In the United States, apple cider is raw, unfiltered apple juice with the pulp and sediment left in, while apple juice is filtered and clarified to produce a clear, golden liquid. Both start as the same thing: crushed apples. The difference comes down to what happens after pressing.
How Each One Is Made
Cider is the simpler product. Apples are washed, crushed, and pressed, and the resulting liquid goes straight into the jug. It keeps the fine pulp, pectin, and sediment that give it a cloudy, opaque appearance and a more complex, tart apple flavor. Some producers pasteurize their cider, but many small orchards and farm stands sell it raw.
Apple juice goes through several additional steps to strip out everything that makes cider look and taste the way it does. First, the pressed liquid is spun in a centrifuge to remove suspended solids. Then enzymes break down the pectin and starch that would otherwise cause haziness. After that, a fining treatment removes remaining colloids, followed by filtration through diatomaceous earth and a final pass through a microfiltration or ultrafiltration membrane. The result is a perfectly clear, shelf-stable product with a milder, sweeter taste.
Taste, Color, and Texture
Cider is brown, opaque, and tastes closer to a fresh apple than juice does. You’ll notice a slight graininess from the pulp and a sharper, more tannic flavor, especially if it’s made from heirloom or mixed apple varieties. It can vary significantly from batch to batch depending on which apples were pressed.
Apple juice is translucent amber or gold, smooth, and consistently sweet. The filtration process removes the compounds responsible for tartness and astringency, so what remains is a uniform, mild sweetness. Some commercial apple juice brands also add sugar, particularly in juice blends, while cider is typically 100% pressed apple with nothing else added.
Nutritional Differences
Calorie and sugar content are roughly similar between the two, since both are fundamentally apple juice. The meaningful nutritional gap is in polyphenols and antioxidants. These plant compounds are bound to the pulp, pectin, and fine particulate matter that filtration removes. Cloudy, unfiltered cider retains significantly more of them than clear juice does.
The apple variety matters too. Heritage and heirloom cultivars contain considerably higher concentrations of polyphenols and flavonoids than commercial varieties like Golden Delicious or Jonagold. A cider pressed from traditional varieties can contain over 500 mg/L of total polyphenols, while one made from common commercial apples may have less than a quarter of that. So a cloudy cider made from diverse, older apple varieties delivers the most antioxidant benefit, and a filtered juice made from a single commercial variety delivers the least.
Pasteurization and Safety
Apple juice sold in stores is almost always pasteurized. Cider may or may not be, and that distinction matters for food safety. The FDA requires non-retail juice processors to treat their product to achieve a 5-log pathogen reduction, meaning the process must eliminate 99.999% of dangerous bacteria like E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, and Listeria. Retail operations that skip this step must put a warning label on the container.
Flash pasteurization of cider, typically done at about 68°C (155°F) for 14 seconds, is enough to eliminate those pathogens without significantly changing the flavor. Consumer taste tests have found no meaningful difference between cider pasteurized at that temperature and cider treated at higher temperatures. Still, if you’re buying cider from a farm stand or farmers’ market, it may be completely raw. That’s generally fine for healthy adults, but unpasteurized cider carries real risk for young children, elderly people, pregnant women, and anyone with a compromised immune system.
Shelf Life
Cider spoils faster than juice because it retains more organic material and is less likely to be pasteurized. Unopened cider lasts about one to two weeks in the refrigerator. Once opened, plan to finish it within 7 to 10 days. You can freeze cider for 8 to 12 months without losing much flavor.
Commercially processed apple juice, by contrast, is shelf-stable for months unopened at room temperature thanks to pasteurization and the removal of solids that would promote microbial growth. Once opened, it still outlasts cider in the fridge by several days.
The Word “Cider” Means Different Things
In the United States, “cider” on its own almost always means sweet, non-alcoholic cider. The fermented version is labeled “hard cider.” In the UK and most of Europe, it’s the opposite: “cider” means the alcoholic drink, and what Americans call cider would just be called apple juice (cloudy or otherwise). This catches American travelers off guard regularly. If you order a cider in a London pub, you’re getting something with an alcohol content closer to beer.
Hard cider is a fundamentally different product. It’s made by fermenting the sugars in pressed apple juice with yeast, typically reaching 4% to 8% alcohol by volume. The non-alcoholic cider you find at U.S. grocery stores and orchards has not been fermented, though raw cider left too long will start to ferment on its own, which is one reason its shelf life is so short.