Cider apple
Bisquet
A reliable, regular-cropping Norman bittersweet planted heavily in modern orchards precisely because it does not do the one thing most traditional French cider apples do, which is crop every other year.
Also written Bisquet de Normandie.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bittersweet base, Bulk juice, Tannin and structure
- Origin
- Normandy
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
French cider apple families
Bittersweet · Douce-amère
Low acid with substantial tannin.
Basis: Tannin 2 to 3 g/L and acidity below 3 g/L as H₂SO₄.
Every classification on CiderHQ names its system. Why there is more than one.
What it contributes to a blend
A direction, not a measurement. These bands are the level of resolution the evidence supports, and they say which way adding this fruit pushes a blend rather than what the finished cider will be.
| Axis | Typical | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Acid | Low | |
| Tannin | Moderate | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Full |
French bittersweet family placement, with bands set at the family midpoint because nothing more specific is verified.
Straightforwardly bittersweet: a firm dry grip, low acid, and a clean rather than complex aroma. It is a fruit that does its job without asserting itself.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Bisquet, and for a great deal of cider fruit that is a finding rather than a gap. Bittersweet apples in particular contribute tannin, sugar and body while being close to aromatically mute, and most of what a cider made from them smells of was produced by the fermentation rather than carried in by the fruit. CiderHQ publishes the absence rather than filling the space with descriptors nothing supports.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Bisquet. Figures for this cultivar circulate, but they reach the present through compilation rather than through the original tables, and publishing a number we cannot attribute would give it an authority it has not earned. What is known about how the fruit behaves is described above and below.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
Ripens a little ahead of the main Norman bittersweets, which spreads the milling season.
Notably regular for a traditional French cider cultivar, which is the main reason it appears so often in plantings made since the 1970s.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
| Fire blight | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate tannin with a clean finish
- Low acid
- Keeves adequately without being outstanding at it
How it is used
- Volume bittersweet in Normandy AOC and cidre fermier blends
- A stabilising component where the rest of the blend is strongly biennial
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Competent alone and rarely bottled that way. Nothing about it is wrong; nothing about it is distinctive enough for a producer to put a name on the label.
About Bisquet
Bisquet is a useful corrective to the romance that attaches to traditional cider fruit. It is planted in quantity across Normandy not because anyone considers it the most distinguished bittersweet available, but because it crops with something close to annual regularity in a family of cultivars that mostly do not. In an orchard economy where a mill needs a predictable tonnage, that is worth more than a marginal gain in tannin quality.
Its juice is unremarkable in a useful way: low acid, moderate tannin, clean, and entirely willing to sit underneath more assertive fruit. It keeves without difficulty, ferments without drama, and produces a cider that tastes of the blend rather than of itself. Producers describing their blends tend to name Bedan, Binet Rouge or a Fréquin and pass over Bisquet in silence, even where it is the largest single component.
It is worth noting how much of the modern French orchard has been shaped by this criterion. The shift from grazed high-stem orchards to planted bush systems changed which cultivars made economic sense, and regularity of cropping — a trait nobody tastes — became one of the strongest selection pressures on the French cider apple population during the twentieth century.
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Fruit that plays a similar part
Cultivars sharing a classification under the same system and a comparable role in a blend. Not a similarity score — a stated relationship.
Douce Moën
The workhorse of Breton cider orchards: a large, pale, very low-acid bittersweet that crops heavily, presses generously, and carries more Breton cider than any other single cultivar.
Michelin
A Norman bittersweet raised near Yvetot in the 1870s that became, in England rather than in France, one of the most widely planted cider apples in the world.
Antoinette
A Norman bittersweet of moderate tannin and reliable habit, one of the cultivars that came through twentieth-century selection into modern French orchards.
Bramtot
A Norman bittersweet raised in the Pays de Caux and taken to England in the 1880s, where it was analysed at Long Ashton and grown as a full bittersweet for most of a century.
Domaines
A regular, well-behaved Norman bittersweet that has done well out of the shift to bush orchards, being one of the few traditional cultivars that suits intensive planting.
Moulin à Vent
A Norman bittersweet named for a windmill, brought to England with the 1880s imports and grown there long enough to acquire an English reputation of its own.
Where it grows
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- How do you blend cider
- What is keeving — Keeving is a technique for starving a ferment of nitrogen so that it stops before all the sugar is gone, leaving a naturally sweet cider. Pectin is made to gel and float as a brown cap, carrying nutrients and yeast out of the juice with it.
- What is keeved cider — A cider made naturally sweet by starving the yeast rather than by adding sugar. Keeving strips nutrients out of the juice before fermentation, so the ferment slows and stops with fruit sugar still in it, and nothing has been put back.
- What is the difference between french cidre and english cider — French cidre is usually sweeter, weaker and more carbonated, because fermentation is arrested while sugar remains. English cider is more often fermented dry and finished still or lightly sparkling, and is stronger for it.
- How long can apples be kept before pressing
- What is normandy cider
Where to go next
- How cider apples are classified — Why there are four schemes and none of them is universal.
- The blend explorer — See which way changing the proportions moves a blend.
- Blending — What a cider maker is actually deciding when they build a blend.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC)
IFPC · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The French technical institute for cider production. The authority for the French cultivar classification families, for keeving as an industrial process, and for the pectin and nitrogen chemistry that keeving depends on.
Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité (INAO)
INAO · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24
The Cidre Pays d’Auge cahier des charges was read in full on 2026-08-24, in the version homologated by arrêté of 17 January 2026 and published in the Journal officiel on 21 January. That qualification is not decoration. A revision adopted by the Comité national on 10 September 2025 is currently under the procédure nationale d’opposition, is clearly marked as not prejudging the final text, and specifies carbonation differently from the text in force — as grams of CO2 per litre rather than as a minimum pressure in bar. A summary citing the draft would have put a figure on the page that no producer is held to. CiderHQ records the operative text and says which one it is.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.