Cider apple
Brettacher
A large, acid, exceptionally long-keeping Württemberg apple found as a chance seedling in the early twentieth century, and one of the most planted Most cultivars of southern Germany.
Also written Brettacher Gewürzapfel, Brettacher Sämling.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Sugar and body, Late season
- Origin
- Brettach, Württemberg, Germany
- 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
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Brettacher. That is common outside Europe: the English, French and Spanish systems were each built for their own fruit, and a cultivar grown where none of them applies simply has no class. What the fruit contributes to a blend is described below regardless — the class is a shorthand for that, not a substitute.
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 | Light | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Consistent description in German practice as a large, high-acid, long-keeping Most apple with good sugar. No registered classification scheme covers German fruit.
Large and firm with a high, clean acid and a faint spiced aroma; a serious cooking apple as well as a press one.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Brettacher, 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 Brettacher. 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
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
Late, and it improves considerably in store — the acid softens and the aroma develops over months.
Among the longest-keeping German apples; it will hold into late spring in a cool store.
Recorded as triploid, which means it is a poor pollinator and needs two other cultivars flowering with it to set a full crop.
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.
Juice and pressing
- High acid with good sugar, an unusually useful combination in German fruit
- Very little tannin
- Juice quality holds through long storage
How it is used
- A leading Most cultivar in Baden-Württemberg
- Cooking and long storage
- Widely planted in Streuobstwiesen through the twentieth century
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Its acid-and-sugar balance makes it one of the German cultivars most capable of standing alone, and small producers do bottle it. What it cannot supply is structure.
About Brettacher
Brettacher is the southern German counterpart to the Rhineland’s Bohnapfel, and it is the better fruit. It is large, it keeps as well as anything in the German repertoire, and it combines high acid with enough sugar to give a Most some weight — a combination the Bohnapfel does not manage. It became one of the standard cultivars of Württemberg orchards in the twentieth century on that basis.
Its triploidy matters practically. A triploid produces poor pollen, so it cannot pollinate its neighbours and needs at least two other compatible diploid cultivars flowering alongside it to crop properly. In a mixed meadow orchard that requirement is met automatically; in a block planting it has to be designed for, and orchards that ignored it have cropped badly for reasons that had nothing to do with the site.
Like every German cider cultivar in this file it carries no classification, because no registered scheme covers German fruit and German practice sorts Mostäpfel by must weight and acid rather than into acid-and-tannin families. Recording an empty classification with an explanation is more honest than assigning a Long Ashton class that no German source would recognise.
It found its way into Swiss orchards as well as German ones, which is unsurprising: the Most tradition runs continuously across southern Germany, Austria and the Swiss plateau, and cultivars move along it more freely than national borders suggest.
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
Consistently attributed to a chance seedling found near Brettach in northern Württemberg in the early 1900s. The attribution is repeated in German pomological literature; CiderHQ has not verified an original record.
Why it matters
- One of the few widely planted German cider cultivars with a reasonably well-attested twentieth-century origin
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Similar role
Rheinischer Bohnapfel
The Rhineland equivalent; Brettacher carries more sugar and more aroma.
Similar role
Hauxapfel
Another large Württemberg Most apple, planted in the same orchards.
Often confused with
Boskoop
Both are large, acid, triploid, long-keeping dual-purpose apples used in Most, and they are used interchangeably often enough to be conflated in descriptions.
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.
Boskoop
A large, russeted, extremely acid Dutch apple found at Boskoop in the mid-nineteenth century, grown across northern Europe as a culinary fruit and used heavily in German and Swiss *Most*.
GoldRush
A scab-resistant Golden Delicious descendant released in 1994, unusually high in both sugar and acid, exceptionally long-keeping, and one of the modern American selections that cider makers actively seek out.
Sturmer Pippin
An English-raised apple that became a southern-hemisphere export staple — very late, very long-keeping, firmly acid, and for a century the backbone of the Tasmanian and Nelson orchard trade.
Winesap
A dark red mid-Atlantic apple named for its wine-like juice, one of the very few American cultivars whose name records a cider use, and a reliable acid contributor to eastern blends.
Cripps Pink
A Western Australian cross of Golden Delicious and Lady Williams released in the 1990s, very late and long-seasoned, notable for keeping usable acid alongside high sugar in a hot climate.
Newton Wonder
A large English dual-purpose apple, sharper than a dessert fruit and sweeter than Bramley, pressed on farms and used in modern blends for acid with some substance.
Styles it is characteristic of
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.
- 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
- Is boskoop good for cider — It is one of the apples most often recommended for German and Dutch cider, on high acid rather than on tannin. Belle de Boskoop is a large, russeted, long-keeping culinary apple, and its role in a blend is the same as any sharp: acid and a lower pH.
- What is bohnapfel — A German Mostapfel — a cider and juice apple of the Rhineland — long valued for high acid and a tannin content unusual among German cultivars, which is why it appears in almost every recommendation for German Apfelwein.
- How long can apples be kept before pressing
- What is apfelwein — Apfelwein is the dry, still, tart apple cider of Hessen in Germany, known locally as Ebbelwoi and served from a stoneware jug into a ridged glass. Despite the name it is a cider, not a wine in any technical sense.
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.
Hochschule Geisenheim University — beverage technology
Hochschule Geisenheim · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
German beverage-technology research covering apple wine and fruit juice processing, including the enzymology of clarification.
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.
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.