Cider apple
Blenheim Orange
A large triploid English dual-purpose apple of nutty character, pressed for cider where a maker wants aroma and substance without tannin.
Also written Blenheim, Blenheim Pippin.
- Classification
- Sweet — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Aroma
- Origin
- Woodstock, Oxfordshire
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3 · triploid
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Sweet
Low acid and low tannin. Fruit that contributes sugar, alcohol and body but little structure or sharpness.
Basis: Below about 0.45% w/v acid and below about 0.2% w/v tannin.
Placed as a sweet when pressed: its acid is low for a culinary apple and its tannin negligible. Some accounts treat it as a mild sharp, and no cider analysis resolves it.
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 | Light | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Medium |
Description of a low-acid dual-purpose apple with a marked nutty aroma, with the acid band left wide because accounts place it differently.
Adds sugar, weight and a distinctly nutty aroma, without acid or tannin.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Blenheim Orange, 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 Blenheim Orange. 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
- Late
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3 · triploid
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
October, and it keeps into the winter.
Slow to come into bearing and inclined to alternate once it does.
A triploid with sterile pollen. It needs two other compatible cultivars nearby and cannot pollinate them in return.
A triploid carries three sets of chromosomes rather than two, and its pollen is effectively sterile. It cannot pollinate another tree and needs two compatible pollinators of its own, which is a real constraint on how an orchard containing it has to be planted.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
| Powdery mildew | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Low acid
- Negligible tannin
- Good sugar
- Nutty aroma
How it is used
- An English dual-purpose apple of long standing
- Pressed by modern producers for aroma and body
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Bottled alone occasionally for the nutty character. Low acid and no tannin make for a soft, broad cider that needs blending to stand up.
About Blenheim Orange
Blenheim Orange is a large, handsome, slightly dry-fleshed apple with a nutty character that has kept it in cultivation for over two centuries despite an awkward tree. It is triploid, slow to bear, strongly biennial and very vigorous — a poor commercial proposition and a fine garden one.
For cider it offers aroma and sugar rather than acid, which makes it an unusual dessert-fruit contribution. Most dessert and culinary apples go into a blend to sharpen it; Blenheim goes in to broaden it. That limits how useful it is, since a cider blend is rarely short of low-acid material, and it is generally used in small quantity for a specific aromatic effect.
The name records a location rather than a raiser: the original tree grew at Woodstock, near Blenheim Palace, and the older name Kempster’s Pippin preserves the man credited with it. That the grander name displaced the personal one is a small illustration of how apple naming works.
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
Raised at Woodstock near Blenheim Palace and credited to a Mr Kempster. The locality and approximate date are consistently reported; the founding-tree account is traditional.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Blenheim Pippin | Historic spelling | A common older form of the name. |
| Kempster’s Pippin | Historic spelling | The name recording the man credited with raising it before the Blenheim association was attached. |
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.
Golden Delicious
A West Virginia chance seedling of about 1890 that became one of the most planted and most bred-from apples in history — high in sugar, low in acid, and by volume one of the largest single inputs to cider worldwide.
Fuji
A Japanese cross of Ralls Janet and Red Delicious released in 1962, exceptionally sweet and dense and very low in acid, now among the most planted apples in the world and a very large contributor of sugar to modern cider.
Gala
A New Zealand cross of Kidd’s Orange Red and Golden Delicious that became one of the most planted apples in the world — sweet, low in acid, and a very large but structurally unhelpful contributor to modern cider.
Court Royal
A large, pale West Country sweet giving a mild, sugary juice, historically grown as much for the size of the crop as for what it contributed to a blend.
Hangdown
A Devon mild bittersweet named for its weeping habit, sitting close enough to the tannin threshold that sources place it on both sides of it.
Morgan Sweet
A large, early, pale Somerset sweet apple, historically sold as an eating apple and pressed for the earliest cider of the year.
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.
- Can you make cider from bramley apples — You can, and it is normally blended rather than used alone. Bramley is a sharp — Long Ashton recorded 0.85 per cent acid and 0.08 per cent tannin — so it raises acid and drops pH in a bittersweet must, and gives a thin, aggressive cider on its own.
- Do cider apple trees need another variety to pollinate them — Almost always. Most apples are self-incompatible, and several important cider varieties are triploid, which means they produce poor pollen and need two compatible partners rather than one.
- How do you blend cider
- Can you make cider from cox apples — Yes, as an aromatic sharp in a blend. Cox carries about 0.60 per cent acid and only 0.07 per cent tannin on the Long Ashton figures, so it brings acid and aroma and no structure at all.
- How is supermarket cider made
- What is herefordshire 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.
University of Reading / Defra, Brogdale · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The UK national reference collection for apple and pear cultivars. The authority CiderHQ uses for whether two names are the same fruit, which is the central duplicate-resolution problem in cider data.
NIAB (incorporating East Malling Research)
NIAB · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
East Malling developed the M-series apple rootstocks that determine tree size in essentially every modern orchard, cider orchards included. The authority CiderHQ uses for rootstock behaviour.
A Somerset Pomona: The Cider Apples of Somerset
Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001. ISBN 9781874336877 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001, ISBN 9781874336877. The author was Long Ashton’s cider pomologist, which is why this work is registered for Somerset cultivar identity at all — it is the nearest thing to a successor to the station’s own descriptions. No copy was opened. Not digitised in any open collection.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.