Cider apple
Bulmer’s Foxwhelp
A twentieth-century Foxwhelp selection distributed under the Bulmer name, keeping the family’s very high acid in a fruit chosen for orchard reliability.
Also written Bulmers Foxwhelp, Bulmer Foxwhelp.
- Classification
- Bittersharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Early (September)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Early season
- Origin
- Herefordshire
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Bittersharp
High acid and high tannin together — the rarest and, for a single-varietal cider, the most useful class.
Basis: Above about 0.45% w/v acid and above about 0.2% w/v tannin.
A bittersharp with very high acid, in line with the rest of the Foxwhelp group.
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 high | |
| Tannin | Moderate | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
The Long Ashton bittersharp placement and the acid range for the Foxwhelp group, rather than an analysis assignable to this selection alone.
Supplies very high acid and a low pH, with the family’s scented character somewhat muted.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Bulmer’s Foxwhelp, 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.
2 separate analyses of total acid. They are shown as they were measured, in their own contexts, and are not averaged — the same fruit grown somewhere else can genuinely give a different number.
Total acid0.750–1.050 % w/v
Long Ashton, Somerset, England, Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985 · Titration of pressed juice, reported as malic acid · National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol
A wide range, deliberately. Analyses of the Foxwhelp group cannot always be assigned confidently to one selection rather than another.
Total acid1.910 % w/v
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England, 1905–1975 · Titration with alkali, reported as malic acid. Composite figure across many seasons; the source states neither the sample count nor the year of any individual analysis. · Andrew Lea
A composite of Long Ashton analyses reaching CiderHQ through three hands: the station’s own work, a printed compilation (Bulmer’s Pomona, 1987, and Beech and Carr, 1977), and a transcription of that compilation. CiderHQ has seen only the transcription.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. Measured in percent weight per volume.
Total tannin0.220 % w/v
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England, 1905–1975 · Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figure across many seasons; the source states neither the sample count nor the year of any individual analysis. · Andrew Lea
A composite of Long Ashton analyses reaching CiderHQ through three hands: the station’s own work, a printed compilation (Bulmer’s Pomona, 1987, and Beech and Carr, 1977), and a transcription of that compilation. CiderHQ has seen only the transcription. A permanganate figure. It is not comparable with a Folin–Ciocalteu total-phenolics figure for the same fruit, and the two can differ by a factor of two.
The phenolic fraction responsible for bitterness and astringency. Measured in percent weight per volume.
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.
Long Ashton composite cider apple analyses
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England · 1905–1975 · Andrew Lea
Maritime and mild, with wet autumns and few hard frosts — the climate the English cider cultivars were selected in, and the reason their acid and tannin figures here are the ones the rest of the world has spent a century comparing its own fruit against.
- Held as
- Listed as “Bulmers / Broxwood Foxwhelp”, early season
Filed here as bittersharp.
Marked in the source as one of the cultivars “generally regarded as having that elusive and hard-to-define character of vintage quality”. The compiler marks fourteen of the forty-two that way, and does not say who regards them so or on what evidence.
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.
The source prints one row for “Bulmers / Broxwood Foxwhelp” and does not separate the two. CiderHQ holds them as two records, because they are two distinct trees with distinct histories, and attaches the single published row to both with this note rather than choosing one or inventing a split.
Freshly expressed juice, not finished cider. Acid by straight titration against alkali, reported as malic acid; tannin by Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figures across seventy years of analyses: the source gives neither a sample count nor the year of any individual reading.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Early
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Late September into October.
Selected for better cropping than the original, and by report achieves it.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Canker | moderate | — |
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Very high malic acid
- Moderate tannin
- Low pH
How it is used
- Acid correction in commercial Herefordshire blends
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Less often bottled alone than Broxwood Foxwhelp, and generally treated as a blending fruit.
About Bulmer’s Foxwhelp
Bulmer’s Foxwhelp is a company selection: H P Bulmer took Foxwhelp material, picked a line that cropped acceptably, and put it into Herefordshire orchards under the firm’s name. The result keeps the family’s defining property — malic acid far above anything else grown in England — in a tree that a commercial grower can live with.
Its purpose in the industry was correction rather than character. Herefordshire cider built on Michelin and Bulmer’s Norman needs acid from somewhere, and a small planting of a Foxwhelp selection supplies it more cheaply than buying culinary fruit. That is an unglamorous role and it kept the Foxwhelp name in commercial orchards through a period when the original was disappearing from them.
It shares the family’s identity difficulty. Material has moved between orchards under the bare name Foxwhelp for a century and a half, and the three records in this file — the original, the Broxwood selection and this one — describe what is documented, not three cleanly separable clones. Anyone needing certainty about a particular tree should go to the collections rather than to the label.
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
Selected and distributed by H P Bulmer from Foxwhelp material. The company’s role is documented in outline; the specific parent tree and the date are not.
Parentage · not established
Derived from Foxwhelp material. Whether it is a sport, a seedling or a re-selection of an existing local strain is not established.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Foxwhelp | Disputed identity | Like the Broxwood selection, frequently listed under the bare family name. |
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.
Foxwhelp
The oldest named English cider apple still grown, a Herefordshire bittersharp of extraordinary acidity whose identity has fractured into a family of sports, seedlings and impostors.
Breakwell’s Seedling
An early Monmouthshire cider apple raised in the early twentieth century, sharp with a little tannin, and widely grown on both sides of the border.
Broxwood Foxwhelp
A Herefordshire selection of Foxwhelp from Broxwood, keeping much of the parent’s acidity in a fruit that is easier to grow, and the form most commonly planted today.
Hewe’s Crab
The historic cider crab of Virginia — small, hard, very high in acid and unusually tannic for an American apple, and probably a hybrid between a cultivated apple and a native crab.
Kingston Black
The most celebrated English single-varietal cider apple: a small dark-red bittersharp carrying acid and tannin in one fruit, and a tree difficult enough that its reputation has always outrun its plantings.
Stoke Red
A small, dense, dark-red Somerset bittersharp carrying both high acid and substantial tannin, and the most reliable alternative to Kingston Black for a single-varietal cider.
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 i balance acid and tannin in a blend — Acid and tannin do different jobs and cannot substitute for each other: acid gives freshness and microbiological safety, tannin gives structure and length. A blend short of acid tastes flabby however tannic it is.
- How do you blend cider
- How is supermarket cider made
- What are the three counties in cider — Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire — the block of country where England’s cider and, above all, its perry have historically concentrated.
- What is foxwhelp
- 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.
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.
Hereford Museum of Cider collections and interpretation
Hereford Cider Museum Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.