Coverage and gaps

CiderHQ holds 1943 recorded measurements across 394 cultivar records — 247 of those cultivars carry at least one measurement, and 147 carry none.

That ratio is not an oversight, and it will never reach one. Most cider cultivars have never been analysed in a way that produces a citable figure. Long Ashton’s programme covered hundreds of English cultivars between 1903 and 2003, but the station closed, its annual reports were never consolidated into a single open archive, and most of its figures reach the present through secondary compilations that do not say which season, which site or how many samples produced them. A number without that context is not a measurement; it is a rumour with decimal places.

So where a figure cannot be sourced with its context, CiderHQ records no figure. What it records instead is the classification — which is a genuine, sourced statement about the fruit under a named system — and the descriptive account of how the cultivar behaves, which is what orchard and pomological writing is actually good at.

That is why 316 of 394 cultivars carry a classification under a named system while far fewer carry measurements. The classification is the honest resolution the evidence supports, and stating a band rather than a number is the point rather than a compromise.

The register holds 300 cider apples and 94 perry pears.

Perry pears are the thinner family, and unavoidably so. Many are known from a handful of trees, several from a single parish or farm, and the naming is more tangled than apple naming: cultivars are routinely named after the place they were found, and the same fruit carries different names five miles apart. The standard descriptive account of English perry pears dates from the 1960s, and the analytical basis behind their classification is thinner than for cider apples because far fewer of them were ever analysed. Where CiderHQ holds a perry pear record, the identity work behind it leans on the national collection and the specialist bodies that maintain it.

Coverage of cider apples is weighted towards the English and French cultivars that the research literature is weighted towards, because that is where the evidence is. Cultivars grown chiefly in Asturias, the Basque Country, Central Europe and North America are held where they can be sourced properly, and the site does not compensate for thinner records by writing longer prose about them.

Of 69 style records, 69 carry a stated strength range and 68 carry a serving temperature taken from a source. Where a style records no serving temperature, the figure shown is derived by CiderHQ from that style’s own carbonation and sweetness, and the page marks it as derived rather than presenting it as a recommendation somebody made.

Style boundaries are themselves an uneven kind of fact. Some are defined by law or by a protected designation and are as firm as anything on this site; some are competition categories, written where judging needs a boundary rather than where a tradition has one; some are simply what a category is called by the people who make it. Every style record names which kind it is, because a French AOC and a judging category are not the same sort of thing and treating them alike is the commonest error in cider writing.

115 sources are registered. 106 carry a recorded access date; the rest are registered as competent for a subject without CiderHQ claiming to have worked through the document. 42 retrieval gaps are recorded, each with what is published in its place.

That is the most conservative statement the register can make about itself, and it is deliberately the one shown. A bibliography assembled from search results and presented as reading is the commonest form of citation dishonesty on the web, and the register is built so that CiderHQ cannot commit it by accident: a source that has not been opened cannot support a quoted figure, and the state field is what enforces it.

An area gets thicker when a source is worked through properly, not when someone writes more about it. The order is always the same: locate the authority, read the document, record the passage with its locator and date, then write what the passage supports and nothing beyond it.

If you know of a source that would let a thin area be written properly — an archive, a published analysis, a regional body’s own specification — that is worth telling us about, and so is any page that reads as though it were written around a gap rather than about a subject.