Cider apple
Erbachhofer
A Württemberg Most apple named for the farm it was found on, notable for cropping reliably on poorer sites where better-regarded cultivars struggle.
Also written Erbachhofer Mostapfel, Erbachhofer Weinapfel.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Württemberg, Germany
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Erbachhofer. 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 | High | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Description in Württemberg orchard practice. No registered classification scheme covers German fruit.
Moderately sharp and plain; a press apple with no pretensions to the table.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Erbachhofer, 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 Erbachhofer. 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
- Late
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
Reliable, including on thin and exposed sites, which is its principal recommendation.
Juice and pressing
- Moderate to high acid
- Negligible tannin
- Consistent yield
How it is used
- Most in Baden-Württemberg, particularly on marginal orchard land
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
A blending fruit by disposition.
About Erbachhofer
Erbachhofer is a cultivar selected for hardiness rather than for juice. It crops on sites where the soil is thin, the exposure is unkind or the management is minimal, and in a landscape of small, part-time, hand-worked meadow orchards that is worth a great deal.
The economics of the Streuobstwiese deserve stating plainly, because they explain why German cider cultivars look as they do. These orchards are labour-intensive, low-yielding per hectare, and produce fruit worth relatively little. They survived on the margins of farm economies and now survive substantially on conservation grounds — they are among the most species-rich habitats in central Europe. A cultivar that asks nothing of a grower has a better chance in that system than a better fruit that asks a lot.
Its juice is unexceptional: moderately acid, no tannin, no aroma to speak of. It is a component of a blend and nothing more, and the record says so.
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 the Erbachhof, a farm. The pattern is the same as the Basque farmstead names and the Norman clos names: a tree identified by where it stood.
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.
Blanquina
A pale-skinned Asturian cultivar of high reputation, and — like Raxao, with which it is usually named — an acid-block fruit rather than a semi-acid one.
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.
Regona
The most acid cultivar the Asturian designation characterises, at 7,1 g/L, and one of the most planted: a late, hard, acid-bitter fruit that supplies the backbone of *sidra natural*.
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 makes a good site for a cider orchard — Frost drainage first, then soil depth and water. A hollow that traps cold air on a May night can lose a crop at blossom, and no later decision recovers it.
- What is most the drink — In Austria, southern Germany and Switzerland *Most* is fermented apple or pear juice — the local cider. Confusingly, *Süßmost* is the unfermented juice, so the word alone does not tell you whether there is alcohol in the glass.
- What is most in germany — In Baden-Württemberg, Most is farm apple wine made from mixed standard-orchard fruit. The region holds the largest meadow-orchard landscape in Europe, and the word means something different again in Austria and Switzerland.
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.
Hochschule Geisenheim University — beverage technology
Hochschule Geisenheim · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
German beverage-technology research covering apple wine and fruit juice processing, including the enzymology of clarification.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.