Cider apple
Fuji
A Japanese cross of Ralls Janet and Red Delicious released in 1962, exceptionally sweet and dense and very low in acid, now among the most planted apples in the world and a very large contributor of sugar to modern cider.
Also written Fuji.
- Classification
- Sweet — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Very late (November onwards)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Bulk juice
- Origin
- The national horticultural research station at Morioka, Iwate prefecture, Japan
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Sweet
Low acid and low tannin. Fruit that contributes sugar, alcohol and body but little structure or sharpness.
Basis: Below about 0.45% w/v acid and below about 0.2% w/v tannin.
Assessed in Fruit grown in western Washington State.
Low acid with no tannin. Its very high sugar is not something the scheme records, which is again the limitation rather than the result.
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 low | |
| Tannin | Negligible | |
| Sugar | Very high | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Medium |
WSU acid and Brix figures from Washington fruit, with the phenolic axes at the floor.
Very sweet, dense and crisp, with a mild honeyed character and an acidity so low that the sweetness has nothing to push against.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Fuji, 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.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brix2 readings, spanning 14.6–16.0 °Bx | 14.0–18.0 °Bx | Mount Vernon, Washington State | 2010sModern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 14.6 °Bx | Winchester, Virginia, USA | 2012–2013Modern analysis | Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry | |
| pH | 4.11 pH | Winchester, Virginia, USA | 2012–2013Modern analysis | Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry |
| Titratable acidity | 4.6 g/L | Winchester, Virginia, USA | 2012–2013Modern analysis | Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry |
| Total acid | 0.200–0.400 % w/v | Mount Vernon, Washington State | 2010sModern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Total phenolics | 238.0 mg/L | Winchester, Virginia, USA | 2012–2013Modern analysis | Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry |
One property here has 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
- Refractometer on pressed juice.
- Meter on pressed juice.
- Titration, reported as malic acid. Published to two decimal places and shown at the one the site displays.
- Folin–Ciocalteu, reported as gallic acid equivalents.
- Reported as malic acid. Low enough that a Fuji-dominated juice needs acid correction for safety as well as for palate.
- Refractometric, and among the highest of any commercial dessert apple. Fuji is genuinely a high-sugar fruit, which is why it is worth having in a blend despite the acid problem.
- A Folin–Ciocalteu figure in gallic acid equivalents. It is not interchangeable with a Löwenthal permanganate “tannin” figure: the two assays respond to different things and can differ by a factor of two on the same juice.
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.
Virginia cultivar polyphenol characterisation
Winchester, in the northern Shenandoah Valley, Virginia · 2012–2013 · Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
Humid subtropical shading into continental, with hot summers — warm enough that acid falls faster through the ripening period than it does in a maritime autumn, which is part of why the titratable acidities here run lower than English figures for comparable fruit.
- Held as
- Listed as “Fuji”
Soluble solids by refractometer, pH by meter, titratable acidity by titration as malic acid, total polyphenols by Folin–Ciocalteu as gallic acid equivalents. Twenty cultivars, one site.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Very late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
A long-season cultivar picked at the very end of the crop; it needs the whole autumn to accumulate the sugar it is grown for.
Strongly biennial without careful thinning.
Exceptional storage life, and it retains its texture longer than almost any other cultivar.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Fire blight | high | Markedly blight-prone, a serious constraint in North American plantings. |
| Apple scab | moderate | — |
| Requires a long growing season | high | — |
Juice and pressing
- Very high sugar — among the highest available from any commercial dessert apple.
- Very low acid, which is the corresponding problem.
- No tannin.
- A mild honeyed aroma and little else.
- High juice yield.
How it is used
- The dominant apple of the Japanese and Chinese crops and a major cultivar in the United States, Chile and South Africa.
- Used in cider and juice blends worldwide for gravity.
- Pressed in large volume as downgraded and surplus fruit.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
The sugar makes a substantial, alcoholic cider and the absence of acid makes it flabby and vulnerable. Where it is made single-varietal, acid is generally added or a sharp cultivar is blended in and the label kept quiet about it.
About Fuji
Fuji is a Japanese apple with two American parents, and its rise is the clearest single illustration of how thoroughly the modern apple crop has become a global one. Crossed at Morioka in 1939 from a Virginian farm apple and an Iowa chance seedling, released in 1962, it is now planted in China on a scale that dwarfs every other apple crop in history, and grown commercially in the United States, Chile, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
For a cider maker the balance sheet is stark and useful. On the credit side, very high sugar — Fuji reaches Brix levels that few dessert apples approach, and a blend containing it ferments to a genuinely higher alcohol. On the debit side, extremely low acid, no tannin, and very little aroma. It contributes gravity and dilutes everything else.
The low acid is a production problem before it is a flavour one, in the same way it is for Red Delicious. A juice heavy in Fuji ferments at a pH where sulphite is less effective and spoilage organisms are at home, and a maker has to correct it — with a sharp cultivar if one is available, with added malic acid if not. Blending in this context is not an aesthetic refinement; it is how the ferment is kept sound.
That is the point this section of the file exists to make. The large majority of cider made in the world today is made from fruit like Fuji, Gala, Golden Delicious and Granny Smith, in proportions decided by what a national orchard industry happens to grow. It is not a corrupted version of a West Country tradition; it is a different practice with different inputs and different constraints, and describing it accurately — including where it is thin, and where it needs correcting — is more useful to a reader than either celebrating it or pretending it is not there.
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
A documented institutional cross. Fuji is included in this family rather than a European one because both its parents are North American and its commercial life is overwhelmingly a Pacific and southern-hemisphere one.
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.
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.
Gala
A New Zealand cross of Kidd’s Orange Red and Golden Delicious that became one of the most planted apples in the world — sweet, low in acid, and a very large but structurally unhelpful contributor to modern cider.
Court Royal
A large, pale West Country sweet giving a mild, sugary juice, historically grown as much for the size of the crop as for what it contributed to a blend.
Hangdown
A Devon mild bittersweet named for its weeping habit, sitting close enough to the tannin threshold that sources place it on both sides of it.
Morgan Sweet
A large, early, pale Somerset sweet apple, historically sold as an eating apple and pressed for the earliest cider of the year.
Slack-ma-Girdle
A Devon cider apple with one of the more memorable names in English pomology, giving a mild, sweet juice and sitting awkwardly on the sweet–bittersweet boundary.
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 know when my cider has finished fermenting — Take two hydrometer readings several days apart: if the gravity has not moved, the ferment is over. Airlock activity is not a reliable test, because a slow ferment can produce gas too slowly to see.
- 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.
- Is golden delicious used to make cider — Heavily, and by volume it is one of the largest single inputs to cider worldwide. It brings sugar and a genuine honeyed aroma; what it does not bring is acid or tannin, so it is a component rather than a cider.
- How is supermarket cider made
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.
Washington State University cider research programme
Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center · university · passage verified 2026-08-24
The single most useful open cider dataset CiderHQ has found. The programme’s cultivar performance database gives juice chemistry, orchard behaviour, bloom and harvest timing and cider-maker tasting notes for 73 cultivars grown at one maritime site over fifteen years, and — unusually — publishes its classification thresholds alongside its figures, so the classification can be checked rather than taken on trust. It also states outright that its results diverge from the English ones. Read in full on 2026-08-24 and transcribed into `data/trials/wsu-mount-vernon.ts`; four published figures were found to be impossible and are withheld there with their reasons.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
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.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.