The daily sugar allowance above is the daily allowance of free sugars.
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Free sugars are sugar in food and drinks that doesn’t add nutritional value. These will be most sugars in things like fruit juices, smoothies and honey.
The NHS recommends 30 g of free sugars a day. These are on top of the nutritional sugars contained in food. A balanced diet will contain sugars as part of your meals, but as cider is a nice bonus to have in our lives, we count the sugar in cider as free sugars. The percentages you see are out of the 30 g a day that the NHS recommends.
I've chosen to display the two top sizes of drinks available for each cider. Some ciders are sold in massive bottles, so I've chosen a pint as that drink (serving) size, so it's easily comparable.
The worst cider (that I've been able to find data for) is Bulmers Toffee Apple, with 12.1 g of sugar per 100 ml. It contains more sugar than full-fat Coca-Cola. To compare, a ‘normal’ Coca-Cola contains around 10.6 g of sugar. There’s about 61 g of sugar in a 500 ml bottle of Bulmers Toffee Apple, which is over double the recommended amount of free daily sugars. Crazy.
The best cider is Stowford Press, with 1 g of sugar per 100 ml. In total, a pint will only have 6 g of sugar, which is pretty good going. It’s only 18% of the recommended amount of free daily sugars.
Choose ciders that have an apple flavour. Ciders with added fruits and flavours tend to be more sugary. So avoid pear, raspberry and dark fruits ciders. Go for the more traditional ciders that taste less sweet. Dry ciders are best.
A cider can have five possible ratings. Each is based on the amount of sugar per 100 ml.