Cider apple
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.
Also written Cortland.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bulk juice, Aroma, Sugar and body
- Origin
- New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Sharp
High acid, low tannin. Includes both purpose-grown sharps and many culinary apples.
Basis: Above about 0.45% w/v acid and below about 0.2% w/v tannin.
Assessed in Fruit grown in New York State trial plantings.
Sits close to the sharp threshold and falls below it in a warm season or after storage.
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 | Moderate | |
| Tannin | Negligible | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Cornell acid figures with the remaining axes from description of a mild, aromatic, low-phenolic dessert apple.
Mild and softly aromatic in the McIntosh manner, with less acid and a rounder, sweeter juice.
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.
- Fresh-cut apple — The smell of a cut apple surface, produced within seconds of the fruit tissue being broken by six-carbon aldehydes released from membrane fats.
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 acid0.450–0.700 % w/v
Geneva, New York State, 2010s · Cornell University, School of Integrative Plant Science
Reported as malic acid, straddling the Long Ashton sharp threshold of roughly 0.45% w/v. Cortland is a milder fruit than its McIntosh parent.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. 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.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Apple scab | high | — |
| Winter cold injury | low | Hardy enough for Quebec and northern New England, which is much of its regional importance. |
Juice and pressing
- Notably slow enzymatic browning — the cultivar’s distinguishing property, and the reason its juice stays pale far longer than most.
- Moderate acid, often falling below the sharp threshold.
- No tannin, moderate sugar, soft aroma.
- Very good juice yield.
How it is used
- A market apple valued for slow browning in salads and on plates.
- A large-volume component of Quebec and northeastern cider and juice.
- Used in ice cider blends alongside McIntosh.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Makes a soft, pale, mild cider with little acid and no grip. Pleasant and slight; it is more useful as part of a blend.
About Cortland
Cortland was bred at Geneva to combine McIntosh flavour with Ben Davis productivity, and it succeeded well enough to become a mainstay of orchards from the Finger Lakes through Quebec. It is a large, mild, softly aromatic apple with less acid than its McIntosh parent and rather more juice.
Its one genuinely distinctive property is chemical. The flesh browns very slowly when cut, because the cultivar carries less active polyphenol oxidase and less oxidisable phenolic substrate than most apples. That made it a salad apple, and it makes its juice stay pale in the press and the tank far longer than a typical American apple’s. A maker who wants a light-coloured cider without heavy sulphiting will notice the difference, and it is one of the very few cases where a cultivar record can point at a mechanism a reader can watch happen.
The same low phenolic content is the reason Cortland brings no structure at all. Slow browning and absent tannin are two faces of one fact. It is a volume and aroma fruit that does its job in a Quebec or northern New England blend without ever giving the cider a backbone.
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
An institutional release with the cross, the year and the release date all on record.
Parentage · a recorded cross
Recorded as a cross by the breeding programme that made it, which is strong evidence about what was intended and weaker evidence about which pollen took; no genotyping study CiderHQ has read confirms it.
The breeding programme recorded making this cross. Strong evidence about what was intended; weaker evidence about which pollen actually took, which only genotyping settles.
Why it matters
- Its resistance to enzymatic browning is a genuine chemical distinction with a direct production consequence, and one of the few in this file that a maker can observe in the tank on the first day.
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Parentage
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.
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.
Browns Apple
The standard Devon sharp: a bright red, heavy-cropping, high-acid apple with almost no tannin, and the fruit most English blends reach for when they need lift.
Golden Russet
The highest-gravity fruit in widespread North American cider use — a small bronze russet from New York whose juice regularly presses above 1.060 and which many revival makers treat as their benchmark cultivar.
McIntosh
The defining apple of eastern Canada and northern New England — an Ontario seedling of about 1811 whose perfumed, high-acid juice is the aromatic foundation of most Quebec and northeastern cider.
Wickson Crab
A Californian dessert crab raised by Albert Etter, exceptional for carrying very high sugar and very high acid at the same time, and now one of the most sought-after cider cultivars in North America.
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.
Styles it is characteristic of
Ice cider
Cider made from apple juice concentrated by freezing, fermented slowly and stopped while a large residual sugar remains, giving a dessert-strength drink of high acid and high sweetness.
Quebec ice cider
Ice cider made under Quebec’s reserved designation, which sets out how the juice may be concentrated, what may be added and what the finished product must contain.
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 apples is quebec cider made from — McIntosh above all. It is to eastern Canada what a bittersweet is to Somerset — the assumed default — and its perfumed, high-acid juice is the aromatic foundation of most Quebec and northeastern cider.
- What does fresh-cut apple mean in a cider tasting note — The smell of a cut apple surface, produced within seconds of the fruit tissue being broken by six-carbon aldehydes released from membrane fats.
- How is ice cider made — Apple juice is frozen and the sugar-rich liquid separated from the ice, either by freezing pressed juice or by leaving fruit on the tree into winter. Fermentation then stops of its own accord well before the concentrated sugar is used up.
- Why does apple juice go brown when pressed — Polyphenol oxidase in the fruit reacts phenolics with oxygen the moment cells are broken, turning the juice brown. In cider making this is sometimes prevented with sulphite and sometimes encouraged, because it also drops harsh tannin out of solution.
- What is modern american cider like
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.
Cornell Cider Research and Extension programme
Cornell University, School of Integrative Plant Science · university · passage verified 2026-08-24
Runs cultivar trials in New York State and publishes juice chemistry for European cider varieties grown in a North American climate — the single most useful counterweight to treating English figures as universal.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.