Cider apple
Frostbite
A small, extremely hardy Minnesota selection with an intense sugar-cane sweetness, held unreleased for seventy years and named in 2008, now grown by northern cider makers for concentration.
Also written Frostbite, MN 447.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Aroma
- Origin
- University of Minnesota fruit breeding programme, Excelsior, Minnesota
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Frostbite. 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 | Low | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Very high | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Full |
Consistent description of an exceptionally sweet, distinctively flavoured hardy selection. No juice analysis is held in CiderHQ’s register.
A concentrated, almost molasses-like sweetness with a distinctive sugar-cane character quite unlike an ordinary apple.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Frostbite, 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 Frostbite. 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
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Winter cold injury | low | Exceptionally hardy — it was selected for survival in Minnesota winters, and that is the origin of the name. |
Juice and pressing
- Very high sugar with a distinctive non-apple sweetness.
- Modest acid, so it needs a sharp partner.
- A little skin astringency.
How it is used
- A breeding parent within the Minnesota programme for most of its existence.
- Grown by northern cider makers since its release for gravity and for its unusual flavour.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Its flavour is distinctive enough to carry a small batch, though the low acid leaves the result soft and it is more often blended.
About Frostbite
Frostbite spent seventy years as a number. The Minnesota programme selected it in the 1930s for cold hardiness, used it repeatedly as a breeding parent, and did not release it — the fruit is small and the flavour is odd by dessert-apple standards. It was finally named in 2008, at which point growers discovered they had a fruit with a highly concentrated, almost molasses-like sweetness and enough hardiness for anywhere apples grow at all.
Northern cider makers took it up for the sugar. Its acid is modest, so it does not carry a blend on its own, but a proportion of Frostbite juice raises gravity substantially and brings a genuinely unusual flavour with it. In ice cider, where everything concentrates together, that combination is worth having.
It also has a genealogical importance out of proportion to its planting. Frostbite is behind Keepsake, and Keepsake is one of the parents of Honeycrisp — so the most commercially successful North American apple of the modern era descends from an unreleased hardiness selection that nobody thought worth naming for seventy years.
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 · documented
Held as an unreleased breeding parent for most of the twentieth century; it stands behind Keepsake and, through Keepsake, behind Honeycrisp.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| MN 447 | Trade name | The Minnesota selection number under which it circulated for decades before it was named and released. |
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.
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.
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.
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.
Manttoni
A Basque cultivar of good reputation with balanced acid and pronounced aroma, one of the cultivars a *sagardotegi* will name when describing a serious blend.
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
- Does honeycrisp make good cider — The property it is famous for does not survive the mill. Honeycrisp’s celebrated crispness comes from unusually large cells that rupture rather than separate when bitten, and once pressed what remains is a mild, sweet, structureless juice.
- What is ice cider — Ice cider is made by concentrating apple juice by freezing before fermentation, so that the ferment starts from a very high sugar level and stops sweet. It is a Quebec speciality with a protected definition there.
- How is ice cider made — Apple juice is frozen and the sugar-rich liquid separated from the ice, either by freezing pressed juice or by leaving fruit on the tree into winter. Fermentation then stops of its own accord well before the concentrated sugar is used up.
- What is modern american cider like
- What is quebec ice 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.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
University of Vermont cider research
University of Vermont Extension · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.