Cider apple
Golden Noble
A Norfolk culinary apple of clean high acid, pressed in eastern counties cider for sharpness without the severity of Bramley.
Also written Golden Noble Apple.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Acid lift
- Origin
- Norfolk
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
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.
A sharp when pressed, with high acid and negligible tannin. Placed on description; no cider analysis attaches.
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 | Negligible | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Light |
Description of a culinary sharp. No cider analysis attaches to this cultivar. These bands were authored from description; published analyses of this fruit have since been transcribed onto the record from named trial programmes and are shown above. The bands are not derived from those figures, which is why this profile is marked as classified rather than measured.
Supplies clean acid with a little more sugar and roundness than Bramley gives at the same proportion.
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.
- Cooked apple — The soft, sweet, aldehyde-stripped apple character of heated fruit or heated juice, the base note of the whole cooked family.
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.
Specific gravity1.046 SG
England — the source does not name the orchards, 1922–1977 · Published in the two-figure form the table uses (a printed 51 meaning 1.051) and written here in full. · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
A National Association of Cider Makers compilation crediting three bodies of work — MAFF/ADAS acidity and pH from freshly harvested fruit, Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties reported in 1977, and the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. The compilation does not say which row came from which, so no row can be dated more precisely than the span of the three.
Juice density, the practical proxy for sugar before fermentation. Measured in specific gravity.
Total acid1.000 % w/v
England — the source does not name the orchards, 1922–1977 · Titration, reported as malic acid, on juice from freshly harvested fruit. · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
A National Association of Cider Makers compilation crediting three bodies of work — MAFF/ADAS acidity and pH from freshly harvested fruit, Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties reported in 1977, and the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. The compilation does not say which row came from which, so no row can be dated more precisely than the span of the three. Several cultivars appear more than once in this table under sample numbers, and the repeats are far apart: Bramley’s acid is 1.21, 1.05 and 1.43 per cent in three rows. Read any single row as one pressing of one parcel of fruit.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. Measured in percent weight per volume.
Total tannin0.050 % w/v
England — the source does not name the orchards, 1922–1977 · Method not stated in the compilation; the Long Ashton work behind it used Löwenthal permanganate titration. · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
A National Association of Cider Makers compilation crediting three bodies of work — MAFF/ADAS acidity and pH from freshly harvested fruit, Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties reported in 1977, and the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. The compilation does not say which row came from which, so no row can be dated more precisely than the span of the three.
The phenolic fraction responsible for bitterness and astringency. Measured in percent weight per volume.
pH3.00 pH
England — the source does not name the orchards, 1922–1977 · Meter on juice from freshly harvested fruit. · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
A National Association of Cider Makers compilation crediting three bodies of work — MAFF/ADAS acidity and pH from freshly harvested fruit, Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties reported in 1977, and the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. The compilation does not say which row came from which, so no row can be dated more precisely than the span of the three.
Acid strength, which governs microbial risk and sulphite effectiveness. Measured in ph.
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.
Typical English apple juice analyses
England — the compilation does not name the orchards · 1922–1977 · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
English fruit-growing country, and no closer than that: the source gives neither site nor season for any individual row, which is a real limit on what the figures can be asked to do.
- Held as
- Listed as “Golden Noble”
Juice from freshly harvested fruit. Acidity and pH credited to MAFF/ADAS; the remainder to Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties (1977) and to the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. Specific gravity is printed in a two-figure form and written out in full here.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
October.
Mid to late flowering. No pollination group is recorded here.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- High acid
- Negligible tannin
- Moderate sugar
How it is used
- A Norfolk cooking apple of nineteenth-century reputation
- Pressed in eastern counties blends for acid
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
A culinary sharp; thin and severe fermented alone.
About Golden Noble
Golden Noble is a Norfolk cooker with a long reputation as one of the better English apples for a pie, and its cider use follows the same logic as Bramley’s: it is grown in quantity for another purpose and its surplus is sharp.
What distinguishes it from Bramley is a slightly gentler acid and a little more sugar, which means a blend can carry more of it before turning thin. It is a minority fruit in cider terms and mostly appears in eastern counties blends, where it is locally available.
It belongs here as part of a broader point: eastern England has a cider tradition built on culinary and dessert fruit rather than on bittersweets, because that is what the region grows. A cider from Norfolk or Essex is a different proposition from one from Somerset, and the difference starts in the orchard rather than in the cellar.
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
Found in a Norfolk orchard and introduced in the 1820s. The introduction is recorded; the raising is not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Can you make cider from bramley apples — You can, and it is normally blended rather than used alone. Bramley is a sharp — Long Ashton recorded 0.85 per cent acid and 0.08 per cent tannin — so it raises acid and drops pH in a bittersweet must, and gives a thin, aggressive cider on its own.
- 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
- Where does a cooked apple aroma in cider come from
- How is supermarket cider made
- Is cider made in kent
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.
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.
NIAB (incorporating East Malling Research)
NIAB · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
East Malling developed the M-series apple rootstocks that determine tree size in essentially every modern orchard, cider orchards included. The authority CiderHQ uses for rootstock behaviour.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.