Fruit
How cider apples are classified
Sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp is the scheme most English-language cider writing uses, and it is the one most often mistaken for a universal standard. It is not one.
Described in full
- The two axes
- Total acid, as malic acid in percent weight per volume of pressed juice, runs up the vertical axis. Tannin, also in percent weight per volume, runs along the horizontal axis. Both thresholds are drawn as dashed lines.
- The thresholds
- Acid divides at roughly 0.45% w/v; tannin at roughly 0.2% w/v. These are the figures the Long Ashton scheme states, derived from Somerset fruit analysed in the first half of the twentieth century.
- Sweet, lower left
- Low acid and low tannin. Contributes fermentable sugar and softness but no structure. Examples on the figure: Sweet Coppin and Taylor’s.
- Bittersweet, lower right
- Low acid with high tannin. The class with no equivalent in dessert fruit and the backbone of West Country blends. Examples: Dabinett and Yarlington Mill.
- Sharp, upper left
- High acid with low tannin. Supplies acid lift and a lower pH, which reduces bacterial spoilage risk. Examples: Browns Apple and Court Royal.
- Bittersharp, upper right
- High acid and high tannin together — the rarest class, and the one the recognised single-varietal cultivars cluster in. Examples: Kingston Black and Foxwhelp.
- What the quadrants do not tell you
- The scheme measures total tannin, not the distribution of chain lengths that decides how much of the effect is bitterness and how much astringency. It says nothing about aroma, nitrogen or fermentation behaviour.
- Fruit near a boundary
- Several cultivars sit close enough to a threshold that sources place them on different sides in good faith — Kingston Black is recorded as both bittersharp and sharp. The same fruit grown somewhere warmer commonly ripens to lower acid and can cross a line.
Described in full
- Axes
- Tannin in grams per litre runs up the vertical axis with gridlines at 2 and 3. Acidity, expressed as sulphuric acid in grams per litre, runs left to right with gridlines at 3 and 4.5. Every region is labelled in French and in English, and every boundary is written as a number on the axis.
- Douce — sweet
- Tannin below 2 g/L and acid below 3 g/L. The low-left region.
- Douce-amère — bittersweet
- Tannin between 2 and 3 g/L and acid below 3 g/L. A band the English scheme has no separate name for; Long Ashton puts everything above 2 g/L of tannin into one bittersweet class.
- Amère — bitter
- Tannin above 3 g/L and acid below 3 g/L. The top-left region, and the fruit used in the smallest proportion.
- Acidulée — sharp
- Tannin below 2 g/L and acid between 3 and 4.5 g/L.
- Aigre — acid
- Tannin below 2 g/L and acid above 4.5 g/L. The right-hand region, used sparingly for acid correction.
- The floor of the whole scheme
- A marked line at 0.6 g/L of tannin runs across the bottom. The same specifications define a cider apple as one whose juice carries at least that much total tannic acid, native or oxidised. Fruit below the line is a dessert apple and the scheme does not classify it at all.
- The unit warning
- The acid axis is sulphuric acid, which is the French convention. English and American figures are conventionally reported as malic acid, and the same juice gives a different number on the two scales. A French threshold and an English one cannot be compared without converting, and nothing on a label says which convention a figure used.
Described in full
- Layout
- Three columns — England, France, Spain — and eleven rows, ordered from low acid at the top to high acid at the bottom. A row with boxes in more than one column is a place where the schemes broadly agree; a dash marks a scheme with no category there at all.
- The shape of each column
- England fills four rows, France five, Spain nine. That asymmetry is the figure’s subject. The English four-way scheme is not a simplified version of the Spanish one; it divides the same fruit on a coarser grid, and a fruit that England has one word for may be two different things in Asturias.
- Where all three agree
- Sweet, Douce and Dulce describe the same fruit: low acid, low phenolics, contributing sugar and body. This is the only row filled in all three columns and uncontroversial.
- What Spain has and neither other does
- Four compound blocks — dulce-amargo, amargo-semiácido, semiácido-amargo and amargo-ácido — have no English or French counterpart. Word order in these names is the classification: semiácido-amargo is chiefly semi-acid with a bitter edge, amargo-semiácido is chiefly bitter with semi-acid behind it, and they are two different fruits.
- The semi-acid gap
- The Asturian semiácido block and its two compounds cover the middle of the acid range. English has no middle at all — fruit is sharp above 0.45% acid and sweet below it — so any translation into English loses three Spanish categories at once.
- What France has and England does not
- French practice separates Amère, more tannic than douce-amère and used in smaller proportion, and Aigre, the most acidic class. English names neither, so a French amère is simply called a bittersweet in English writing.
- The thresholds do not line up either
- Even where two schemes name the same thing, they measure it differently. Asturian acidity is published as grams per litre of sulphuric acid; English acidity as a percentage of malic acid. The same juice reads about 1.37 times lower in the first convention, so the boxes are not interchangeable even when the words are.
- Why this matters
- A cultivar can legitimately sit in different boxes under two schemes, and in different boxes under the same scheme in two climates. This is why every classification statement on the site names its system, its source and, where the source gives one, its measured basis.
A classification of cider fruit is a tool for predicting how a blend will behave. Different people, working with different fruit in different climates for different methods, built different tools. A French classifier sorts the same apples into five families on different cut-offs; an Asturian one uses thresholds fitted to Asturian cultivars and has a semi-sharp class the English scheme has no name for; a modern North American programme may not classify at all and simply publish the numbers.
None of them is wrong. They answer slightly different questions — and the same cultivar can legitimately land in different boxes under two of them, or in different boxes under the same one in two climates, because acid falls and sugar rises as fruit ripens further in a warmer season.
That is why every classification statement on CiderHQ names its system, and why the cultivar pages show more than one where more than one exists.
9 cultivars on CiderHQ carry a classification under more than one system. Those records are the interesting ones: they show where the schemes agree, and where a French amère has no English equivalent above bittersweet.
Long Ashton classification
The English four-way split of cider apples by acid and tannin: sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp. The scheme most English-language cider writing uses, and the one most often mistaken for a universal standard.
Who devised it: Devised at the National Fruit and Cider Institute, later the Long Ashton Research Station, from analyses of fruit grown in Somerset during the first half of the twentieth century.
What it sorts on: Two thresholds applied to pressed juice: total acid at roughly 0.45% w/v as malic acid, and tannin at roughly 0.2% w/v. Fruit is placed in one of four quadrants according to whether it falls above or below each.
Cultivars classified under it here: 133
The categories
| Category | What it is | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| Sweet | Low acid and low tannin. Fruit that contributes sugar, alcohol and body but little structure or sharpness.Below about 0.45% w/v acid and below about 0.2% w/v tannin. | Fermentable sugar and softness. A blend built only from sweet fruit ferments to something flat and, because its pH stays high, microbiologically vulnerable. |
| Bittersweet | Low acid, high tannin. The class that has no real equivalent in dessert fruit and that defines West Country cider.Below about 0.45% w/v acid and above about 0.2% w/v tannin. | Bitterness, astringency, body and ageing capacity. Bittersweets are the backbone of traditional English blends and are close to undrinkable eaten raw. |
| Sharp | High acid, low tannin. Includes both purpose-grown sharps and many culinary apples.Above about 0.45% w/v acid and below about 0.2% w/v tannin. | Acid lift and a lower pH, which brightens the palate and materially reduces the risk of bacterial spoilage. |
| Bittersharp | High acid and high tannin together — the rarest and, for a single-varietal cider, the most useful class.Above about 0.45% w/v acid and above about 0.2% w/v tannin. | Both structure and freshness from one fruit, which is why the recognised single-varietal cultivars cluster here. |
What it does not tell you
- The thresholds were derived from fruit grown at one site in one climate. The same cultivar grown somewhere warmer commonly ripens to lower acid and can cross a boundary.
- It measures total tannin, not the distribution of tannin chain lengths — and that distribution, not the total, decides how much of the effect is bitterness and how much is astringency.
- It says nothing about aroma, nitrogen, sugar level or fermentation behaviour, all of which matter as much to a finished cider.
- A number of cultivars sit close enough to a threshold that different sources place them on different sides in good faith.
French cider apple families
Classification des variétés à cidre
A five-family French scheme built on the same two axes as the English one but cut differently, with a middle class the English system has no name for — and, unusually, with its thresholds written into law.
Who devised it: Maintained in French cider practice, codified by the Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles, and given numeric boundaries in the cahiers des charges of the Cidre de Bretagne and Cidre de Normandie protected geographical indications.
What it sorts on: Tannin and acid content of the juice in grams per litre, with acidity expressed as sulphuric acid. The Cidre de Bretagne IGP specification tabulates the boundaries, and the same table appears in the Cidre de Normandie IGP specification.
Cultivars classified under it here: 39
The categories
| Category | What it is | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| SweetDouce | Low acid, low tannin. Sugar and body.Tannin below 2 g/L and acidity below 3 g/L as H₂SO₄. | Alcohol and softness. |
| BittersweetDouce-amère | Low acid with substantial tannin.Tannin 2 to 3 g/L and acidity below 3 g/L as H₂SO₄. | The structural core of a Normandy blend. |
| BitterAmère | Very high tannin with low acid — more tannic than the bittersweet family and used in smaller proportion.Tannin above 3 g/L and acidity below 3 g/L as H₂SO₄. | Concentrated bitterness and astringency; rarely more than a fraction of a blend. |
| SharpAcidulée | High acid with low tannin.Tannin below 2 g/L and acidity 3 to 4.5 g/L as H₂SO₄. | Freshness and a safer pH. |
| AcidAigre | The most acidic class, used sparingly.Tannin below 2 g/L and acidity above 4.5 g/L as H₂SO₄. | Acid correction where a blend is dominated by sweet and bitter fruit. |
What it does not tell you
- The boundary between amère and douce-amère is a matter of degree, and sources differ on where individual cultivars sit — but the boundary itself is not vague: the IGP table puts it at 3 g/L of tannin.
- Acidity here is expressed as sulphuric acid, which is the French convention. English and American figures are conventionally expressed as malic acid, and the two scales are not the same number for the same juice. A French threshold and an English one cannot be compared without converting, and nothing on a label tells a reader which convention a figure used.
- French thresholds are not the English thresholds, so a cultivar labelled bittersweet under one scheme need not be under the other. Long Ashton splits on 0.2% w/v of tannin, which is 2 g/L — the French bittersweet floor — but Long Ashton has no upper bound above it, so everything the French scheme calls amère is bittersweet in English.
- The same specifications define a cider apple as one whose juice carries at least 0.6 g/L of total tannic acids. A dessert apple below that floor is not classified by this scheme at all; it is excluded from it.
- The scheme describes fruit for blending in the French tradition, where keeving and slow low-nitrogen fermentation are assumed. It carries assumptions about method as well as fruit.
Asturian technological blocks
Bloques tecnológicos
The Asturian scheme divides cider fruit into nine technological blocks on total acidity and phenolic concentration — a finer and differently-shaped grid than the English four, and one that names compound characters rather than forcing fruit into a corner of a square.
Who devised it: Characterised by the fruit-research programme of SERIDA, the Principality of Asturias agri-food research service, and published by the Consejo Regulador of DOP Sidra de Asturias for each variety the designation admits.
What it sorts on: Total acidity, published in grams per litre of sulphuric acid rather than malic, and total polyphenols in grams per litre of tannic acid.
Cultivars classified under it here: 72
The categories
| Category | What it is | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| SweetDulce | Low acid and low phenolics. Contributes sugar and body without sharpening or gripping the blend. | Sugar and softness. |
| Sweet-bitterDulce-amargo | Low acid with appreciable phenolics — the block closest to an English bittersweet, though the Asturian examples are generally less phenolic than a Somerset one. | Body and mild bitterness without acid. |
| BitterAmargo | Phenolics dominant, acid low. Asturias has few of these, and they are used sparingly. | Bitterness and structure. |
| Semi-acidSemiácido | Intermediate acidity with low phenolics. Together with the acid block this is where most admitted fruit sits. | Balance — acidity without severity. |
| Semi-acid-bitterSemiácido-amargo | Chiefly semi-acid, with a secondary bitterness. The word order carries the emphasis and is not decorative. | Balance with a phenolic edge. |
| Bitter-semi-acidAmargo-semiácido | Chiefly bitter, with semi-acid behind it — the mirror of the block above, and a different fruit. | Bitterness carried on moderate acid. |
| AcidÁcido | High acid, low phenolics. The largest single block and the backbone of *sidra natural*. | Acid structure and microbiological safety. |
| Acid-bitterÁcido-amargo | Acid dominant with real phenolic weight behind it. The nearest Asturian equivalent to a bittersharp. | Acid and grip together. |
| Bitter-acidAmargo-ácido | Phenolics dominant with acid behind them. Rare, and prized for it. | Bitterness first, acid as support. |
What it does not tell you
- Six of the nine blocks are compound characters — semi-acid-bitter, bitter-semi-acid, acid-bitter, bitter-acid — and none of them has an English equivalent. A translation into sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp does not lose precision at the edges; it destroys the distinction the scheme is built on.
- Acidity is published as sulphuric acid equivalent, the Spanish convention. A figure of 4.7 g/L here is not the same juice as 4.7 g/L expressed as malic — the malic figure would be roughly 1.37 times higher — and comparing Asturian and English numbers without converting produces a systematic error in one direction.
- The word order in a compound name is the classification. Semiácido-amargo and amargo-semiácido are two different blocks describing two different fruits, and treating the pair as one category is the commonest way the scheme is mishandled in English writing.
- The blocks describe varieties admitted to the protected designation. They are neither a complete census of Asturian fruit nor a stable list: the register is a regulatory instrument and changes.
- The Consejo occasionally qualifies a block in prose — muy ácido, ligeramente amarga — as emphasis rather than as a tenth and eleventh category. CiderHQ records the block and keeps the qualifier as a note.
Perry pear classification
Perry pears are sorted on the same acid-and-tannin logic as cider apples, but the categories behave differently because pears carry citric as well as malic acid, and because sorbitol leaves sweetness behind that fermentation cannot remove.
Who devised it: Developed alongside the Long Ashton perry pear work and carried forward by the National Perry Pear Centre.
What it sorts on: Acid and tannin content of pressed pear juice, assessed on the four-quadrant pattern.
Cultivars classified under it here: 81
The categories
| Category | What it is | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| Sweet | Low acid, low tannin. Mild perry pears giving soft, light perry. | — |
| Medium sharp | Moderate acid with low to moderate tannin. | — |
| Bittersweet | Low acid with substantial tannin — the class that gives perry grip. | — |
| Bittersharp | Acid and tannin together; the most structured perry pears. | — |
What it does not tell you
- Perry pear tannin is often more astringent and less bitter than apple tannin at the same measured level, so the class label predicts the palate less well.
- Citric acid is present in pears and not in apples, and it is not distinguished by a total-acid figure.
- Many perry pears are known from a handful of trees, so the analytical basis is thinner than for cider apples.
BJCP cider and perry style categories
A judging framework that groups ciders and perries into named categories with expected sensory ranges. It is explicitly a competition construct, not a legal or traditional classification, and CiderHQ names it as such wherever it appears.
Who devised it: Beer Judge Certification Program, for competition judging.
What it sorts on: Origin tradition, production method, fruit and additions, with sensory expectations attached to each category and an entry judged against the category its entrant declared.
Cultivars classified under it here: 0
The categories
| Category | What it is | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| Standard cider and perry | Ciders and perries without significant additions, subdivided by the character of the fruit and by origin tradition.No adjuncts beyond what the fruit and the fermentation supply. Sweetness, carbonation and strength are declared by the entrant rather than fixed by the category. | Where a cider made from apples alone is judged on what the apples and the ferment did. |
| Speciality cider and perry | Ciders carrying fruit, spice, hops, wood or another addition, or made by a method the standard categories do not cover.The addition or the method is declared, and the judging asks whether it is integrated rather than whether it should be there. | The category most modern commercial cider would actually be entered in. |
| Historical categories | Named traditional forms — New England cider, applewine, and the European regional styles — described as historical or regional types.A written description of what the tradition is understood to produce, rather than a specification a producer must meet. | The part of the framework that most often gets mistaken for a definition of the tradition itself. |
What it does not tell you
- Written for judging, so its categories are drawn where competitions need boundaries rather than where traditions do. The consequence is that entries are sorted by what is convenient to compare, and two ciders a producer would call the same thing can land in different categories because one of them had honey in it.
- It does not bind any producer and has no legal standing. Nothing prevents a cider entered as one category from being labelled as something else, and no producer anywhere is obliged to make anything the guidelines describe.
- Its treatment of European traditions is necessarily summary, and a Spanish or Norman producer would not recognise their own cider in a competition category. The guidelines describe sidra natural in a paragraph; the DOP specification that governs it runs to many pages and disagrees with the paragraph in places.
- The sensory ranges attached to a category describe what judges expect, which is a statement about a judging population rather than about the drink. A cider outside the range is marked down for being outside the range, and that is a circular test that a category with few entrants can fail to escape.
- It is revised. The framework in general circulation was the 2015 edition for a decade; treating a category boundary as fixed means treating one edition as permanent, and CiderHQ names the edition wherever a category is cited.
Reading a classification honestly
A class tells you roughly where a fruit sits on two axes, as measured somewhere, at some point, by someone. It tells you nothing about aroma, nitrogen, fermentation behaviour or how the fruit keeps — all of which matter as much to a finished cider as acid and tannin do. And in the case of tannin it measures a total, when the thing that decides how much of the effect is bitterness and how much is astringency is the distribution of chain lengths inside that total.
The practical consequence is that a class is a starting point for a blend rather than a specification. The blend explorer works at the same level of resolution deliberately, and says so.
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.
The Science of Cidermaking and associated technical writing
Andrew Lea · reference work · passage verified 2026-08-24
Written by a food chemist who worked at Long Ashton on apple phenolics. Unusual among specialist cider writing in that it is primary-research-adjacent: the author is describing work he did, and cites the literature. This is why it is registered at tier 1 for chemistry while a general cider book is not.
Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC)
IFPC · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The French technical institute for cider production. The authority for the French cultivar classification families, for keeving as an industrial process, and for the pectin and nitrogen chemistry that keeving depends on.
Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité (INAO)
INAO · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24
The Cidre Pays d’Auge cahier des charges was read in full on 2026-08-24, in the version homologated by arrêté of 17 January 2026 and published in the Journal officiel on 21 January. That qualification is not decoration. A revision adopted by the Comité national on 10 September 2025 is currently under the procédure nationale d’opposition, is clearly marked as not prejudging the final text, and specifies carbonation differently from the text in force — as grams of CO2 per litre rather than as a minimum pressure in bar. A summary citing the draft would have put a figure on the page that no producer is held to. CiderHQ records the operative text and says which one it is.
Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement (INRAE)
INRAE · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
French national agricultural research. Its Angers programme produced much of the published work on apple procyanidin chain length and on the relationship between polymer size, bitterness and astringency.
eAmbrosia — the EU geographical indications register
European Commission · designation authority · registered as competent for this subject
The single authoritative register of EU PDO, PGI and TSG names, carrying each product specification. Cider and perry designations across France, Spain and elsewhere resolve here.
Servicio Regional de Investigación y Desarrollo Agroalimentario (SERIDA)
Principado de Asturias · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The Asturian regional agri-food research service, and the technical authority behind the Asturian cultivar classification and the analysis of sidra natural. SERIDA’s own site has not been opened; what CiderHQ has read is SERIDA’s varietal characterisation as republished by the Consejo Regulador of DOP Sidra de Asturias, which credits it explicitly. The Asturian measurements therefore cite the Consejo rather than SERIDA — citing the body that did the work, at a document CiderHQ has not seen, would be exactly the kind of borrowed authority this register exists to prevent.
Denominación de Origen Protegida Sidra de Asturias
Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias · designation authority · passage verified 2026-08-24
The regulating council for Asturian cider. Read on 2026-08-24, and it turned out to carry far more than a permitted-variety list: an agronomic and technological characterisation of each admitted variety, with total acidity, total polyphenols, vigour, flowering, ripening, cropping and susceptibility to fungal disease. The characterisation is credited to SERIDA’s fruit-research programme. Two things it settles are corrections to what CiderHQ previously held: Asturias sorts cider fruit into nine technological blocks rather than five, and it publishes acidity as sulphuric acid rather than malic. The figures are transcribed into `data/trials/serida-asturias.ts` and cite this source, because this is where they were read.
Perry Pears
L. C. Luckwill and A. Pollard (eds), published for the National Fruit and Cider Institute by the University of Bristol, 1963 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25 · covers 1963
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, which records the work as Luckwill, 1963, published for the National Fruit and Cider Institute by the University of Bristol. The catalogue entry names Luckwill alone where the standard citation names Luckwill and Pollard as joint editors; CiderHQ keeps both names and records the discrepancy rather than silently following one catalogue. This is the foundational descriptive work on English perry pears and the ancestor of most later variety lists. No copy was opened: it is sixty years old, out of print, and held in research libraries rather than in open digital collections.
National Perry Pear Centre, Hartpury · specialist organisation · passage verified 2026-08-24
Read on 2026-08-24 — and the address CiderHQ had registered, perrypears.co.uk, is no longer the Centre at all. It fails the TLS handshake over https, and over plain http it resolves to a Sedo domain-parking page: an earlier pass in this sprint recorded it as retrieved on the strength of an HTTP 200, which was wrong, and the correction is the point. The Centre publishes at nationalperrypearcentre.org.uk. It is the closest thing British perry has to an identity authority: it holds at least two examples of most known varieties, states that the DNA of most of them has been determined and is used as an aid to identification, and publishes a variety register with synonym lists. Its 121-variety register is transcribed into the perry pear records, including the nineteen names it shows being claimed by more than one variety.
BJCP Beer Style Guidelines — cider and perry categories
Beer Judge Certification Program · classification framework · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24, and the edition matters. CiderHQ registered the 2015 cider guidelines; BJCP has since published a 2025 cider edition, and the old URL now redirects into the current guidelines index. A competition style guide is a dated framework rather than a standing definition, and citing the wrong edition of one is the same class of error as citing a superseded specification. CiderHQ treats BJCP as one competition framework among several and never as the universal cider taxonomy.
ACA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Publishes a widely used US cider style framework and runs the Certified Cider Professional programme. Cited as one framework among several rather than as a universal classification.
CAMRA cider and perry standards
Campaign for Real Ale · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24. Registered for the consumer-campaigning vocabulary — "real cider", "full juice" — which is advocacy language rather than legal definition, and is recorded as such wherever CiderHQ uses it.