"Farmer Boy" apple Cider - Was it non-alcoholic?

In Laura Ingles Wilder's book "Farmer Boy", it has the family taking apples to be made into apple cider that even the young children drink through winter.  In other respects they were strict church-going Protestants, and there is no indication they drank alcohol.  Was this non-alcoholic, and how do you make and store it if it was?  How is this different to making apple cider vinegar?

apple juice/cider can be canned. i’d assume they were in jars.

I'll have to find my sources, but in colonial America cider was kept in barrels because it was safer to drink than much of the water. Yeast was introduced eventually and hard cider was created because it was more stable. Children would drink a diluted form of it. I'm not sure of the religious implications/tolerance but it was more out of necessity than pleasure.

**Edit** I had to look up the book in particular and see that it is set around the 1860's where there was a kind of a boom of cider production with cider mills and presses being sold everywhere. A link that might give you some insight can be found here.

Quote from Timothy's link:

In the early days of America, people did not drink water very often. Diseases such as typhoid fever and cholera were real threats from drinking water.

Instead, hard cider was the drink of choice — even children drank it. The alcohol in the cider killed bacteria, preventing diseases that water could carry. Between 1800 and 1830, the average American drank 23 gallons of alcohol each year; hard cider made up 15 of those gallons.

The only problem I see with this is the math.  15 gallons of cider per year is just over a quart a week.  Not really enough to survive on...  Unless the numbers are just for the alcohol within the cider.  

Now I'm going down the rabbit hole!

For some information on "Childrens Cider" I have found the word Ciderkin brings up some results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciderkin

Mike Haasl wrote:Quote from Timothy's link:

In the early days of America, people did not drink water very often. Diseases such as typhoid fever and cholera were real threats from drinking water.

Instead, hard cider was the drink of choice — even children drank it. The alcohol in the cider killed bacteria, preventing diseases that water could carry. Between 1800 and 1830, the average American drank 23 gallons of alcohol each year; hard cider made up 15 of those gallons.

The only problem I see with this is the math.  15 gallons of cider per year is just over a quart a week.  Not really enough to survive on...  Unless the numbers are just for the alcohol within the cider.  

Right, to me it reads `alcohol within the cider', which I guess would make it more like 50-100 gallons.  That then probably has to be de-averaged, inasmuch as that practice must have been restricted to a subset of the population it's averaged over.

Fresh apple cider does not contain alcohol.

This is because it has not been fermented.

Over time the fermenting turns apple cider into Hard Apple cider.

When my kids were growing up I used to purchase Apple Cider at the grocery store every year around Thanksgiving.  It was found in the aisle with juice and I believe refrigerated.

We also served this fresh apple cider at school functions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_cider

I think if they would have kept it in barrels or jugs in the root cellar it wouldn't turn. Perhaps they boiled it first to keep the yeast from growing.

Howdy,

I used to buy gal jugs of "fresh pressed apple cider" from farm stands when working in the woods in rural NY. Leaving it in the truck and it would be fermenting in 2-3 days.

Just a guess here, but the cider is called "sweet" I believe, which would suggest it wasn't alcoholic.  Since they were storing it through winter, maybe it was kept frozen, and a jug was brought to the cellar to thaw every day?  Farmer Boy was set in upstate New York after all, and I understand it stays pretty cold through winter.

However, it's possible it was lightly alcoholic;  hard cider (just called cider in this country) isn't particularly strong, more like beer than wine, and a little bit of alcohol before bed makes you feel warm and sleepy...

I'm my corner of the United States, "cider" means fresh unfiltered apple juice.  It has a short expiration date and has to remain refrigerated in the grocery store. If you let it warm up, it will ferment and become "hard cider" which most kids won't enjoy the taste of.  Apple JUICE is the filtered and pasteurized stuff that is shelf stable until you open it.