Cider apple
Empire
A 1945 Geneva cross of McIntosh and Red Delicious released in 1966, firmer than either parent and widely planted across the northeast, contributing aroma and moderate acid to blends.
Also written Empire.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bulk juice, Aroma
- Origin
- New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Regular cropping
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Empire. That is common outside Europe: the English, French and Spanish systems were each built for their own fruit, and a cultivar grown where none of them applies simply has no class. What the fruit contributes to a blend is described below regardless — the class is a shorthand for that, not a substitute.
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 data with the remaining axes from description of a firm, mildly aromatic dessert apple.
A firmer, sweeter McIntosh — the same family of aroma at lower intensity, with a crisper texture that survives handling.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Empire, 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 acid0.400–0.650 % w/v
Geneva, New York State, 2010s · Cornell University, School of Integrative Plant Science
Reported as malic acid. Empire sits around or just below the Long Ashton sharp threshold, inheriting acid from McIntosh and mildness from Red Delicious.
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
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Regular cropping
- Keeping
- Good
Precocious and reliably annual — a well-behaved commercial tree.
Keeps considerably better than McIntosh, which was much of the point of the cross.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Apple scab | high | — |
| Fire blight | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid around the sharp threshold.
- Reasonable sugar and a clean, mildly aromatic juice.
- No tannin.
How it is used
- A commercial market apple across New York and New England.
- Pressed as culls and surplus in the northeastern juice trade.
- A blending component in Quebec and northeastern cider.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Mild, moderately sweet and unstructured; there is nothing wrong with a single-varietal Empire and nothing much to it.
About Empire
Empire is a deliberate compromise, and understanding it as one explains its cider behaviour. Geneva crossed McIntosh with Red Delicious to get McIntosh flavour in a fruit that would survive commercial handling and storage, and the resulting apple is firmer and better-keeping than McIntosh and considerably less aromatic. Both halves of that trade show up in the juice.
For a blender it is a mild, dependable, moderately acid component. It is planted widely enough across New York and New England that its culls are readily available, and a great deal of northeastern cider carries Empire without anyone thinking about it. That describes most of the cultivars in this section: their importance to cider is a function of orchard acreage rather than of any cider-specific virtue.
It is one of a large family of Geneva releases — Cortland, Empire, Jonagold, Liberty and others — that between them reshaped northeastern orchards during the twentieth century. The same station that classified the heritage cider fruit was breeding its commercial replacements, which is a fair summary of how North American pomology treated cider for most of that century: as a use for surplus, not a purpose for breeding.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Fameuse
The historic apple of the St Lawrence valley, grown in New France from the seventeenth century, snow-white fleshed and delicately perfumed, and the probable parent of McIntosh.
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 is modern american cider like
- Why is red delicious a poor cider apple — Very low acid, no tannin, almost no aroma and modest sugar — and the high juice pH makes an uncorrected ferment a genuine spoilage risk rather than merely a dull one. Seventy years of selecting for colour rather than flavour is the reason.
- Do you need to sort apples before pressing
- Why is quebec known for ice cider — Because the winters are cold enough and long enough to concentrate apple juice by freezing reliably, which is the one thing ice cider needs and most cider regions cannot supply.
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
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.