Cider apple
Burrow Hill Early
An early Somerset cider apple associated with Burrow Hill near Kingsbury Episcopi, giving usable juice at the very start of the season.
Also written Burrow Hill Early Apple.
- Classification
- Sweet — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Very early (Late August to early September)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Early season, Sugar and body
- Origin
- Burrow Hill, Kingsbury Episcopi, Somerset
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
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.
A sweet on description: low acid, low tannin. Some accounts place it as a mild bittersweet, and no analysis resolves the question.
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 | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Description in Somerset cultivar records; nothing measured attaches to this fruit.
Gives mild, sweet juice at the very beginning of the season, when almost nothing else is ready.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Burrow Hill Early, 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 Burrow Hill Early. 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
- Very early
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Late August into September. Must be milled at once; it will not wait and will not store.
A very early apple that breaks down within days of ripening.
Early to mid flowering. No pollination group is recorded.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Low acid
- Low tannin
- Available in late August
How it is used
- The first fruit of a south Somerset pressing season
- Used for early cider intended to be drunk young
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Low in acid and low in tannin, so a cider made from it alone is soft and vulnerable. It is used for what it is: something to press in August.
About Burrow Hill Early
Burrow Hill Early does one thing: it ripens in August. A mill that wants to start pressing before September has a very short list of options, and a heavy-cropping early sweet that gives clean juice is worth having even though the juice itself is unremarkable.
The fruit must be used as it comes. It does not hang, does not store and does not tolerate handling, so a grower harvests and mills within a day or two. Because it is low in acid, an early ferment from it needs either blending with sharp fruit or careful sulphiting, since August weather and a high-pH juice are a poor combination.
A note on its regional attribution. Burrow Hill Early is sometimes listed among Welsh and border cultivars. The locality in the name is Burrow Hill in south Somerset, in the parish of Kingsbury Episcopi, and this record places it there. Where a name points clearly at a place, the place is better evidence than a listing.
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
Associated with Burrow Hill in south Somerset — the same district that produced Porter’s Perfection. It is occasionally listed among Welsh and border cultivars, which appears to be a misattribution: the locality is Somerset.
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.
Morgan Sweet
A large, early, pale Somerset sweet apple, historically sold as an eating apple and pressed for the earliest cider of the year.
Reine des Hâtives
A French early sweet apple grown in English cider orchards, and the lowest-acid fruit in the Long Ashton composite table.
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.
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.
- How do you blend cider
- When are cider apples harvested — In the northern hemisphere the cider harvest runs from about September to November, with late bittersweets such as Dabinett and Vilberie coming in last. Cider fruit is generally picked riper than dessert fruit, and often gathered from the ground.
- Why is sulphite added to cider — Sulphur dioxide suppresses spoilage bacteria and wild yeast before fermentation and protects the finished cider from oxidation. How much of it is active depends strongly on pH, which is why low-acid juice is harder to protect.
- What is a traditional west country cider blend — Predominantly bittersweet fruit for body and tannin, with a proportion of sharp fruit for acidity and sometimes a smaller share of bittersharps for both. The exact composition varied by farm and by what was in the orchard.
- What is somerset cider
- Why is cider made in the west country — Because the climate suits apples and disappoints wheat and barley: mild, wet winters, heavy soils and a long growing season. Where grain was hard to grow, orchards took its place and cider took beer’s.
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.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.