Cider apple
Foxwhelp
The oldest named English cider apple still grown, a Herefordshire bittersharp of extraordinary acidity whose identity has fractured into a family of sports, seedlings and impostors.
Also written Old Foxwhelp, Foxwhelps, Fox Whelp.
- Classification
- Bittersharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Early (September)
- Single varietal
- Established as a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Vintage quality, Aroma, Early season
- Origin
- Herefordshire
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Severely biennial — a substantial crop only every other year
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Bittersharp
High acid and high tannin together — the rarest and, for a single-varietal cider, the most useful class.
Basis: Above about 0.45% w/v acid and above about 0.2% w/v tannin.
A bittersharp of exceptional acidity — among the highest recorded for any cider apple in the English scheme — with tannin comfortably above the threshold.
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 high | |
| Tannin | Moderate | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Medium |
Long Ashton acid and tannin ranges, with acid at the top of the scale and aroma banded high on consistent reports of a distinctive scented juice.
Delivers acid at a level nothing else in the English repertoire reaches, together with a distinctive scented character that survives fermentation.
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.
- Apple skin — The dry, faintly waxy and slightly bitter aroma of the fruit’s surface rather than its flesh, carried by cuticular waxes, hexyl esters and skin-concentrated phenolics.
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.
Measured on the fruit
Measured on the fruit itself, before anything was done to it. These figures hold whatever was later made from the juice.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fruit diameter2 readings, spanning 77–81 mm | 81 mm | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 77 mm (68–86) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| Fruit firmness | 51.4 N (33.1–69.7) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Fruit weight | 192 g (125–258) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Juice yield | 564 L/t | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Starch pattern index | 8.0 SPI | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
Measured on the juice
Measured on juice as pressed, before fermentation. This is where most cider analysis lives and what the classification schemes are defined on.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brix2 readings, spanning 11.6–12.0 °Bx | 12.0 °Bx | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 11.6 °Bx (6.5–16.7) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| pH2 readings, spanning 3.20–3.49 pH | 3.20 pH | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 3.49 pH | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| Total acid2 readings, spanning 0.690–0.950 % w/v | 0.800–1.100 % w/v | Long Ashton, Somerset, England | Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985Historic analysis | National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol |
| 0.690 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center | |
| Total tannin2 readings, spanning 0.170–0.230 % w/v | 0.180–0.280 % w/v | Long Ashton, Somerset, England | Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985Historic analysis | National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol |
| 0.170 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center | |
| Fructose | 61.1 g/L (58.0–64.2) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Glucose | 15.6 g/L (13.5–17.7) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Sorbitol | 5.4 g/L (3.8–7.0) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Specific gravity | 1.048 SG | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Sucrose | 22.0 g/L (12.2–31.8) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Titratable acidity | 4.0 g/L (0.8–7.2) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Total phenolics | 1440.0 mg/L | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
5 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
- Permanganate titration against indigo carmine, reported as tannic acid equivalent
- Titration, reported as malic acid equivalent
- Published as 3.18 inches; converted at 25.4 mm to the inch
- Juice pressed from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Published as 256 mL/lb; converted at 2.204623 lb to the kilogram
- Mean of the fruit sampled per accession; where a bracket is shown it is one standard deviation either side of the mean, not the observed range. Published to two decimal places and shown at the precision CiderHQ displays for the unit.
- Mean of the fruit sampled per accession; where a bracket is shown it is one standard deviation either side of the mean, not the observed range.
- Cornell generic starch–iodine chart, 1–8, where 1 is no hydrolysis and 8 is complete. Mean of replicate fruit; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of it.
- Penetrometer, mean of replicate fruit; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Refractometer on pressed juice. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Titration to pH 8.2 with sodium hydroxide, reported as malic acid equivalents. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Meter on pressed juice before fermentation. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported by the source as grams per litre of tannic acid equivalent and stored here as milligrams per litre by exact conversion so that it sits in one column with the Folin–Ciocalteu figures the site also holds. The two methods do not measure the same thing and are not interchangeable.
- Enzymatic assay (Megazyme). Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- D-sorbitol/xylitol assay kit (Megazyme), sorbitol dehydrogenase method. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Exceptionally high acid, from fruit grown at one Somerset site. The figure should also be read against the identity problem: material analysed as Foxwhelp may not all have been one clone.
- Given as a range, and one that touches the classification threshold at its lower end.
- A chart position, not a quantity. Almost every accession here scored at or near 8, which says the fruit was picked at or past full starch conversion rather than that the cultivars are alike.
- One harvest at one site. Soluble solids move several degrees between seasons and with crop load.
- The published standard deviation on this reading is too large to describe real variation in the pH of apple juice and is not reproduced; the mean is.
- A permanganate figure and a Folin–Ciocalteu figure for the same juice can differ by a factor of two. Compare this reading with other permanganate readings, not with a Folin one. The published standard deviation on this reading equals or exceeds the mean, so the interval it describes runs below zero. It is not reproduced; the mean is.
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.
WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial
Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center, Mount Vernon, Skagit Valley, Washington · 2002–2017 · Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Maritime, with cool summers and mild wet winters — the closest North American analogue to the English West Country, and the reason the programme planted European cider fruit here rather than east of the Cascades.
- Mean full bloom
- 5 May
- Harvest
- 4 October
- Bloom density
- 3.8 of 5
- Productivity
- 2.9 of 5
- Growth habit
- –
- Bearing
- –
- Alternate bearing
- Semi alternate
- Rootstocks
- MM.106, M27
Filed here as bittersharp, though the juice measured at this site falls in the sharp quadrant of the site’s own thresholds.
WSU lists this fruit as bittersharp — the class it carries in England — but the juice measured at Mount Vernon falls in the sharp quadrant of the site’s own thresholds. Neither reading is an error. A class assigned on acid and tannin describes fruit grown somewhere, and this is somewhere else.
Color amber, mildly bitter. No outstanding character, will add some body and lot of acid to blends; earthy tones. Best use as blender. Sharp apple, pear, butterscotch.
Recorded by the programme from professional cidermakers in the region. One panel, one place, one set of seasons — a description of these ciders rather than of the cultivar everywhere.
Juice characteristics measured on 250 mL of pressed juice; juice yield from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Bloom density, productivity and blind wood are the site’s own subjective 1–5 ratings. Figures are means across the seasons each cultivar was in the trial.
USDA-PGRU Malus germplasm characterisation
USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, in the Finger Lakes region of western New York State · 2017 · Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit
Humid continental, with cold winters and warm summers moderated by the Finger Lakes — a sharper seasonal swing than any of the European cider regions whose fruit the collection holds, and warm enough in late summer to bring acid down faster than a maritime autumn does.
- Held as
- PI 589318, held as “Foxwhelp”
- Published standard deviation on juice pH, published as mean 3.49, standard deviation 3.4. A standard deviation of that size cannot describe real variation in the pH of apple juice. The mean is published; the interval is not.
- Published standard deviation on total phenolics, published as mean 1440 mg/L, standard deviation 2000 mg/L. The deviation equals or exceeds the mean, so the interval it describes runs below zero. Something in the replicates for this accession went wrong, and CiderHQ publishes the mean without pretending to know the spread.
One harvest season. Fruit assessed for weight, diameter, starch pattern index on the Cornell 1–8 chart and flesh firmness by penetrometer; juice pressed and measured for soluble solids by refractometer, titratable acidity by titration to pH 8.2 as malic acid, pH by meter, total phenolics by Löwenthal permanganate titration as tannic acid equivalent, and glucose, fructose, sucrose and sorbitol by enzymatic assay.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Early
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Severely biennial — a substantial crop only every other year
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Late September into October. The fruit does not hang long and should be milled promptly.
A famously poor and irregular cropper on a tree that is prone to canker. This, more than fashion, is why the cultivar declined.
Mid-season flowering.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Canker | high | Severe canker is the classic complaint against Foxwhelp and the usual cause of tree loss. |
| Scab | high | — |
Juice and pressing
- Extremely high malic acid
- Moderate tannin
- A distinctive scented, almost aromatic character noted since the seventeenth century
- Very low pH, which is microbiologically protective
How it is used
- A celebrated single-varietal cider apple of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Herefordshire
- Used in small proportion to acidify low-acid bittersweet blends
On its own
Established as a single-varietal cider
Historically the single-varietal cider apple of England, and still made as one. The acid is severe enough that a Foxwhelp varietal is a demanding drink, and many producers blend a little sweet fruit in rather than bottle it straight.
About Foxwhelp
Foxwhelp is the oldest name in English cider that still has fruit attached to it. Seventeenth-century writers on Herefordshire orchards named it alongside the Redstreak as the county’s two great cider apples, and while the Redstreak has gone, something called Foxwhelp is still grown and still pressed. What it gives is acid — malic acid at a concentration nothing else in the English repertoire approaches — together with a scented character that is hard to describe and easy to recognise, and enough tannin to keep the whole thing from being merely sour.
The identity is the problem, and it is worse than the usual cider-apple confusion. By the nineteenth century orchardists were already distinguishing "Old Foxwhelp" from lookalikes and using the term "Bastard Foxwhelp" for fruit that resembled it and was known not to be it. Selections were made and named — Broxwood Foxwhelp, Bulmer’s Foxwhelp — and propagated locally alongside the original and alongside chance seedlings that inherited the acid. Modern collections hold accessions under several of these names. Whether any of them descends from the tree Beale and Evelyn were writing about is not established and probably cannot be.
The tree explains the decline. Foxwhelp cankers badly, crops irregularly and shyly, and drops its fruit in a short early window. A seventeenth-century orchard that valued the cider above all else could carry that; a twentieth-century one planting for tonnage could not. It survives because a handful of producers want the acid and want the name, and because the name is a genuine piece of English cider history rather than a marketing conceit.
For blending purposes the practical point is pH. A juice this acidic pulls a bittersweet-dominated blend down into a range where sulphite works properly and lactic spoilage is much less likely, and it does so at a small percentage. Makers who use Foxwhelp for that reason rather than for its flavour are using it exactly as eighteenth-century Herefordshire did.
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 in seventeenth-century cider writing, which makes it the earliest English cider apple with a continuous documented name. Whether trees grown today descend from the fruit those writers described is a separate and unresolved question.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Old Foxwhelp | Historic spelling | Used to distinguish the original from the later Broxwood and Bulmer’s selections. |
| Red Foxwhelp | Disputed identity | Applied variously to the original, to Broxwood Foxwhelp and to unrelated red-striped Herefordshire fruit. |
| Bastard Foxwhelp | Disputed identity | A nineteenth-century name for fruit resembling Foxwhelp but known not to be it. That such a term was needed indicates how early the confusion began. |
Why it matters
- The earliest English cider apple with a continuously documented name
- The centre of the most tangled identity problem in English pomology
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Sport
Broxwood Foxwhelp
A Herefordshire selection understood as a sport or seedling of Foxwhelp, and the form most commonly grown today.
Sport
Bulmer’s Foxwhelp
A twentieth-century selection distributed under the Bulmer name.
Often confused with
Redstreak
The other celebrated Herefordshire apple of the seventeenth century, and the one Foxwhelp is most often discussed alongside.
Often confused with
Skyrme’s Kernel
A Herefordshire bittersharp whose fruit has been mistaken for Foxwhelp in old orchards.
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.
Broxwood Foxwhelp
A Herefordshire selection of Foxwhelp from Broxwood, keeping much of the parent’s acidity in a fruit that is easier to grow, and the form most commonly planted today.
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.
Frederick
A Monmouthshire bittersharp with bright red-striped fruit and high acid, the most widely known of the Welsh border cider apples and a genuine single-varietal candidate.
Skyrme’s Kernel
A Herefordshire bittersharp with high acid and firm tannin, one of the county’s few genuine vintage-quality cider apples.
Hewe’s Crab
The historic cider crab of Virginia — small, hard, very high in acid and unusually tannic for an American apple, and probably a hybrid between a cultivated apple and a native crab.
Stoke Red
A small, dense, dark-red Somerset bittersharp carrying both high acid and substantial tannin, and the most reliable alternative to Kingston Black for a single-varietal cider.
Styles it is characteristic of
Herefordshire cider
Cider from the county with England’s largest cider orchard area, protected as a geographical indication and spanning farmhouse practice, bottle-fermented cider and industrial-scale production.
Single-varietal cider
Cider made wholly or overwhelmingly from one apple cultivar, presented so that the fruit’s own character is the subject of the drink.
Three Counties cider
The shared cider and perry tradition of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, defined by a common fruit inventory and by the perry pear orchards that survive nowhere else in comparable numbers.
Vintage cider
Cider from the fruit of a single named harvest, made and sold as an expression of that season rather than of a house style.
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
- Why is sulphite added to cider — Sulphur dioxide suppresses spoilage bacteria and wild yeast before fermentation and protects the finished cider from oxidation. How much of it is active depends strongly on pH, which is why low-acid juice is harder to protect.
- Why does cider smell of apple skin
- 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.
- What are the three counties in cider — Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire — the block of country where England’s cider and, above all, its perry have historically concentrated.
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.
Pomona, or an Appendix concerning Fruit-Trees in relation to Cider
John Evelyn, Royal Society · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1664
Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1670 edition held by the Internet Archive. The attribution needs correcting and CiderHQ has corrected it: *Pomona* is not a book by John Evelyn. It is an appendix annexed to Evelyn’s *Sylva*, published by express order of the Royal Society, and the contributors recorded for the volume are John Evelyn, John Beale, Daniel Colwall, Paul Neile, John Newburgh and Sylas Taylor. Beale has his own entry in this register, and the overlap is not a coincidence — the two texts come out of the same Royal Society enquiry into cider in the 1660s. Citing *Pomona* as Evelyn’s flattens a collaborative compilation into a single-author work.
Herefordshire Orchards, a Pattern for all England
John Beale · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1657
Identified on 2026-08-24. John Beale’s account of Herefordshire orcharding was first printed in 1657; the copy located and confirmed is the 1724 reprinting held by the Internet Archive, and CiderHQ says which it has seen rather than implying it has read the first edition. The work is an epistolary address rather than a treatise, which is worth knowing before quoting it: it argues a case for Herefordshire practice to a correspondent, and reads as advocacy as much as description. Beale is also one of the contributors to *Pomona*.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.