BTW, for people unawares, cider is traditionally an Alcoholic beverage but since around the time of the prohibition it is non-alcoholic in most of the USA.
It's often got a lot of cinnamon, spices, and pulp in it, sold around the winter holidays as seasonal items. Sparkling Cider, on the other hand, is a lot more like apple juice.
The left one is cider in American nomenclature, the right apple juice.
We have a wide array of alcoholic ciders, we just tend to usually call them "hard cider".
Because non alcoholic cider tends to be less shelf stable if it's any good, places that produce it tend to have at least a bit of a "thing" about cider season starting and recipies for hot cider and stuff.
The cider mill near me sells hard cider year round, but the fresh unfiltered stuff is only available during and just after apple harvest.
Everyone in the state is compelled to drive to the orchard and watch the presses crush apples, then buy some hot cider and donuts and walk around looking at the apple trees.
In the US, if you say Apple Cider then it's non-alcoholic non-filtered apple juice. If you say Hard Cider, it's the alcoholic stuff. If you just say cider, it's context specific. Say it at an orchard or a breakfast place or a fall festival, it's going to be assumed to mean the cloudy apple juice. Say it at a bar or non-breakfast restaurant or at a party and it'll be assumed to mean the alcoholic one. Generally the only time one needs to clarify is if you ask someone to grab some cider from the store.
Was also the most popular alcoholic beverage drank in the US until the import of German culture, which brought beer. Beer isn't seen as German so much in the US partly because of what the world wars did to the German identity.
When I was a minor the risk of someone just stealing your money when you needed smokes or alcohol was an inherent risk, with no discernable trait of who would screw you over. That's why an honest drunk in the park was so valuable and got repeat "requests" with added tokens of appreciations and such.