Cider apple
Campfield
The sweet partner to Harrison in the Newark cider trade — a low-acid New Jersey apple pressed for sugar and softness rather than for structure.
Also written Campfield Sweet, Newark Sweeting.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Essex County, New Jersey
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Campfield. 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 | Very low | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Medium |
Historic American pomological description of a sweet cider apple, corroborated by modern collection growers. No modern juice analysis is held in CiderHQ’s register. These bands were authored from description; published analyses of this fruit have since been transcribed onto the record from named trial programmes and are shown above. The bands are not derived from those figures, which is why this profile is marked as classified rather than measured.
Mild, sweet juice with little sharpness and a faint tannic dryness at the end.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Campfield, 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 diameter | 73 mm | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Juice yield | 351 L/t | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brix | 12.8 °Bx | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| pH | 4.38 pH | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Specific gravity | 1.055 SG | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Total acid | 0.230 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Total tannin | 0.170 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
How these were measured
- Permanganate titration against indigo carmine, reported as tannic acid equivalent
- Titration, reported as malic acid equivalent
- Published as 2.89 inches; converted at 25.4 mm to the inch
- Juice pressed from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Published as 159 mL/lb; converted at 2.204623 lb to the kilogram
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
- 2 May
- Harvest
- 21 October
- Bloom density
- 3.4 of 5
- Productivity
- 2.2 of 5
- Growth habit
- Upright
- Bearing
- Semi Spur
- Alternate bearing
- Semi alternate
- Blind wood
- 2 of 5
- Rootstocks
- MM106
Filed here as sweet.
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.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
A late apple, traditionally left to hang and then sweated before pressing.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Fire blight | moderate | Assessed as a mid-Atlantic risk rather than from a published cultivar-specific trial. |
Juice and pressing
- Low acid, to the point that a blend built on it alone would ferment at a pH that invites bacterial trouble.
- Moderate sugar and a soft, slightly astringent finish.
- Better juice yield than Harrison, which is why the two were pressed together.
How it is used
- Blended with Harrison in the Newark cider trade.
- Pressed for domestic farm cider across northern New Jersey and the lower Hudson Valley.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Its low acid makes a single-varietal Campfield both flabby on the palate and vulnerable in the vat. It was always a blending fruit, and the historic practice of pairing it with Harrison is a direct response to that.
About Campfield
Campfield is the other half of a two-cultivar tradition. Where Harrison brought concentration, Campfield brought bulk and sweetness, and the New Jersey growers pressed them together in a proportion that varied by orchard but always put more Campfield in the mill. It is a reminder that even the most celebrated American cider fruit was worked as part of a blend, not as a soloist.
The fruit is low in acid — low enough that it is a liability on its own. A juice with little malic acid ferments at a pH where lactic and acetic bacteria are comfortable, and the traditional Harrison pairing is as much a microbiological decision as a flavour one, even though nobody in eighteenth-century Newark would have described it that way. Modern makers using Campfield generally still bring acid in from elsewhere.
Its survival is thinner than Harrison’s. Campfield came through in collections rather than in commercial orchards, and there is no modern juice analysis for it in CiderHQ’s register — the blend profile above is derived from description, and is labelled as such. That is the normal condition of the American heritage cider apples: the history is recoverable, the chemistry mostly is not.
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
Named for the Campfield family of Newark; the association is consistent across nineteenth-century American pomological writing.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Newark Sweeting | Historic spelling | New Jersey. The name under which it appears in several nineteenth-century American pomologies, describing its low acid rather than a distinct fruit. |
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.
Douce Moën
The workhorse of Breton cider orchards: a large, pale, very low-acid bittersweet that crops heavily, presses generously, and carries more Breton cider than any other single cultivar.
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.
Somerset Redstreak
A mild bittersweet planted at very large scale in the late twentieth century for its heavy, regular cropping on bush trees, and a fruit whose commercial importance exceeds its character.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- What is harrison apple — A New Jersey cider apple, nearly lost and revived, and the highest-phenolic fruit in a Virginia study of twenty cultivars at 926 mg/L against a Golden Delicious of 218. It is the clearest single number CiderHQ holds for why a cider apple is a different object from an eating apple.
- 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
- What does sweating apples mean — Sweating is holding picked fruit in a heap or store for days or weeks before milling, so it softens, loses water and gains sugar concentration. Perry pears in particular are usually held until they yield to the thumb.
- What is american heritage cider
- Why was cider so important in new england — Apples grew where grapes and barley struggled, water was often unsafe, and every farm could press. Cider was the ordinary drink of colonial New England until temperance and then industrial brewing displaced it.
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.
Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own
Ben Watson, The Countryman Press, first edition 1999; third edition 2013 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: first published 1999 by The Countryman Press, with five editions recorded and a 2008 printing scanned by the Internet Archive as ciderhardsweethi0000benw. The scan is access-restricted to the print-disabled collection. The site had registered this without a year; it now carries one, and the first-edition date matters because a general trade book on cider written in 1999 predates almost the whole of the North American cider revival it is sometimes cited about.
Cider: Making, Using and Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider
Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols, Storey Communications, 1997; first published as Sweet & Hard Cider by Garden Way, 1980 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, and the verification changed what CiderHQ knows about it. The work first appeared in 1980 as Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, & Enjoying It (Garden Way, Charlotte, Vermont) and was retitled for the 1997 Storey edition the site had registered; nine editions are recorded in total. That matters for a source cited on North American practice, because a passage in the 1980 text and a passage in the 1997 one are not interchangeable and neither is the 2003 revision. Two scans exist in the Internet Archive — sweethardciderma0000prou for the 1980 edition and cidermakingusing0000prou for the 1997 — both access-restricted to the lending library and the print-disabled collection, so neither is openable by retrieval.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.