Cider apple
Collaos
A late, moderately-cropping Asturian semi-acid cultivar, ripening at the very end of November — later than almost anything else on the permitted list.
Also written Collaos de Asturias, Collao.
- Classification
- Semi-acid — Asturian technological blocks
- Harvest
- Very late (November onwards)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Late season, Acid lift
- Origin
- Asturias
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
Asturian technological blocks
Semi-acid · Semiácido
Intermediate acidity with low phenolics. Together with the acid block this is where most admitted fruit sits.
Assessed in Asturias, as characterised for the protected designation.
Published by the Consejo Regulador of DOP Sidra de Asturias as “Semiácido”, on total acidity 4,9 g/L as sulphuric acid and total polyphenols 1,0 g/L as tannic acid. Asturian practice reports acidity as sulphuric acid, so the figure is not directly comparable with an English or North American malic-acid one.
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 | High | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Published figures for the protected designation: total acidity 4,9 g/L as sulphuric acid, total polyphenols 1,0 g/L as tannic acid.
Moderately acid with light phenolics: a balanced fruit rather than a corrective one, and not the bitter apple CiderHQ once recorded it as.
Aroma
Descriptors associated with this fruit. Each names a character with a known cause, and association is not a promise — what reaches the glass depends on the ferment as much as on the apple.
- Apple skin — The dry, faintly waxy and slightly bitter aroma of the fruit’s surface rather than its flesh, carried by cuticular waxes, hexyl esters and skin-concentrated phenolics.
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.
Titratable acidity4.9 g/L
Asturias, Spain, Published characterisation, retrieved 2026-08-24 · Total acidity expressed as sulphuric acid equivalent, the Spanish convention. Not comparable with a malic-acid figure without conversion: multiply by about 1.37 to reach malic-acid equivalent. · Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias
Acid measured by neutralisation — the quantity of acid, not its strength. Measured in grams per litre.
Total phenolics1.0 g/L
Asturias, Spain, Published characterisation, retrieved 2026-08-24 · Total polyphenols expressed as tannic acid equivalent. · Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias
All phenolic compounds together, usually reported as gallic acid equivalents. Measured in grams per litre.
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.
DOP Sidra de Asturias varietal characterisation
Asturias, northern Spain · Published characterisation, retrieved 2026-08-24 · Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias
Atlantic and markedly wet — cool summers, mild winters and high rainfall on the Bay of Biscay coast, a climate that suits high-acid fruit and long, cool ferments.
- Harvest
- the last ten days of November (published as “3ª decena de noviembre”)
Filed here as semiacido.
Vigour: moderate to low. Susceptibility to fungal disease: moderate. Flowering: late. Cropping: a good level of cropping. As characterised by the Consejo Regulador.
Total acidity expressed as grams per litre of sulphuric acid, the Spanish convention; total polyphenols as grams per litre of tannic acid. Characterisation carried out by the fruit-research programme of SERIDA and published by the Consejo Regulador.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Very late
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
The Consejo Regulador records ripening in the last ten days of November (“3ª decena de noviembre”).
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Middling acid at 4,9 g/L, which sits in the semi-acid block rather than the acid one
- Phenolics of 1,0 g/L — ordinary for Asturias and low by English standards
- Very late ripening, which extends a llagar’s pressing season into December
How it is used
- A small-proportion structural addition to sidra natural
- On the permitted-variety list of the Asturian protected designation
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Nothing about the analysis rules it out, but there is no established tradition of bottling it alone.
About Collaos
Collaos ripens in the last ten days of November, which makes it one of the latest cultivars the Asturian designation admits, and its value to a llagar is partly that: it keeps the mill working after the main crop is in. The tree is moderate to low in vigour and crops well, and its susceptibility to fungal disease is recorded as moderate.
The Consejo Regulador places it in the semiácido block on 4,9 g/L of acidity and 1,0 g/L of polyphenols. Both figures are unremarkable, which is the point of the semi-acid block: it holds the fruit that gives a blend balance rather than a correction, and it is one of the two largest groups in the Asturian register.
Collaos is sometimes listed among the Asturian bitter cultivars. Its published phenolic content is 1,0 g/L — half Meana’s, and well under half Amariega’s 2,4 — and the designation does not place it in a bitter block at all. The handful of genuinely phenolic Asturian varieties is smaller than most accounts of the region suggest.
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 collado is a mountain pass or saddle, and the Asturian form of the word is the likeliest source of the name. That is an inference from the word rather than a record.
Why it matters
- The clearest evidence that the Asturian scheme’s bitter class describes a genuinely different population from the French bitter class
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.
Perico
A vigorous, very late-flowering Asturian cultivar in the semi-acid block at 3,9 g/L, planted on the permitted list for balance rather than for correction.
De la Riega
A well-regarded Asturian cultivar in the semi-acid block at 4,3 g/L, low in disease and reliable in crop — balanced rather than sweet, despite a mild eating character.
Errezil
A celebrated Basque russet reinette from the village of Errezil, primarily an eating and cooking apple with a protected reputation, and used in cider where the crop allows.
Goikoetxe
An aromatic Basque cultivar from Bizkaia, valued for the fruit character it brings to a blend that is otherwise built on acid.
Manttoni
A Basque cultivar of good reputation with balanced acid and pronounced aroma, one of the cultivars a *sagardotegi* will name when describing a serious blend.
Carrió
A very late Asturian cultivar in the semi-acid block, vigorous and heavy-cropping, pressed at the winter end of the season.
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 does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
- How do you blend cider
- What is sidra natural — Sidra natural is the still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, bottled without added carbonation and poured from a height to rouse it. It is tart, funky and made to be drunk in small measures poured one at a time.
- What is maceration in cider making — Maceration is letting milled pomace stand before pressing, so that enzymes soften the tissue and phenolics and aroma move from the skins into the juice. It raises both colour and tannin, and raises the risk of oxidation with them.
- Why does cider smell of apple skin
- What is asturian cider
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.
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.
Primary authority Evidence standard for this record. What that means.