US National Hot Mulled Cider Day
<p>On the night of Old Twelvey, 17 January, in the cider counties of Somerset and Devon, men once carried a wooden bowl into the orchard, soaked slices of toast in warm spiced cider, and hung them in the bare branches of the oldest apple tree. They sang to it, banged pots, and sometimes fired shotguns into the canopy to wake the tree and frighten off whatever might spoil the coming harvest. The drink in that bowl was hot mulled cider, and US National Hot Mulled Cider Day on 30 September is, in its quieter American way, a descendant of that orchard rite: a single date set aside for the spiced, steaming apple drink that signals the turn from harvest to cold.</p>
<h2 id="where-the-spiced-cider-comes-from">Where the spiced cider comes from</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The custom of warming a drink with spice is far older than any apple orchard in North America. Medieval cooks across England and northern Europe heated ale, wine, and cider with cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg — spices that were expensive imports and therefore a way of showing both hospitality and means. The cider version belongs to a tradition the English called wassailing, from the Old Norse <em>ves heill</em>, “be in good health”, a greeting carried to England by Danish settlers in the ninth century.</p>
<p>By the time of the first recorded orchard wassail — Fordwich in Kent, mentioned in 1585 — the spiced apple drink already had a fixed seasonal role. An early form was called lambswool: hot ale or cider into which roasted crab apples were dropped so they burst into a pale, woolly froth. Shakespeare’s audiences would have known it. The drink and the ritual travelled together, and both crossed the Atlantic in the holds of colonial ships.</p>
<h2 id="history">History</h2>
<p>Apple trees were among the first crops English, French, and Dutch colonists planted in North America, brought as seed in the early 1600s. The fruit thrived, and cider quickly became the everyday drink of colonial life — partly because it kept better than milk and was safer than water of uncertain origin. It was served at most meals and drunk by every age group, in both its sweet, unfermented form — the same fresh-pressed juice honoured on <a href="/specialdate/us-national-apple-cider-day/">US National Apple Cider Day</a> — and its fermented “hard” version.</p>
<p>In the colder parts of New England, colonists went a step further and concentrated their hard cider into applejack by leaving barrels out to freeze and skimming off the ice, leaving a stronger spirit behind. The most famous name in that trade is Laird & Company of New Jersey, who launched commercially in 1780 and received what the family records as the first distillery licence issued by the new United States government. George Washington is said to have requested the Laird recipe. Against that backdrop, a pot of cider gently mulled with whatever spices a household could afford was both comfort and continuity — a taste of the old country adapted to a new climate.</p>
<p>Cider’s American story took a dramatic turn in the early twentieth century. The temperance movement and then Prohibition (1920–1933) fell hard on the apple, because so much of the crop went to hard cider; reformers reportedly chopped down cider orchards, and growers were pushed to recast the apple as a wholesome eating fruit — the era that gave us the slogan “an apple a day”. Sweet, unfermented cider, drunk warm and spiced, fitted that family-friendly reinvention neatly, and it is largely this version that the American holiday celebrates rather than the potent colonial original.</p>
<p>The modern observance on 30 September has no documented founder; like most single-day food celebrations it surfaced through calendar sites and word of mouth rather than any proclamation. What it marks, though, is genuine: the moment in late September when the first apples come in and the evenings turn cold enough to want something warm in the hand.</p>
<h2 id="why-it-deserves-a-day">Why it deserves a day</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>A spiced cider is a small machine for marking time. Few foods are as tightly bound to a season as the apple, and the act of mulling — slow, fragrant, deliberately unhurried — is an antidote to a year that otherwise rushes past. Setting aside 30 September acknowledges the older agricultural rhythm in which the cider press, not the calendar, told you autumn had arrived.</p>
<p>There is also a thread of preservation running through it. The orchards that once supplied colonial cider were enormously diverse, with thousands of named apple varieties, many now lost. A day that sends people back to orchards and farm shops is, in a modest way, a vote for keeping that diversity alive rather than letting it narrow to the handful of varieties that survive in supermarkets.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>The day is celebrated mostly at the domestic scale, which suits it. A pot of fresh apple cider goes on the hob with cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, allspice, slices of orange, and perhaps a knob of fresh ginger, and is held just below a simmer until the kitchen smells of it. Some households stud an orange with cloves and float it whole. The drink is the natural centrepiece of apple-picking trips to orchards in New England, the Hudson Valley, and the Pacific Northwest, and of harvest gatherings where it is ladled from a slow cooker into mugs. Many cider mills across the apple belt open to visitors through autumn, turning the simple purchase of a jug into a day out. The spice blend is where households diverge: some keep it austere with cinnamon and clove alone, others build in star anise, cardamom, a curl of lemon peel, or a spoonful of brown sugar or maple syrup, and adults frequently lace the pot with dark rum, bourbon, or a measure of applejack to bring the drink closer to its colonial ancestor. The one near-universal rule is patience — cider boiled hard turns bitter and loses its aromatics, so the pot is kept just below a simmer and the spices given time to steep rather than being rushed.</p>
<h2 id="variations-across-the-world">Variations across the world</h2>
<p>The same impulse takes different shapes elsewhere, and the words shift confusingly across the Atlantic. In Britain, “cider” almost always means the alcoholic apple drink, so British mulled cider is spiced and warmed for bonfire nights in early November and for Christmas markets; in the United States, “cider” usually means the cloudy, unfermented apple juice, and the holiday drink is family-friendly. Mulled cider’s close relations carry the tradition further: Germany and Austria pour Glühwein, spiced hot wine, at their Christkindlmärkte, while the Nordic countries make glögg, a spiced wine often laced with aquavit and dotted with raisins and almonds. For those who would rather skip the apple altogether, the spiced-and-steaming impulse finds its purest form in the cocoa celebrated on <a href="/specialdate/national-hot-chocolate-day/">National Hot Chocolate Day</a>, another winter answer to the same cold-evening question. The Wassail bowls of the West Country, meanwhile, still get carried into orchards each January, the oldest living form of the custom.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-and-what-they-mean">Symbols and what they mean</h2>
<p>The cinnamon stick standing in a steaming mug is the drink’s signature image, and the clove-studded orange is its decorative emblem — a habit borrowed from the pomander, the spiced orange once hung up to scent rooms and ward off illness. Beneath both sits the apple itself, standing for the orchard and the harvest the whole tradition is built on. The wassail bowl, passed from hand to hand, carries the oldest meaning of all: a shared drink as a wish for health.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The toast soaked in cider and hung in orchard trees during the wassail is one origin story for the phrase “to toast” someone’s health — the drinker was literally given the toast from the bowl.</li>
<li>Colonial New England produced so much cider that consumption estimates run to dozens of gallons per person per year, including children, who drank a watered-down “ciderkin”.</li>
<li>Laird & Company holds U.S. distillery licence No. 1 and has been run by the same family since the 1700s, making it one of the oldest continuously operating distillers in the country.</li>
<li>“Lambswool”, the medieval spiced cider with burst roasted apples floating in it, was named for the woolly white froth the apples created, not for any connection to sheep.</li>
<li>Orchard wassailing nearly died out but was deliberately revived in the late twentieth century; ceremonies at Carhampton in Somerset now draw crowds every January on Old Twelfth Night.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>Mulled cider is one of the few drinks that tastes of a calendar. Reach for it in July and it would seem absurd; in late September it feels inevitable, because the spices and the warmth do a job no cold drink can — they mark the year tipping over into its darker half and invite you to sit with that rather than resist it. The orchard wassailers understood this instinctively. They did not pour cider over tree roots because they thought the tree was thirsty; they did it to mark a threshold, to say out loud that one season was ending and to ask for the next. A mug of spiced cider on 30 September is the same gesture, scaled down to a kitchen — a small, fragrant acknowledgement that the light is going and there are months of cold ahead worth meeting with something warm.</p>
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