Cider apple
Douce Coëtligné
A large, pale, genuinely sweet Breton apple with very little acid and very little tannin, grown for the sugar and body it puts into a blend rather than for any character of its own.
Also written Douce Coetligne, Dous Koetligne, Coëtligné.
- Classification
- Sweet — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Brittany
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
French cider apple families
Sweet · Douce
Low acid, low tannin. Sugar and body.
Basis: Tannin below 2 g/L and acidity below 3 g/L as H₂SO₄.
A clear member of the sweet family rather than a borderline case: both axes sit low.
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 | Very low | |
| Tannin | Negligible | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Full |
French sweet family placement; the bands follow the class definition rather than any cultivar-specific analysis.
Mild and sugary with almost nothing to grip. Pleasant to eat off the tree, which is unusual for cider fruit and tells you how little tannin it has.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Douce Coëtligné, 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
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Douce Coëtligné. Figures for this cultivar circulate, but they reach the present through compilation rather than through the original tables, and publishing a number we cannot attribute would give it an authority it has not earned. What is known about how the fruit behaves is described above and below.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Soft-fleshed and goes mealy quickly; it wants pressing rather than storing.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- High sugar, high potential alcohol
- Negligible acid and negligible tannin
- Good juice yield
How it is used
- Sugar and alcohol in Breton farm blends
- Softening a blend that has become too astringent from Kermerrien or Marie Ménard
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
On its own it ferments to something alcoholic and characterless, with a pH high enough to be a spoilage risk. It is a component, not a cider.
About Douce Coëtligné
Douce Coëtligné exists in Breton blends to raise gravity. It brings sugar and it brings body, and it brings almost nothing else — no acid to speak of, no tannin worth counting, and only a faint aroma. In a tradition where the bitter fruit is very bitter and the sharp fruit is very sharp, a neutral sweet apple with a high sugar content is genuinely useful, and the cultivar has survived on that basis alone.
Because it is soft and low in tannin it is one of the few French cider apples that is agreeable to eat, which has led to it turning up in mixed farm orchards as a dual-purpose tree. That in turn has muddled its identity: several large pale sweet Breton apples get called Douce Coëtligné or simply dous, and it is not always possible to tell from a tree in a hedge which one is which.
It keeps badly, which constrains how it is used. A grower cannot hold it for weeks waiting for the bitter fruit to sweat down, so it tends to be pressed as it comes and the juice held rather than the apples. Where a mill is working through a long autumn, this changes the practical shape of a blend more than any sensory consideration does.
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
Named for a Breton locality. No raiser recorded, and the fruit was almost certainly a chance seedling propagated locally before it acquired a catalogue name.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Dous Koetligne | Regional name | Brittany. Breton orthography for the same fruit. |
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.
Doux Normandie
A Norman sweet apple grown for sugar and alcohol, one of the *douce* cultivars that supply the fermentable weight a bittersweet-heavy blend needs.
Blanc Mollet
A soft, pale, early Norman sweet apple that must be pressed almost as soon as it is picked, and whose name says exactly that about it.
Muscadet de Dieppe
An aromatic Norman sweet apple from the Dieppe country, grown for the musky perfume it lends a blend rather than for acid, tannin or sugar.
Douce Moën
The workhorse of Breton cider orchards: a large, pale, very low-acid bittersweet that crops heavily, presses generously, and carries more Breton cider than any other single cultivar.
Golden Delicious
A West Virginia chance seedling of about 1890 that became one of the most planted and most bred-from apples in history — high in sugar, low in acid, and by volume one of the largest single inputs to cider worldwide.
Somerset Redstreak
A mild bittersweet planted at very large scale in the late twentieth century for its heavy, regular cropping on bush trees, and a fruit whose commercial importance exceeds its character.
Styles it is characteristic of
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 is pressing yield — Pressing yield is the proportion of fruit weight recovered as juice. It varies from under half on a poorly loaded basket press to around seventy per cent on a well-run rack-and-cloth or belt press.
- What is juice blending
- What does cidre de bretagne igp actually guarantee — That the apples were grown and the cider made in the area, and that the fruit met a measured tannin floor. It permits concentrate to 40 per cent of the must, added water and injected gas, all of which the French appellations of origin forbid.
- What does cidre fermier mean
- What is breton 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.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.