Cider apple
Braeburn
A New Zealand chance seedling found near Motueka in the 1950s, sharper and denser than most modern dessert apples, and one of the better commercial cultivars available to a cider blender.
Also written Braeburn.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Sugar and body, Aroma, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Waiwhero, near Motueka in the Nelson district of New Zealand
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Sharp
High acid, low tannin. Includes both purpose-grown sharps and many culinary apples.
Basis: Above about 0.45% w/v acid and below about 0.2% w/v tannin.
Assessed in Fruit grown in western Washington State.
A North American assignment for North American fruit. New Zealand-grown Braeburn has not been classified in any source CiderHQ holds.
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 | High | |
| Tannin | Negligible | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
WSU acid and Brix figures from Washington fruit, with the remaining axes from description.
Dense and firmly sharp with a spicy, slightly pear-like aroma; more assertive than most modern dessert fruit.
Aroma
Descriptors associated with this fruit. Each names a character with a known cause, and association is not a promise — what reaches the glass depends on the ferment as much as on the apple.
- Fresh-cut apple — The smell of a cut apple surface, produced within seconds of the fruit tissue being broken by six-carbon aldehydes released from membrane fats.
- Ripe apple — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
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.
Total acid0.550–0.850 % w/v
Mount Vernon, Washington State, 2010s · Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Reported as malic acid from western Washington. This is not a Nelson figure — CiderHQ holds no New Zealand juice analysis — and Braeburn from Hawke’s Bay or the Western Cape would be expected to carry less acid.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. Measured in percent weight per volume.
Brix12.0–15.0 °Bx
Mount Vernon, Washington State, 2010s · Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Refractometric. Good for a dessert apple, and one reason Braeburn presses better than most of its commercial contemporaries.
Refractometric sugar reading. Measured in degrees brix.
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.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
Late in the Nelson season, which runs from about March to May. The window label above is a position in the season, not a northern-hemisphere month.
Sets very heavily and needs thinning, or fruit size and sugar both suffer.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Bitter pit | high | Badly affected, which downgrades a great deal of fruit to the press. |
| Apple scab | moderate | — |
| Internal browning in storage | moderate | A storage disorder that also sends fruit to the juice trade. |
Juice and pressing
- Good acid for a modern dessert apple — better than Gala, Fuji or Golden Delicious.
- Good sugar, giving reasonable gravity.
- A spicy, slightly pear-like aroma that carries into the ferment.
- Very little tannin.
How it is used
- A major New Zealand export apple and a worldwide commercial crop.
- The base fruit of a great deal of New Zealand and Australian cider.
- Pressed in volume as bitter-pitted and storage-downgraded fruit.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Among the better dessert apples for a single-varietal cider, because it brings acid, sugar and a genuine aroma at once. New Zealand producers make it, and the result is fresh and dense and finishes short for want of tannin.
About Braeburn
New Zealand’s contribution to the world apple crop is out of all proportion to its size, and Braeburn is half of it. It was found growing in a hedgerow near Motueka in the Nelson district around 1952, probably as a Granny Smith seedling, and within forty years it was planted across Europe, North and South America and South Africa.
For cider it is one of the better modern commercial cultivars — which is a modest claim, but a real one. The acid genuinely clears the sharp threshold in a cool season, the sugar is decent, and there is an actual aroma with a spicy, faintly pear-like character that survives fermentation. A New Zealand or Australian maker building a blend from what the local industry grows starts in a considerably better place with Braeburn than with Gala.
A great deal of the Braeburn that reaches a press does so because of bitter pit and internal browning, two storage disorders that make fruit unsellable and leave the juice entirely unaffected. This is the same mechanism described in the Honeycrisp record and it deserves restating: the composition of commercial cider is set as much by which cultivars fail their grading standards as by which ones anyone would choose.
The measurements here are Washington figures, and the caveat is not decorative. The Nelson district has a cool maritime climate not unlike western Washington; Hawke’s Bay and the Western Cape are considerably warmer, and Braeburn grown there is a softer, sweeter, less acid fruit. Without a registered southern-hemisphere source CiderHQ cannot say by how much, and does not guess.
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 · documented
A well-documented chance seedling, found in a hedgerow and propagated commercially from the Braeburn orchard that gave it its name.
Parentage · not established
Generally taken to be a Granny Smith seedling on the basis of fruit character and location. Not formally established.
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Parentage
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.
Browns Apple
The standard Devon sharp: a bright red, heavy-cropping, high-acid apple with almost no tannin, and the fruit most English blends reach for when they need lift.
Golden Russet
The highest-gravity fruit in widespread North American cider use — a small bronze russet from New York whose juice regularly presses above 1.060 and which many revival makers treat as their benchmark cultivar.
McIntosh
The defining apple of eastern Canada and northern New England — an Ontario seedling of about 1811 whose perfumed, high-acid juice is the aromatic foundation of most Quebec and northeastern cider.
Wickson Crab
A Californian dessert crab raised by Albert Etter, exceptional for carrying very high sugar and very high acid at the same time, and now one of the most sought-after cider cultivars in North America.
Baldwin
The dominant New England apple of the nineteenth century until a single catastrophic winter destroyed the orchards; a firm, moderately sharp keeper still used in northeastern cider blends.
Cortland
A 1898 Geneva cross of Ben Davis and McIntosh, released in 1915, whose flesh browns unusually slowly — a property that made it a salad apple and makes its juice unusually resistant to oxidative browning.
Styles it is characteristic of
New Zealand cider
Cider from New Zealand, made in a country with a substantial export apple industry and a small but technically confident craft cider sector.
South African cider
Cider from South Africa, where a very large mainstream category built on Western Cape dessert fruit dominates and a small craft sector works alongside it.
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
- Can you make cider with granny smith
- What does fresh-cut apple mean in a cider tasting note — The smell of a cut apple surface, produced within seconds of the fruit tissue being broken by six-carbon aldehydes released from membrane fats.
- Where does a ripe apple aroma in cider come from — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
- How is supermarket cider made
- Is single variety cider better than a blend — Neither is inherently better and CiderHQ does not rank them. A single varietal shows one cultivar’s character and depends entirely on that fruit being balanced; a blend is how most makers reach balance deliberately.
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.
Washington State University cider research programme
Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center · university · passage verified 2026-08-24
The single most useful open cider dataset CiderHQ has found. The programme’s cultivar performance database gives juice chemistry, orchard behaviour, bloom and harvest timing and cider-maker tasting notes for 73 cultivars grown at one maritime site over fifteen years, and — unusually — publishes its classification thresholds alongside its figures, so the classification can be checked rather than taken on trust. It also states outright that its results diverge from the English ones. Read in full on 2026-08-24 and transcribed into `data/trials/wsu-mount-vernon.ts`; four published figures were found to be impossible and are withheld there with their reasons.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
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.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.