 0.05%. To get a clearer idea of just how low <0.05% ABV actually is, you can look at some common foods and drinks that contain similar amounts of alcohol. Fruit juices have more alcohol by volume than alcohol free beer and even most breads do! How much alcohol is in common foods? A standard alcoholic cider (drawing parallel to the USDA standard beer) has 5% ABV whereas an alcohol free cider has not more than 0.05%. You can easily see one has far less than to other but it would also be easy to assume that 0.05% is still more than in everything else you eat and drink so still relatively high in alcohol. The surprising truth is, many foods and drinks contain alcohol as a by product of fermentation and in similar if not higher concentrations to even non alcoholic cider! Below is a selected list of just some fermented foods with surprising amounts of alcohol. Food or DrinkAlcohol by volume content %Rye bread0.18%Ripe banana0.2-0.4%Ripe pear0.04%Orange juice0.5%Vinegar 0.2%Alcohol free cider<0.05%ABV of various foods and drinks When you do this comparison, you can see just how little alcohol 0.05% ABV represents. It is 10% of the alcohol in orange juice and even much less than most breads. You can read more about the surprising hidden alcohol in your foods and drinks here What is the range of non alcoholic ciders that equals one cider? Most non alcoholic ciders are 0.5% ABV, so it would take 10 of them to equal one alcoholic cider. However i have drank non alcoholic ciders from 0.2-0.5% so there is clearly a range. It would take x25 0.2% non alcoholic ciders to equal one alcoholic cider Non alcoholic cider percentageHow many to equal one alcoholic cider (5%)0.2%250.3%16.670.4%12.50.5%10Non alcoholic ciders to standard alcoholic cider Above is how the ratio changes if you change the concentration of the non alcoholic beer but what about if the cider you are comparing is not 5%. Below is how the ratio changes if the alcoholic cider is a different ABV than 5%. Alcoholic cider percentageHow many non alcoholic ciders to equal (0.5%)4%85%106%128%16Non alcoholic ciders to different alcoholic ciders What is the range of alcohol free ciders that equals one cider? Lastly, we can look at the alcohol free ciders and what changes in the ratio if the cider is less than the upper limit of 0.05% Alcohol free cider percentageHow many to equal one alcoholic cider (5%)0.02%2500.03%166.70.04%1250.05%100Alcohol free ciders to standard alcoholic cider And if the alcoholic cider you are comparing it to, is not 5%... Alcoholic cider percentageHow many alcohol free ciders to equal (0.05%)4%805%1006%1208%160Alcohol free ciders to different alcoholic ciders How many pints of non alcoholic cider equals one pint of cider? The good news is the rule of 10 still applies as long as the alcohol percentages stay the same. It would take 10 non alcoholic pints of cider to equal one pint of 5% ABV cider and 100 alcohol free pints of cider to equal one 5% ABV pint of cider.