Cider apple
Cox’s Orange Pippin
The defining English dessert apple, pressed for cider where its aroma is wanted rather than its structure, of which it has none.
Also written Cox, Coxs Orange Pippin, Cox Orange.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Aroma, Acid lift
- Origin
- Colnbrook, Buckinghamshire
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- 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.
A sharp when pressed, though at the mild end: its acid is moderate by cider standards and its tannin negligible.
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 | Negligible | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Dominant | |
| Body | Light |
Long Ashton acid and tannin ranges, with aroma at the top of the scale because Cox’s aromatic complexity is the entire reason anyone presses it.
Contributes a complex, faintly spiced aromatic character that survives fermentation, and nothing structural whatever.
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.
- Ripe apple — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
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.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total acid4 readings, spanning 0.500–0.760 % w/v | 0.400–0.600 % w/v | Long Ashton, Somerset, England | Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985Historic analysis | National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol |
| 0.600 % w/v | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England | 1905–1975Historic analysis | Andrew Lea | |
| 0.680 % w/v | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology | |
| 0.760 % w/v | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology | |
| Total tannin4 readings, spanning 0.040–0.070 % w/v | 0.030–0.100 % w/v | Long Ashton, Somerset, England | Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985Historic analysis | National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol |
| 0.070 % w/v | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England | 1905–1975Historic analysis | Andrew Lea | |
| 0.040 % w/v | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology | |
| 0.050 % w/v | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology | |
| pH2 readings, spanning 3.30–3.48 pH | 3.48 pH | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology |
| 3.30 pH | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology | |
| Specific gravity2 readings, spanning 1.050–1.075 SG | 1.075 SG | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology |
| 1.050 SG | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology |
4 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
- Titration of pressed juice, reported as malic acid
- 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.
- 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.
- Published in the two-figure form the table uses (a printed 51 meaning 1.051) and written here in full.
- Titration, reported as malic acid, on juice from freshly harvested fruit.
- Method not stated in the compilation; the Long Ashton work behind it used Löwenthal permanganate titration.
- Meter on juice from freshly harvested fruit.
- A dessert apple analysed for cider use, on fruit grown at one Somerset site. Acid in Cox falls markedly in store, so pressing date matters more than for most fruit here.
- Negligible, as expected of dessert fruit.
- 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 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.
- A National Association of Cider Makers compilation crediting three bodies of work — MAFF/ADAS acidity and pH from freshly harvested fruit, Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties reported in 1977, and the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. The compilation does not say which row came from which, so no row can be dated more precisely than the span of the three.
- A National Association of Cider Makers compilation crediting three bodies of work — MAFF/ADAS acidity and pH from freshly harvested fruit, Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties reported in 1977, and the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. The compilation does not say which row came from which, so no row can be dated more precisely than the span of the three. Several cultivars appear more than once in this table under sample numbers, and the repeats are far apart: Bramley’s acid is 1.21, 1.05 and 1.43 per cent in three rows. Read any single row as one pressing of one parcel of fruit.
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 “Cox’s Orange Pippin”, dessert season
Filed here as sharp.
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.
Typical English apple juice analyses
England — the compilation does not name the orchards · 1922–1977 · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
English fruit-growing country, and no closer than that: the source gives neither site nor season for any individual row, which is a real limit on what the figures can be asked to do.
- Held as
- Listed as “Cox”, sample 1
Juice from freshly harvested fruit. Acidity and pH credited to MAFF/ADAS; the remainder to Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties (1977) and to the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. Specific gravity is printed in a two-figure form and written out in full here.
Typical English apple juice analyses
England — the compilation does not name the orchards · 1922–1977 · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
English fruit-growing country, and no closer than that: the source gives neither site nor season for any individual row, which is a real limit on what the figures can be asked to do.
- Held as
- Listed as “Cox 2”, sample 2
Juice from freshly harvested fruit. Acidity and pH credited to MAFF/ADAS; the remainder to Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties (1977) and to the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. Specific gravity is printed in a two-figure form and written out in full here.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
Late September into October. Press soon after picking if the acid is wanted.
Mid-season flowering and a good pollinator, though it is notoriously demanding of site and climate.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | high | — |
| Canker | high | Cox is among the more canker-prone commercial cultivars, and requires a well-drained site. |
| Powdery mildew | high | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid
- Negligible tannin
- Good sugar
- Pronounced aroma
How it is used
- The most widely recognised English dessert apple
- Used by cidermakers for aroma, usually as a minority component
- Pressed as a single varietal by producers making an aromatic modern cider
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made as a varietal by producers working in a modern, aromatic idiom. The cider is fragrant and light and has no tannin at all, which some drinkers read as elegance and others as thinness.
About Cox’s Orange Pippin
Cox is the apple against which English dessert fruit is measured, and its relationship with cider is one of borrowed aroma. It has moderate acid, effectively no tannin, and an aromatic complexity — a mixture of ripe apple, faint spice and something floral — that comes through fermentation more or less intact. A maker wanting a cider that smells of apples rather than of tannin and time reaches for it.
It is a bad orchard proposition anywhere but a good site. Cox is susceptible to scab, mildew and canker, demands warmth and drainage, and rewards intensive management. Cidermakers using it are almost always buying surplus dessert fruit rather than growing it, which means they take what the fresh market rejects and press it when it arrives.
That has a consequence worth knowing. Cox loses acid in store faster than most apples, so fruit that has spent two months in a cold room contributes noticeably less acid than fruit pressed from the tree. If Cox is in the blend for aroma the difference matters little; if it is there for acid, the pressing date is doing more work than the cultivar choice.
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
Raised by Richard Cox at Colnbrook in about 1825. Contemporary record supports both the raiser and the approximate date, which is unusual.
Parentage · not established
Commonly given as a seedling of Ribston Pippin, possibly with Blenheim Orange as the pollen parent. The Ribston connection is widely accepted and the second parent is not established.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Cox | Trade name | The universal short form. |
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.
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.
Kingston Black
The most celebrated English single-varietal cider apple: a small dark-red bittersharp carrying acid and tannin in one fruit, and a tree difficult enough that its reputation has always outrun its plantings.
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.
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.
Styles it is characteristic of
Eastern counties cider
Cider from eastern and south-eastern England made largely from dessert and culinary apples, giving a lighter, sharper and less tannic drink than the West Country tradition.
New Zealand cider
Cider from New Zealand, made in a country with a substantial export apple industry and a small but technically confident craft cider sector.
Tasmanian cider
Cider from Tasmania, whose cool maritime climate and long apple-growing history give fruit with the acid that most Australian districts cannot hold.
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
- Where does a ripe apple aroma in cider come from — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
- How long can apples be kept before pressing
- What is juice blending
- How is supermarket cider made
- Is single variety cider better than a blend — Neither is inherently better and CiderHQ does not rank them. A single varietal shows one cultivar’s character and depends entirely on that fruit being balanced; a blend is how most makers reach balance deliberately.
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.
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.
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.
NIAB (incorporating East Malling Research)
NIAB · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
East Malling developed the M-series apple rootstocks that determine tree size in essentially every modern orchard, cider orchards included. The authority CiderHQ uses for rootstock behaviour.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.