Cider apple
Cap of Liberty
A Somerset bittersweet with a conspicuously ribbed, crowned fruit, named for the revolutionary liberty cap and grown in small quantity for its firm tannin.
Also written Cap of Liberty Apple.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Late season
- Origin
- Somerset
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
- Evidence
- Analysed in 2 sources, watched at 2 trial sites
How it is classified
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.
A medium to full bittersweet, placed on description. No analysis attributable to this cultivar is available.
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 | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Drying | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Medium |
West Country cultivar descriptions of a firm, tannic bittersweet. No measured analysis is attached to this fruit. 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.
Adds firm, drying tannin to a blend and carries little else.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Cap of Liberty, 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 49–57 mm | 57 mm | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 49 mm (45–54) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| Fruit firmness | 49.9 N (39.6–60.2) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Fruit weight | 57 g (42–73) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Juice yield | 549 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 | 8.0 SPI | 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 11.8–13.5 °Bx | 11.8 °Bx | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 13.5 °Bx (10.1–16.9) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| pH2 readings, spanning 3.14–3.50 pH | 3.14 pH | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 3.50 pH (3.46–3.54) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| Fructose | 71.3 g/L (60.9–81.7)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 |
| Glucose | 27.1 g/L (24.5–29.7)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 |
| Sorbitol | 6.4 g/L (5.6–7.2)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 |
| Specific gravity | 1.047 SG | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Sucrose | 32.7 g/L (27.4–38.0)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 |
| Titratable acidity | 5.7 g/L (5.6–5.8) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Total acid | 1.140 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Total phenolics | 1740.0 mg/L (1490.0–1990.0) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Total tannin | 0.200 % 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 2.26 inches; converted at 25.4 mm to the inch
- Juice pressed from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Published as 249 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.
- 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 | Cap of Liberty | Programme median | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Titratable acidity as malic | 5.7 g/L | 4.1 g/L | Above 39 and below 7 of the other 46: highest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | pH | 3.50 | 3.64 | Above 12 and below 28 of the other 40: lower middle |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Total phenolics | 1740 mg/L | 980 mg/L | Above 35 and below 11 of the other 46: highest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Brix | 13.5 °Bx | 12.5 °Bx | Above 34 and below 12 of the other 46: upper middle |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Fruit diameter | 49.0 mm | 65.0 mm | Above 1 and below 45 of the other 46: lowest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Fruit weight | 57 g | 124 g | Above 1 and below 45 of the other 46: lowest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Fruit firmness | 49.9 N | 58.9 N | Above 8 and below 36 of the other 44: lowest quarter |
| The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation | Starch pattern index | 8.0 SPI | 8.0 SPI | Above 20, level with 24, below 0 of the other 44: upper middle |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Total acid | 1.14 % w/v | 0.32 % w/v | Above 50 and below 0 of the other 50: highest quarter |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | pH | 3.14 | 3.92 | Above 2 and below 43 of the other 45: lowest quarter |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Total tannin | 0.20 % w/v | 0.20 % w/v | Above 21, level with 3, below 20 of the other 44: upper middle |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Specific gravity | 1.047 | 1.051 | Above 9, level with 3, below 32 of the other 44: lowest quarter |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Brix | 11.8 °Bx | 12.5 °Bx | Above 14, level with 2, below 34 of the other 50: lower middle |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Juice yield | 549.0 L/t | 545.0 L/t | Above 24 and below 18 of the other 42: upper middle |
| The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial | Fruit diameter | 57.0 mm | 63.0 mm | Above 5, level with 1, below 37 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
- 5 May
- Harvest
- 7 October
- Bloom density
- 4.2 of 5
- Productivity
- 3.1 of 5
- Growth habit
- Semi Upright
- Bearing
- Spur
- Alternate bearing
- Yes
- Blind wood
- 1 of 5
- Rootstocks
- MM.106, Bud 9
Filed here as bittersharp, though the juice measured at this site falls in the sharp quadrant of the site’s own thresholds.
WSU lists this fruit as bittersharp — the class it carries in England — but the juice measured at Mount Vernon falls in the sharp quadrant of the site’s own thresholds. Neither reading is an error. A class assigned on acid and tannin describes fruit grown somewhere, and this is somewhere else.
Color gold to slightly amber; moderately bitter, bittersharp. Unbalanced, bitterness lingers, body viscous but not heavy. Long bitter aftertaste, sour, need to have acids balanced, complex spicy flavors will be enhanced when balanced.
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.
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 161830, held as “Cap of Liberty”
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
- Late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Late October into November.
Late-flowering. No pollination group is recorded.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Low acid
- Firm tannin
How it is used
- A tannin component of Somerset farmhouse blends
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
A structural blending fruit with no acid to balance it.
About Cap of Liberty
Cap of Liberty is the sort of apple that survives because it is recognisable. The fruit is strongly ribbed and crowned at the eye, giving it a shape that a grower can identify at a glance, and the name attaches it to the Phrygian cap that stood for revolution in the 1790s. That places the naming and hints at the sympathies of whoever did it; it says nothing about when the tree first fruited.
The juice is a firm, low-acid bittersweet with tannin that dries the palate. It has never been planted in quantity and is now grown chiefly by collections and by producers interested in the older Somerset fruit. No analysis can be attributed to it with confidence, so this record gives a described-confidence profile and no measurements — an honest limit rather than a gap to be filled.
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
The name refers to the Phrygian cap of the French and American revolutions, which suggests a naming date in the decades after 1789 and proves nothing about when the tree was raised. No origin is recorded.
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.
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.
Yarlington Mill
A vigorous Somerset bittersweet, conical and red-striped, giving a cider with more aromatic lift than most of its class and a reputation for fruitiness that the tannin figures do not explain.
Chisel Jersey
A hard, high-tannin Somerset bittersweet used in small proportion for structure, and one of the fruit most often reached for when a blend needs backbone rather than bulk.
Fréquin Rouge
A small, hard, deeply tannic Norman bitter apple that gives a French blend its grip, and the most widely planted member of a whole family of local Fréquins that are not all the same fruit.
Harry Masters’ Jersey
A medium bittersweet from the Yarlington district, valued for tannin that is full without being harsh, and among the more reliable croppers in a class that is generally unreliable.
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.
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 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
- What is chisel jersey
- What is tannin balancing
- 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.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.