Calibrate your Cider Tasting: Strengthen Quality Control By Drinking like a Certified Pommelier

Properly tasting your cider with an objective and calibrated approach can help strengthen your cidery’s quality control and assurance processes. 

Certified Pommeliers Tim Powers of Commonwealth Wine School and Kate Pinsley of Schilling Cider recently shared several strategies during the 2025 CiderCon in a seminar called, “How to Evaluate Ciders for the Certified Pommelier Exam,” which can help anyone looking to better their cider evaluation to better their products.

One of the first steps in a structured cider tasting is evaluating appearance. Powers recommends spending no more than 15 seconds on clarity, color and carbonation. Powers emphasized clarity by checking if text can be read through the cider. Gold and amber hues can be tricky to distinguish, but Pinsley suggested using gold jewelry as a reference to help calibrate the eye.

Controlling tasting variables is crucial to keeping evaluations consistent. Powers said that tasters should avoid wearing strong perfumes or colognes and use the same glassware style for each tasting session. 

“By controlling as many of those external variables as possible, you can be more calibrated and more specific with the one thing that you can’t control, which is going to be the cider that’s in the glass,” he said.

For assessing aroma intensity, Powers recommends using what he calls a trombone technique — moving the glass closer and farther from the nose to detect how quickly the aromas are perceived. This helps determine whether the cider’s aroma intensity is light, medium or pronounced. He encourages cider makers to build a strong sensory vocabulary by regularly smelling and tasting fruits and other aromatic ingredients. 

“You’re not able to smell or taste anything that you’ve not smelled or tasted before,” Powers said. “The more specific you can get, the absolute better you can be.”

When evaluating taste, sweetness, acidity, tannin and body should all be assessed in sequence. Powers suggests checking for residual sugar by noting both the sweetness on the tongue and the viscosity of the cider, which can indicate sugar content. 

He recommends a simple calibration exercise: “Get four glasses of just plain water and add different amounts of sugar into each one, and practice tasting through until you’re able to perceive one from the other.”

Acidity can be gauged by how quickly saliva builds up after spitting the cider out. 

“We’re able to hijack this biological response in order to gauge the level of acidity,” Powers said, adding that this technique isolates pH response independent of other taste components. 

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Finally, the finish of the cider is measured in seconds, and a concise description of the cider’s balance and structure completes the tasting assessment.

By adopting these structured methods, cidery owners can better calibrate their teams, align sensory evaluations and maintain product consistency across batches.