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 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.