Cider apple
Cimetière
A late French bittersweet in the English composite table, low in acid and well supplied with tannin, whose name means “graveyard”.
Also written Cimetiere, Cimetière de Blangy.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bittersweet base, Tannin and structure, Late season
- Origin
- Normandy, France
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
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.
Long Ashton recorded 0.16% acid and 0.28% tannin — low acid with substantial tannin, firmly in the bittersweet quadrant.
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 | Firm | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Marked | |
| Astringency | Drying | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Full |
The Long Ashton composite: 0.16% acid, 0.28% tannin.
A soft, tannic juice with almost no acid — a classic Normandy bittersweet shape.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Cimetière, 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.
Total acid0.160 % 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 tannin0.280 % 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 “Cimetiere”, late season
Filed here as bittersweet.
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
- Late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Late in the Long Ashton table, alongside Dabinett, Vilberie and the other heavy bittersweets.
Not directly evidenced. The tendency is general among late French bittersweets and is recorded as a class characteristic rather than as an observation of this cultivar.
Late bittersweets of this kind are the fruit traditionally left to sweat before milling.
Not recorded in any source CiderHQ has verified.
Juice and pressing
- Tannin of 0.28% w/v
- Very low acid at 0.16% w/v
- Ratio of tannin to acid close to two to one, which is the Normandy bittersweet signature
How it is used
- Blended for tannin in a late-season pressing.
- Grown in Normandy and among the French cultivars planted in English orchards.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
A juice at 0.16% acid gives a cider with nothing to lift it, whatever the tannin is doing.
About Cimetière
Cimetière is a Normandy bittersweet that Long Ashton measured at 0.16 per cent acid and 0.28 per cent tannin, and its name means graveyard. That is less morbid than it sounds: a churchyard was one of the few places in a French village where a tree could stand undisturbed for a hundred years, and a good many found cultivars are named for exactly such a spot.
The composition is the Normandy shape in miniature — tannin nearly twice the acid, and the acid very low. English cider fruit has never been short of sharpness; what the English industry imported French cultivars for was tannin that arrived without acid attached, so that a blend could be built with the two adjusted independently. Cimetière does that job cleanly.
Its lateness reinforces it. Late bittersweets are the fruit traditionally sweated — held after picking until the flesh softens and the juice concentrates — and the practice is worth more on fruit like this, where there is little acid to be lost and a great deal of sugar and tannin to be gained.
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
A Normandy cider apple. The name means “cemetery” or “graveyard”, and in French orchard naming that generally records where the original tree stood — a churchyard being one of the few places a tree was left undisturbed for a century.
Why it matters
- Its acid-to-tannin ratio is close to the extreme of the bittersweet class, which is what a maker importing French fruit was after: tannin without the acid that English sharps already provided in abundance.
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.
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.
Ashton Brown Jersey
A late, full bittersweet selected at Long Ashton from Somerset material, giving high tannin and a long finish from a tree that crops poorly.
Nehou
A Norman bittersweet long grown in English orchards, giving high tannin from a small, late, hard fruit and cropping better than most of its class.
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 the difference between french cidre and english cider — French cidre is usually sweeter, weaker and more carbonated, because fermentation is arrested while sugar remains. English cider is more often fermented dry and finished still or lightly sparkling, and is stronger for it.
- 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 does the pays d auge aoc actually require — Pure cider apple juice from a closed variety list, a blend at least 70% phenolic varieties and at most 25% acidulée, compulsory maceration and pectic settling, capped orchard yields, and a sparkle that may only come from fermentation finishing in the bottle over at least six weeks. Pasteurisation, added water, added sugar and gasification are all prohibited.
- What is normandy cider
- What is tannin balancing
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 Apple Compositional Data
Andrew Lea · reference work · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 1905–2014
Registered separately from the same author’s Science of Cidermaking, and at a lower tier, because its evidential character is different. The Science of Cidermaking is a chemist writing about work he did; this page is that chemist transcribing other people’s tables, and CiderHQ can vouch for the transcription without vouching for what lies behind it. It carries three tables: the Long Ashton composite for forty-two cultivars, credited to Bulmer’s Pomona (1987) and Beech and Carr (1977); a late-1970s New York analysis credited to unpublished work printed in a 1989 food-technology chapter; and a 2014 Virginia polyphenol study. Every figure CiderHQ takes from it records that chain.
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.
Expert reference Evidence standard for this record. What that means.