TA News

This October the Environmental Studies and Outdoor Education course at Thetford Academy conducted an experiment with local apples and apple cider. The class first found and collected a wide variety of different apples from our campus and local community. Then the apples were pressed into five different ciders with distinct flavors. Each cider was measured for sugar content, PH, temperature and specific gravity. The goal of the experiment was to compare qualitative and quantitative analysis. So, the class decided to test if the student body at TA could identify which cider is the sweetest and see if that cider is the cider with the highest sugar content. The class hypothesized:

“If sugar content in cider is low, then perceived sweetness will also be low, because high sugar content will increase perceived sweetness.”

Five different ciders all with different sugar contents and distinct flavors were displayed and sampled by 100 students and faculty during school lunch. The Thetford Academy community overwhelmingly voted for cider E as the sweetest with 63 out of 100 votes. Cider E was the cider with the second highest sugar content with 14 grams of sugar/100ml. Cider D had 15 grams of sugar/100 ml and only received 8 votes as the sweetest. In the end the students hypothesis was not correct and they realized that there is a lot more to cider flavor than just sugar that will affect its perceived sweetness.