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Cider apples

A cider apple is not an eating apple that happened to be fermented. It is a different kind of fruit, bred over centuries for tannin, for sugar and for juice — and most of them are close to inedible raw.

CiderHQ holds 300 cider apple cultivars and 94 perry pears. Each record says what the fruit contributes to a blend, where the evidence for that comes from, and — where an analysis exists — the measured figures with the place and period they were taken in.

Start with the classification if you want to understand the fruit as a system, with the blend roles if you are building one, or with the harvest calendar if you are planning a pressing season.

The harvest seasonThe five harvest windows CiderHQ uses, as they fall in the English West Country. A window is a ripening period for a population of trees in one climate, not a date.AugSepOctNovDecVery earlyearly sharpsEarlyearly bittersweetsMidmain-crop bittersweetsLatelate bittersweetsVery lateperry pears, vintage fruitNorthern hemisphere
The five harvest windows CiderHQ uses, as they fall in the English West Country. A window is a ripening period for a population of trees in one climate, not a date.
Described in full
Where these months apply
Southern and western England — Somerset, Devon, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire — which is the geography the five window names were coined in and the one almost every English harvest date on this site was recorded in. They are not universal. The same cultivar ripens on different dates in Normandy, in Asturias and in the Skagit Valley, and this chart should not be read against a harvest anywhere else without adjusting for it.
The axis
August to December, left to right, with month divisions marked. Each of the five harvest windows the site uses is drawn as a bar spanning the period it covers.
Very early
Late August into early September. Early sharps and early dessert fruit. Useful for starting a mill before the main crop, and rarely capable of a balanced cider alone.
Early
September. Early bittersweets, and the point at which a mill can begin pressing in earnest.
Mid
Late September to mid October. The main crop, and most of the traditional bittersweets. The bulk of any West Country blend is picked in this window.
Late
Late October. Late bittersweets, ripening as leaf fall begins and the weather turns against gathering from grass.
Very late
November onwards. Perry pears and the latest vintage-quality apples. Fruit here is often picked hard and held to sweat, and a wet November can lose an entire late crop.
Why the windows overlap
They are ripening periods for populations of trees, not fixed dates. Season, site and rootstock move a given cultivar by two or three weeks in either direction, and the same fruit is early in Herefordshire and mid in a colder year.
Hemisphere
These are northern-hemisphere months. Tasmanian, New Zealand and South African harvests run through the equivalent southern months, roughly February to June.
What a cultivar page shows instead
A cultivar record carries the window it is placed in and, where a named programme recorded one, that programme’s own observation — the mean harvest date at WSU Mount Vernon, or the ripening band the National Perry Pear Collection records at Hartpury. Those are site observations and they sometimes disagree with the window; both are kept rather than one overwriting the other, because the disagreement is a fact about where the fruit was grown.

By classification

The English four-way split of cider apples by acid and tannin: sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp. The scheme most English-language cider writing uses, and the one most often mistaken for a universal standard.

One scheme among several

The four classes below are the Long Ashton scheme, devised in Somerset for Somerset fruit. French, Spanish and North American practice sort the same apples differently, and a cultivar can cross a boundary simply by being grown somewhere warmer. How the schemes differ.

Sweet (17)

Low acid and low tannin. Fruit that contributes sugar, alcohol and body but little structure or sharpness.

Fermentable sugar and softness. A blend built only from sweet fruit ferments to something flat and, because its pH stays high, microbiologically vulnerable.

Bittersweet (64)

Low acid, high tannin. The class that has no real equivalent in dessert fruit and that defines West Country cider.

Bitterness, astringency, body and ageing capacity. Bittersweets are the backbone of traditional English blends and are close to undrinkable eaten raw.

Sharp (46)

High acid, low tannin. Includes both purpose-grown sharps and many culinary apples.

Acid lift and a lower pH, which brightens the palate and materially reduces the risk of bacterial spoilage.

Bittersharp (13)

High acid and high tannin together — the rarest and, for a single-varietal cider, the most useful class.

Both structure and freshness from one fruit, which is why the recognised single-varietal cultivars cluster here.

Not classified under any scheme (65)

Mostly North American and southern-hemisphere fruit, plus the dessert and culinary apples that make up much of the world’s commercial cider. The absence of a class is not a gap in the record: no scheme was ever built for this fruit, and assigning one here would be inventing evidence.

By what it does in a blend

Most cider is blended, and most blending decisions are about filling a gap. These are the parts a cultivar can play.

By harvest window

Cider fruit does not ripen together. A mill that presses from September to November is pressing a different blend each week, and planning an orchard means planning a sequence.

Harvest windows, given for the northern hemisphere. Southern-hemisphere growers should shift these by six months.
WindowRoughlyCultivars
Very earlyLate August to early SeptemberGravensteiner, Discovery, Morgan Sweet, Cheddar Cross, Burrow Hill Early, Grenadier, Blanc Mollet
EarlySeptemberTremlett’s Bitter, Ellis Bitter, Foxwhelp, Gala, Major, Broxwood Foxwhelp, Bulmer’s Foxwhelp, Ashton Bitter and 15 more
MidLate September to mid OctoberKingston Black, Somerset Redstreak, Browns Apple, Douce Moën, Michelin, Hewe’s Crab, Wickson Crab, McIntosh and 111 more
LateLate OctoberDabinett, Yarlington Mill, Bramley’s Seedling, Bedan, Blanquina, Txalaka, Harrison, Golden Russet and 82 more
Very lateNovember onwardsRegona, Rheinischer Bohnapfel, Granny Smith, Vilberie, Médaille d’Or, Raxao, Durona de Tresali, Xuanina and 53 more

Every cultivar

All cider apples on CiderHQ, alphabetically.

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