Cider apple
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.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bittersweet base, Tannin and structure
- Origin
- Pays de Caux, Seine-Maritime, Normandy
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
- Evidence
- Analysed in 2 sources, watched at 2 trial sites
How it is classified
Classified under more than one system. The systems use different thresholds and were built for different fruit, so the answers can legitimately differ — that is a fact about the schemes, not a contradiction.
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.
Long Ashton classification
Bittersweet
Low acid, high tannin. The class that has no real equivalent in dessert fruit and that defines West Country cider.
Basis: Below about 0.45% w/v acid and above about 0.2% w/v tannin.
Assessed in Fruit grown in Somerset from the English introductions..
Long Ashton recorded it as a full bittersweet — that is, towards the tannic end of the English class — where the French scheme keeps it in the bittersweet family rather than promoting it to amère. The schemes are drawing their lines at different heights.
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 drink will be.
| Axis | Typical | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Acid | Low | |
| Tannin | Firm | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | Marked | |
| Astringency | Drying | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Full |
Dual placement in the French bittersweet family and the Long Ashton bittersweet class, with English analysis putting it at the tannic end.
A full, rounded bitterness with decent sugar behind it and enough body to be noticed in a blend at modest proportions.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Bramtot, 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 diameter2 readings, spanning 56–57 mm | 56 mm | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 57 mm (50–65) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| Fruit firmness | 71.1 N (59.8–82.5) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Fruit weight | 82 g (52–112) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Juice yield | 825 L/t | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Starch pattern index | 7.7 SPI (7.2–8.2) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brix2 readings, spanning 13.1–18.7 °Bx | 13.1 °Bx | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 18.7 °Bx (18.2–19.3) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| pH2 readings, spanning 4.04–4.53 pH | 4.04 pH | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 4.53 pH (3.79–5.27) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| Fructose | 92.1 g/L (74.2–110.0)Not used in comparisons: see note below | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Glucose | 34.1 g/L (22.0–46.2)Not used in comparisons: see note below | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Sorbitol | 28.7 g/L (23.7–33.7)Not used in comparisons: see note below | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Specific gravity | 1.057 SG | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Sucrose | 42.4 g/L (18.7–66.1)Not used in comparisons: see note below | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Titratable acidity | 2.2 g/L | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Total acid | 0.320 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Total phenolics | 3530.0 mg/L (3500.0–3560.0) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Total tannin | 0.500 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
3 properties here have been measured more than once. The readings are shown as they were taken and are deliberately not averaged — climate, season, ripeness at picking, the age of the tree and the analytical method all move these numbers, and a single figure would hide every one of them. Where a spread is given below a property, it is the distance between separate studies, not the variation within any one of them.
How these were measured
- Permanganate titration against indigo carmine, reported as tannic acid equivalent
- Titration, reported as malic acid equivalent
- Published as 2.21 inches; converted at 25.4 mm to the inch
- Juice pressed from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Published as 374 mL/lb; converted at 2.204623 lb to the kilogram
- Mean of the fruit sampled per accession; where a bracket is shown it is one standard deviation either side of the mean, not the observed range. Published to two decimal places and shown at the precision CiderHQ displays for the unit.
- Mean of the fruit sampled per accession; where a bracket is shown it is one standard deviation either side of the mean, not the observed range.
- Cornell generic starch–iodine chart, 1–8, where 1 is no hydrolysis and 8 is complete. Mean of replicate fruit; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of it.
- Penetrometer, mean of replicate fruit; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Refractometer on pressed juice. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Titration to pH 8.1 with sodium hydroxide, reported as malic acid equivalents. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- The starting pH recorded by the autotitrator before titration, on juice stored frozen at −80 °C and thawed; the source describes no separate pH measurement. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Folin–Ciocalteu assay against gallic acid standards, published in grams per litre of gallic acid equivalent and stored here as milligrams per litre by exact conversion. The source converts these figures to Löwenthal tannic acid equivalents, by a laboratory factor of 1.6, only to sort its accessions into classes; the figure here is the unconverted one.
- Enzymatic assay (Megazyme). Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- D-sorbitol/xylitol assay kit (Megazyme), sorbitol dehydrogenase method. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Glucose, fructose, sucrose and sorbitol: Not used in any distribution, ranking or comparison. This programme’s enzyme-assayed sugars do not reconcile with its own refractometer readings across the collection — for many varieties the sugars add up to more than the Brix reading allows. The figures were checked against the thesis’s own tables in October 2026 and are transcribed exactly: the disagreement is in the published source, which does not say which reading is wrong. Proportions between glucose, fructose and sucrose, which came from one assay, are still used in summary.
- A chart position, not a quantity. Almost every accession here scored at or near 8, which says the fruit was picked at or past full starch conversion rather than that the cultivars are alike.
- One harvest at one site. Soluble solids move several degrees between seasons and with crop load.
- The published standard deviation on this reading equals or exceeds the mean, so the interval it describes runs below zero. It is not reproduced; the mean is.
- A Folin–Ciocalteu figure counts everything that reduces the reagent, not tannin alone, and is not interchangeable with a Löwenthal permanganate figure for the same juice. Compare this reading with other Folin–Ciocalteu readings in gallic acid equivalents.
Where it sits among the varieties each programme measured
| Programme | Property | Bramtot | Programme median | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Titratable acidity as malic | 2.2 g/L | 4.1 g/L | Above 12, level with 3, below 31 of the other 46: lower middle |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | pH | 4.53 | 3.64 | Above 35 and below 5 of the other 40: highest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Total phenolics | 3530 mg/L | 980 mg/L | Above 45 and below 1 of the other 46: highest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Brix | 18.7 °Bx | 12.5 °Bx | Above 46 and below 0 of the other 46: highest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Fruit diameter | 57.0 mm | 65.0 mm | Above 6, level with 2, below 38 of the other 46: lowest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Fruit weight | 82 g | 124 g | Above 6 and below 40 of the other 46: lowest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Fruit firmness | 71.1 N | 58.9 N | Above 33 and below 11 of the other 44: highest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Starch pattern index | 7.7 SPI | 8.0 SPI | Above 13, level with 2, below 29 of the other 44: lower middle |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Total acid | 0.32 % w/v | 0.32 % w/v | Above 25, level with 2, below 23 of the other 50: upper middle |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | pH | 4.04 | 3.92 | Above 24 and below 21 of the other 45: upper middle |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Total tannin | 0.50 % w/v | 0.20 % w/v | Above 42 and below 2 of the other 44: highest quarter |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Specific gravity | 1.057 | 1.051 | Above 36, level with 2, below 6 of the other 44: highest quarter |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Brix | 13.1 °Bx | 12.5 °Bx | Above 32, level with 1, below 17 of the other 50: upper middle |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Juice yield | 825.0 L/t | 545.0 L/t | Above 42 and below 0 of the other 42: highest quarter |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Fruit diameter | 56.0 mm | 63.0 mm | Above 4 and below 39 of the other 43: lowest quarter |
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
- 10 May
- Harvest
- 15 September
- Bloom density
- 4.1 of 5
- Productivity
- 3.2 of 5
- Growth habit
- –
- Bearing
- –
- Alternate bearing
- Semi-alternate
- Rootstocks
- M9
Filed here as bittersweet.
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.
USDA-PGRU Malus germplasm characterisation
USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, in the Finger Lakes region of western New York State · 2017 · Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit
Humid continental, with cold winters and warm summers moderated by the Finger Lakes — a sharper seasonal swing than any of the European cider regions whose fruit the collection holds, and warm enough in late summer to bring acid down faster than a maritime autumn does.
- Held as
- PI 158731, held as “Bramtot”
- Published standard deviation on titratable acidity, published as mean 2.2 g/L, standard deviation 3.3 g/L. The deviation equals or exceeds the mean, so the interval it describes runs below zero. Something in the replicates for this accession went wrong, and CiderHQ publishes the mean without pretending to know the spread.
One harvest season. Fruit assessed for weight, diameter, starch pattern index on the Cornell 1–8 chart and flesh firmness by penetrometer; juice pressed and measured for soluble solids by refractometer, titratable acidity by titration to pH 8.1 as malic acid, pH as the autotitrator’s starting reading on juice that had been frozen, total phenolics by Folin–Ciocalteu assay as gallic acid equivalent, and glucose, fructose, sucrose and sorbitol by enzymatic assay.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
Mid-season in both countries; in England it ripens with the main bittersweet crop, which is one reason it fitted into English practice easily.
Its alternation was one of the complaints recorded against it in English orchards.
106 other cultivars on this site with a recorded group could pollinate it — diploids flowering in group 4 or a group either side. See which, with their class and harvest window.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Canker | high | A recurring problem in English plantings, and part of why it lost ground to Michelin. |
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Full tannin with good sugar
- Low acid
- Ferments willingly
How it is used
- A tannic component in Norman blends
- A recognised bittersweet in English cider orchards from the 1880s until the mid-twentieth century
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Its combination of tannin and sugar would carry a single ferment better than most French bitters, and English growers occasionally treated it that way; the practice never became established.
About Bramtot
Bramtot is one of the fruits that makes the 1880s import of Norman cultivars into England legible. English cider at the time was widely regarded, by its own trade, as inferior to Norman cider, and a deliberate effort was made to bring French bittersweets across the Channel. Bramtot, Michelin, Médaille d’Or and Reine des Pommes were among the fruit that arrived, and they were planted, analysed and argued about for decades afterwards.
The analytical result is instructive. Long Ashton recorded Bramtot as a full bittersweet — high tannin by the English standard — while French practice keeps it in the ordinary bittersweet family rather than in the bitter one. That is not a contradiction: the English scheme’s bittersweet class spans everything above 0.2% w/v tannin with low acid, so it contains fruit the French system would separate into two families. Cross-scheme comparison loses information in exactly this direction.
In English orchards its problem was canker, which is a real cultivar-by-climate interaction rather than a defect of the fruit. Norman orchards on well-drained slopes handled it; wet Herefordshire clay did not, and growers who had planted Bramtot on the strength of its juice found themselves cutting out infected wood. Michelin, which resisted canker better and cropped more regularly, replaced it.
It survives in French orchards and in English collections. Where a modern English producer works with it, they are generally doing so with an eye to the historical question — what English cider might have become if the imports had taken hold differently — which is a legitimate reason to keep a cultivar alive.
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
Named after a Norman family or locality of the same name. The English record of its introduction in the 1880s is firmer than the French record of its raising.
Why it matters
- One of the French imports that shaped the English bittersweet population before Michelin displaced most of them
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Traditional blend partner
Michelin
Arrived in England together and competed for the same orchard space; Michelin won on cropping and canker resistance.
Traditional blend partner
Médaille d’Or
The third of the well-known 1880s imports.
Similar role
Moulin à Vent
Another Norman bittersweet from the same import wave and the same functional class.
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.
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.
Nehou
A Norman bittersweet long grown in English orchards, giving high tannin from a small, late, hard fruit and cropping better than most of its class.
Reine des Pommes
A dark red Norman bittersweet with a grand name and a solid reputation, imported into England alongside Michelin and Médaille d’Or and analysed there as a bittersweet of some quality.
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.
Médaille d’Or
A small, russeted Norman bittersweet with exceptionally high tannin and sugar, famous in England out of all proportion to how much of it anyone has ever managed to grow.
Dabinett
The most widely planted English cider apple: a small, late-ripening bittersweet whose soft, full tannin ferments into a cider that needs almost nothing added to 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
- What is a michelin apple
- 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.
- What is maceration in cider making — Maceration is letting milled pomace stand before pressing, so that enzymes soften the tissue and phenolics and aroma move from the skins into the juice. It raises both colour and tannin, and raises the risk of oxidation with them.
- What is medaille d or
- 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.
Long Ashton Research Station cider fruit analyses
National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol · research institute · registered as competent for this subject · covers 1903–2003
The foundational body of cider-fruit science in English. Long Ashton produced the acid-and-tannin classification that divides cider apples into sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp, and analysed hundreds of cultivars grown at its Somerset site. Its figures are historic measurements of specific fruit at a specific place, not universal constants — a distinction CiderHQ preserves in every measurement record that cites it.
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.
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.