Cider apple
Blanc Mollet
A soft, pale, early Norman sweet apple that must be pressed almost as soon as it is picked, and whose name says exactly that about it.
Also written Blanc-Mollet.
- Classification
- Sweet — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Very early (Late August to early September)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Early season, Sugar and body
- Origin
- Normandy
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 2
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
French cider apple families
Sweet · Douce
Low acid, low tannin. Sugar and body.
Basis: Tannin below 2 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 | Very low | |
| Tannin | Negligible | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
French sweet family placement.
Mild and mealy-sweet with very little acid and no tannin; pleasant fresh and forgettable in a glass.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Blanc Mollet, 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
Each figure is shown with where and when it was taken. They are not averaged: the same cultivar grown in another climate genuinely gives different numbers, and collapsing them into one would be the most misleading thing this page could do.
Measured on the fruit
Measured on the fruit itself, before anything was done to it. These figures hold whatever was later made from the juice.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fruit diameter | 45 mm | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Juice yield | 606 L/t | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
Measured on the juice
Measured on juice as pressed, before fermentation. This is where most cider analysis lives and what the classification schemes are defined on.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brix | 11.2 °Bx | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| pH | 4.31 pH | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Specific gravity | 1.046 SG | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Total acid | 0.150 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Total tannin | 0.200 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
How these were measured
- Permanganate titration against indigo carmine, reported as tannic acid equivalent
- Titration, reported as malic acid equivalent
- Published as 1.78 inches; converted at 25.4 mm to the inch
- Juice pressed from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Published as 275 mL/lb; converted at 2.204623 lb to the kilogram
Compare within a study to see where these figures sat among the other cultivars the same work analysed — which is a more robust statement than the figures themselves, because absolute values move between laboratories and the ordering inside one study mostly survives.
Watched in the orchard
What named research programmes recorded about this fruit at their own sites. Bloom, harvest and cropping belong to a place and a run of seasons rather than to a cultivar, so they are reported site by site rather than merged.
WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial
Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center, Mount Vernon, Skagit Valley, Washington · 2002–2017 · Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Maritime, with cool summers and mild wet winters — the closest North American analogue to the English West Country, and the reason the programme planted European cider fruit here rather than east of the Cascades.
- Mean full bloom
- 13 May
- Harvest
- 4 September
- Bloom density
- 2.7 of 5
- Productivity
- 3 of 5
- Growth habit
- Semi Upright
- Bearing
- Semi Spur
- Alternate bearing
- Yes
- Blind wood
- 1.5 of 5
- Rootstocks
- Bud 9
Filed here as bittersweet, though the juice measured at this site falls in the sweet quadrant of the site’s own thresholds.
WSU lists this fruit as bittersweet — the class it carries in England — but the juice measured at Mount Vernon falls in the sweet quadrant of the site’s own thresholds. Neither reading is an error. A class assigned on acid and tannin describes fruit grown somewhere, and this is somewhere else.
Color deep gold, mild to moderately bitter. A medium bodied bittersweet cider with light flavors & aromatics. Medium length finish with a bitter & mildly astringent aftertaste. A nice addition to a bittersweet blend.
Recorded by the programme from professional cidermakers in the region. One panel, one place, one set of seasons — a description of these ciders rather than of the cultivar everywhere.
Juice characteristics measured on 250 mL of pressed juice; juice yield from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Bloom density, productivity and blind wood are the site’s own subjective 1–5 ratings. Figures are means across the seasons each cultivar was in the trial.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Very early
- Flowering
- Pollination group 2
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Among the first Norman cider apples down, and it will not wait. Fruit left more than a few days goes soft and loses juice yield.
Genuinely poor rather than merely short — the flesh breaks down quickly.
Juice and pressing
- Sugar with almost no structure
- Falls in yield rapidly once the flesh softens
- High pH; a risky juice on its own
How it is used
- The first pressing of the Norman season
- Fresh sweet juice and early cidre nouveau
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Made alone it is flabby and vulnerable to spoilage. It was used to get an early cider on the table, not to make a keeping one.
About Blanc Mollet
Blanc Mollet is a working cultivar for the start of the season. Norman farms wanted something to drink before the main cider was ready, and an early, soft, sugary apple gave them a quick ferment that could be broached within weeks. That cider was not expected to keep and generally did not.
Its weakness is structural as well as sensory. Very low acid means a high pH, and a high-pH must fermenting warm in early autumn with no sulphite is close to an ideal environment for lactic and acetic bacteria. Early Norman cider had a reputation for going over quickly, and cultivars like this one are the reason.
It is scarce now. Refrigeration and juice storage removed the need to press something in early September, and a fruit whose only advantage was earliness lost its purpose. Where it survives it is generally in old mixed orchards rather than in anything planted deliberately.
Names, origin and identity
Cultivar naming is the hardest problem in cider fruit data. The same tree carries different names across ten miles, and two different trees have shared a name for two centuries.
Origin · traditional account
Mollet means soft, and the name is a warning about handling rather than a claim about origin.
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 Coëtligné
A large, pale, genuinely sweet Breton apple with very little acid and very little tannin, grown for the sugar and body it puts into a blend rather than for any character of its own.
Muscadet de Dieppe
An aromatic Norman sweet apple from the Dieppe country, grown for the musky perfume it lends a blend rather than for acid, tannin or sugar.
Doux Normandie
A Norman sweet apple grown for sugar and alcohol, one of the *douce* cultivars that supply the fermentable weight a bittersweet-heavy blend needs.
Chestnut Crab
A Minnesota-bred crab from 1946 with a distinctive nutty flavour and good sugar, cold-hardy enough for the upper Midwest and Quebec, and widely used as an aroma component in northern cider.
Morgan Sweet
A large, early, pale Somerset sweet apple, historically sold as an eating apple and pressed for the earliest cider of the year.
Reine des Hâtives
A French early sweet apple grown in English cider orchards, and the lowest-acid fruit in the Long Ashton composite table.
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 does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
- What is pressing yield — Pressing yield is the proportion of fruit weight recovered as juice. It varies from under half on a poorly loaded basket press to around seventy per cent on a well-run rack-and-cloth or belt press.
- When are cider apples harvested — In the northern hemisphere the cider harvest runs from about September to November, with late bittersweets such as Dabinett and Vilberie coming in last. Cider fruit is generally picked riper than dessert fruit, and often gathered from the ground.
- What does doux mean on a cider — *Doux* means sweet. A cidre doux is typically the lowest in alcohol of the French sweetness grades, often around three per cent, because fermentation was stopped early.
- What is normandy cider
- What does cidre fermier mean
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.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.