Cider apple
Crimson King
A bright red Somerset sharp with high acid and negligible tannin, planted widely as a companion to bittersweet fruit and occasionally used as a culinary apple.
Also written Crimson King Apple, John Toucher’s.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Somerset
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
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 clear sharp: high acid, very low tannin.
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 | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Light |
Long Ashton acid and tannin ranges for the cultivar.
Supplies straightforward acid and lowers pH, with no tannin and little aroma of its own.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Crimson King, 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 acid0.500–0.700 % w/v
Long Ashton, Somerset, England, Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985 · Titration of pressed juice, reported as malic acid · National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol
One site, one climate. Acid falls if the fruit is left to over-ripen.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. Measured in percent weight per volume.
Total tannin0.060–0.140 % w/v
Long Ashton, Somerset, England, Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985 · National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol
Very low, as expected of a sharp. Recorded as a range because the underlying tables are unverified.
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.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
October. The fruit is showy and holds its colour well.
A regular and heavy cropper.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
| Canker | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- High acid
- Negligible tannin
- Deeply coloured skin, pale juice
How it is used
- The sharp component of Somerset blends
- Used as a dual-purpose cooking and cider apple on farms
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Ferments to something clean, sharp and thin. It works as a light cider but has none of the aromatic interest that leads producers to bottle Browns Apple alone.
About Crimson King
Crimson King is a working sharp. It gives high acid and effectively no tannin from a heavy, regular cropper, and its job in a Somerset orchard is to sit alongside bittersweets and correct them. That is a role fruit has to be planted for deliberately, because nothing in a bittersweet orchard supplies it.
It is a handsome apple — deep red, medium-sized, glossy — and on farms it doubled as a cooker, which was common practice: a tree that could go to the kitchen or the mill was worth more than one that could only do the second. That dual use also means it turns up in old farm records under names that describe how it was used rather than what it was.
Against Browns Apple, its closest counterpart, it is the plainer fruit. Both supply acid; Browns Apple also supplies aroma, and that is why the Devon fruit has spread further and why Crimson King is rarely bottled on its own.
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 Somerset cider sharp of unrecorded origin. The name is nurseryman’s language and postdates whatever the fruit was originally called.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| John Toucher’s | Regional name | Somerset. A Somerset name reported for this fruit; the attribution is local tradition. |
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.
Bramley’s Seedling
England’s dominant cooking apple, a triploid of very high acid and negligible tannin, and by volume one of the most important fruits in modern British cider.
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.
Granny Smith
An Australian chance seedling of the 1860s that became one of the most planted apples on earth, and — because it is reliably sharp when almost nothing else commercial is — a genuine workhorse of commercial cider worldwide.
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.
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.
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.
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 i balance acid and tannin in a blend — Acid and tannin do different jobs and cannot substitute for each other: acid gives freshness and microbiological safety, tannin gives structure and length. A blend short of acid tastes flabby however tannic it is.
- How do you blend cider
- What is a traditional west country cider blend — Predominantly bittersweet fruit for body and tannin, with a proportion of sharp fruit for acidity and sometimes a smaller share of bittersharps for both. The exact composition varied by farm and by what was in the orchard.
- What is somerset cider
- What is herefordshire cider
- Why is cider made in the west country — Because the climate suits apples and disappoints wheat and barley: mild, wet winters, heavy soils and a long growing season. Where grain was hard to grow, orchards took its place and cider took beer’s.
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.
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.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.