Johnny Appleseed wasn’t planting edible apples, he was sowing seeds for a variety that tasted absolutely terrible, but was the best for alcoholic cider. What other country has a folk hero whose mission in life was making sure the next generation never ran out of alcoholic cider?
sowing seeds for a variety that tasted absolutely terrible
Is it even possible to predict the variety of apple tree grown from seed? I was under the impression that growing apples from seed was essentially a lottery, and all “good” apple varieties are propagated by cloning (cutting and grafting) an original plant that happened to produce tasty apples.
You are correct, and the “Apple-seed” is confusing. He didn’t plant seeds, he started many plant nurseries, and propagated apple trees until the area was established, then moved onto another area. But to the layman, trees come from seeds, hence the name.
As I expanded on in an post higher up, here in Portugal cider is mainly sweetened apple juice with a little bit of alcohol: basically an alchopop.
It’s probably due to how the local taste in many things tends a lot toward the sweet side (even though coffee here is usually a tiny cup of expresso, it comes with 10g packets of sugar, and unsurprisingly 10% of the population has Type II diabetes) and no tradition at all of brewing cider.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in other countries without a tradition of brewing cider the thing also tends towards being some kind of alcoholic apple juice.
Not just in UK, but literally everywhere in the world. Apart from US.
Nah, US too.
Johnny Appleseed wasn’t planting edible apples, he was sowing seeds for a variety that tasted absolutely terrible, but was the best for alcoholic cider. What other country has a folk hero whose mission in life was making sure the next generation never ran out of alcoholic cider?
Is it even possible to predict the variety of apple tree grown from seed? I was under the impression that growing apples from seed was essentially a lottery, and all “good” apple varieties are propagated by cloning (cutting and grafting) an original plant that happened to produce tasty apples.
You are correct, and the “Apple-seed” is confusing. He didn’t plant seeds, he started many plant nurseries, and propagated apple trees until the area was established, then moved onto another area. But to the layman, trees come from seeds, hence the name.
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Not quite.
As I expanded on in an post higher up, here in Portugal cider is mainly sweetened apple juice with a little bit of alcohol: basically an alchopop.
It’s probably due to how the local taste in many things tends a lot toward the sweet side (even though coffee here is usually a tiny cup of expresso, it comes with 10g packets of sugar, and unsurprisingly 10% of the population has Type II diabetes) and no tradition at all of brewing cider.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in other countries without a tradition of brewing cider the thing also tends towards being some kind of alcoholic apple juice.
The main point - it’s alcoholic. Cider in the US is non alcoholic.
Yeah, it does indeed sound unusual that something called cider is just apple juice with no alcohol at all.