Cider apple
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.
Also written Frederic, Frederick Apple.
- Classification
- Bittersharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Aroma, Vintage quality
- Origin
- Monmouthshire
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
Classified under more than one system. The systems use different thresholds and were built for different fruit, so the answers can legitimately differ — that is a fact about the schemes, not a contradiction.
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: high acid with tannin above the threshold. Placed on description and on the fruit’s behaviour in the tank; no verified per-cultivar analysis is attached.
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.
Recorded because the tannin is only modestly above the threshold and some accounts treat the fruit as a sharp. The disagreement is genuine and neither placement should be presented as settled.
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 | Moderate | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Medium |
The bittersharp classification and consistent description of a high-acid, aromatic fruit, with the tannin band spanning the class boundary the cultivar sits on.
Brings sharp acid and a fresh, distinctly fruity aroma, with enough tannin to give the cider some grip.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Frederick, 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 acid1.020 % w/v
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England, 1905–1975 · Titration with alkali, reported as malic acid. Composite figure across many seasons; the source states neither the sample count nor the year of any individual analysis. · Andrew Lea
A composite of Long Ashton analyses reaching CiderHQ through three hands: the station’s own work, a printed compilation (Bulmer’s Pomona, 1987, and Beech and Carr, 1977), and a transcription of that compilation. CiderHQ has seen only the transcription.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. Measured in percent weight per volume.
Total tannin0.090 % w/v
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England, 1905–1975 · Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figure across many seasons; the source states neither the sample count nor the year of any individual analysis. · Andrew Lea
A composite of Long Ashton analyses reaching CiderHQ through three hands: the station’s own work, a printed compilation (Bulmer’s Pomona, 1987, and Beech and Carr, 1977), and a transcription of that compilation. CiderHQ has seen only the transcription. A permanganate figure. It is not comparable with a Folin–Ciocalteu total-phenolics figure for the same fruit, and the two can differ by a factor of two.
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.
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.
Long Ashton composite cider apple analyses
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England · 1905–1975 · Andrew Lea
Maritime and mild, with wet autumns and few hard frosts — the climate the English cider cultivars were selected in, and the reason their acid and tannin figures here are the ones the rest of the world has spent a century comparing its own fruit against.
- Held as
- Listed as “Frederick”, early season
Filed here as sharp.
Marked in the source as one of the cultivars “generally regarded as having that elusive and hard-to-define character of vintage quality”. The compiler marks fourteen of the forty-two that way, and does not say who regards them so or on what evidence.
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.
Freshly expressed juice, not finished cider. Acid by straight titration against alkali, reported as malic acid; tannin by Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figures across seventy years of analyses: the source gives neither a sample count nor the year of any individual reading.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
October. The fruit is conspicuously striped and holds its colour well.
Mid to late flowering. No pollination group is recorded.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
| Canker | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- High acid
- Light to moderate tannin
- Pronounced fruit aroma
- Low pH
How it is used
- A principal cider apple of Monmouthshire and the Welsh border
- Used to acidify blends dominated by border bittersweets
- Bottled as a single varietal by Welsh producers
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made as a varietal by several Welsh producers and it holds together: the acid and aroma carry it, though the tannin is light and the result is a brighter, leaner cider than a West Country bittersharp gives.
About Frederick
Frederick is the Welsh border’s answer to the question of where acid comes from. Monmouthshire orchards carried a good deal of low-acid bittersweet fruit, much of it shared with adjoining Herefordshire, and Frederick — brightly striped, high in acid, noticeably aromatic — supplied what the rest of the orchard could not.
It is one of the few Welsh cultivars regularly bottled as a single varietal, and the cider is distinctive: sharp, fruity, lighter in structure than a Somerset bittersharp and correspondingly fresher. Producers in Monmouthshire and Glamorgan have built a modest reputation on it, and it is the cultivar most often named when Welsh cider is discussed as something with its own character rather than as an extension of Herefordshire.
Its classification is not settled. The tannin sits close enough to the Long Ashton threshold that sources place it as a bittersharp and as a sharp in roughly equal measure, and this record carries both. In practice the fruit behaves like a sharp with a little structure, which is a description the four-box scheme has no room for.
Nothing is known about the origin. "Frederick" is a given name attached to no recorded person, and the cultivar arrives in the record already established. That is more common than the confident origin stories in cider writing suggest.
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 Monmouthshire cider apple, long grown on the Welsh side of the border and in adjoining Herefordshire. The name is a given name with no recorded referent, and no origin story survives.
Why it matters
- The most widely grown of the named Welsh cider apples
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Similar role
Breakwell’s Seedling
The other well-known Welsh border cider apple, and the usual blending partner.
Similar role
Kingston Black
The West Country bittersharp Frederick is inevitably compared to; Frederick is lighter in tannin.
Traditional blend partner
Perthyre
A Monmouthshire bittersweet blended with it locally.
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.
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.
Breakwell’s Seedling
An early Monmouthshire cider apple raised in the early twentieth century, sharp with a little tannin, and widely grown on both sides of the border.
Porter’s Perfection
A very late Somerset bittersharp with high acid and moderate tannin, cropping heavily in its on years and barely at all in its off ones.
Golden Russet
The highest-gravity fruit in widespread North American cider use — a small bronze russet from New York whose juice regularly presses above 1.060 and which many revival makers treat as their benchmark cultivar.
Wickson Crab
A Californian dessert crab raised by Albert Etter, exceptional for carrying very high sugar and very high acid at the same time, and now one of the most sought-after cider cultivars in North America.
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.
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.
- What is kingston black — Kingston Black is a Somerset bittersharp with an unusual balance of acid and tannin, long regarded as capable of making a complete cider unblended. It is difficult to grow well, which is why it is scarcer than its reputation suggests.
- 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
- 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.
- What is welsh 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.
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.
WPCS · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Documents Welsh cider and perry traditions and has done substantial work identifying and conserving Welsh perry pear cultivars that were close to being lost.
Marcher Apple Network · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Has rediscovered and DNA-fingerprinted a number of lost Welsh border cultivars. Cited for identity work on cultivars the national collections do not hold.
Expert reference Evidence standard for this record. What that means.