Cider apple
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.
Also written Granny Smith, Smith’s Seedling.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Very late (November onwards)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Eastwood, New South Wales
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
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.
Assessed in Fruit grown in western Washington State.
A modern North American assignment for North American fruit. Granny Smith grown in the Western Cape or the Goulburn Valley ripens in a hotter season and would not necessarily give the same 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 | High | |
| Tannin | Negligible | |
| Sugar | Low | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Light |
WSU acid and Brix figures from Washington fruit, with the remaining axes reflecting a cultivar with essentially no phenolic content and a restrained aroma.
Hard, green and emphatically sharp, with a grassy, slightly herbal note and no sweetness to soften it.
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.
- Fresh-cut apple — The smell of a cut apple surface, produced within seconds of the fruit tissue being broken by six-carbon aldehydes released from membrane fats.
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 11.8–12.5 °Bx | 11.0–14.0 °Bx | Mount Vernon, Washington State | 2010sModern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 11.8 °Bx | Winchester, Virginia, USA | 2012–2013Modern analysis | Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry | |
| pH | 3.51 pH | Winchester, Virginia, USA | 2012–2013Modern analysis | Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry |
| Titratable acidity | 9.9 g/L | Winchester, Virginia, USA | 2012–2013Modern analysis | Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry |
| Total acid | 0.700–1.000 % w/v | Mount Vernon, Washington State | 2010sModern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Total phenolics | 361.0 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 from maritime western Washington. This is Washington fruit, not Australian, South African or New Zealand fruit; CiderHQ holds no southern-hemisphere analysis for this cultivar and the difference between a cool maritime season and a hot Cape one is exactly the kind of difference that moves an acid figure.
- Refractometric. Low — Granny Smith is picked before it accumulates much sugar, because its market wants it green and hard.
- 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 “Granny Smith”
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
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
A very long-season cultivar. In Australia and South Africa it is picked from March; in Washington and California it is among the last of the crop. It is often picked earlier than full ripeness because the market wants it green, and early-picked fruit is sharper and lower in sugar still.
Stores for many months without softening, which underpins its worldwide commercial position.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Apple scab | high | — |
| Requires a long growing season | high | It will not ripen in a short or cool season, which restricts it to warm and long-season regions. |
| Powdery mildew | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Reliably high acid — the property that makes it valuable and the reason so much commercial cider depends on it.
- Low sugar, particularly when picked green for the fresh market.
- No tannin whatever.
- High juice yield and a pale, stable juice.
- A slightly grassy, herbal aroma that reads as freshness rather than as fruit.
How it is used
- A worldwide fresh-market and processing apple, grown on every continent that grows apples commercially.
- The standard acid supply for large-scale cider in Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.
- Pressed in enormous volume as culls, undersized fruit and processing-grade crop.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made single-varietal by a number of Australian and South African producers, and by many home makers. The result is bracingly sharp, pale, light-bodied and clean, with nothing at the finish. Whether that counts as a good cider is a matter of expectation rather than of fault.
About Granny Smith
Granny Smith is the apple that most deserves to be taken seriously by people who write about cider and usually is not. It is a dessert apple with no tannin, no cider history and no romance, and it supplies a very large share of the acid in commercially made cider across the English-speaking world. A blend built on sweet, low-acid processing fruit needs sharpening, Granny Smith is sharp and available everywhere in industrial quantity, and so it goes in.
What it brings is precise and limited. High malic acid, which lifts the palate and drops the pH into a range where the ferment is safer from bacterial spoilage. Low sugar, so it dilutes gravity. No phenolics at all, so it adds nothing to structure, length or ageing capacity. A slightly grassy freshness. Understanding those four facts explains a great deal about how mass-market cider tastes: bright, clean, thin, short, and reliant on residual or added sweetness for balance because there is no tannin to provide it.
It is not a substitute for a cider apple and it is not trying to be. The comparison that gets made — that Granny Smith cider is a lesser version of a West Country one — sets it against a standard it was never in. The honest comparison is with the alternative available to a large producer, which is not a bittersweet blend but a flatter, softer, higher-pH juice that would be worse in every respect including safety.
The Washington figures above are recorded with an unusually emphatic caveat. Granny Smith is grown in the Goulburn Valley, the Western Cape, Hawke’s Bay, Chile and Washington, and those climates are not alike. A cultivar that needs a long season and is picked to a colour standard rather than a ripeness one will vary enormously between them, and a single acid figure without a site is close to meaningless for this fruit in particular.
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
Found by Maria Ann Smith as a chance seedling on her Eastwood property, reportedly from discarded Tasmanian crab apple material. The finding and the finder are well documented; the seed parentage is not.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Smith’s Seedling | Historic spelling | New South Wales. The name under which it first circulated in Australia before it was renamed for its finder. |
Why it matters
- Probably the single most important cultivar to commercial cider worldwide by volume of acid contributed, and almost never named on a label.
- The clearest example of a fruit whose cider role is real, large and entirely different from the role a traditional cider apple plays.
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.
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.
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.
Baldwin
The dominant New England apple of the nineteenth century until a single catastrophic winter destroyed the orchards; a firm, moderately sharp keeper still used in northeastern cider blends.
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.
Crimson King
A bright red Somerset sharp with high acid and negligible tannin, planted widely as a companion to bittersweet fruit and occasionally used as a culinary apple.
Styles it is characteristic of
Modern American cider
The dominant contemporary American category: cider from culinary and dessert apples, fermented clean, often carbonated and frequently flavoured, defined against the heritage sector rather than by any tradition.
Australian cider
Cider from Australia, dominated by a large mainstream sector using dessert fruit and concentrate, with a smaller full-juice movement working from cool-climate orchards.
New Zealand cider
Cider from New Zealand, made in a country with a substantial export apple industry and a small but technically confident craft cider sector.
Tasmanian cider
Cider from Tasmania, whose cool maritime climate and long apple-growing history give fruit with the acid that most Australian districts cannot hold.
South African cider
Cider from South Africa, where a very large mainstream category built on Western Cape dessert fruit dominates and a small craft sector works alongside it.
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 i make my cider sweeter
- How do you blend cider
- What does fresh-cut apple mean in a cider tasting note — The smell of a cut apple surface, produced within seconds of the fruit tissue being broken by six-carbon aldehydes released from membrane fats.
- Which supermarket apple can carry a cider on its own — Braeburn has the strongest claim: it brings acid, sugar and a genuine spicy aroma at once, which few modern dessert apples do. New Zealand producers bottle it single-varietal. It still finishes short, for want of tannin.
- What is juice blending
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.
Cider and perry production technical training material
Peter Mitchell / Cider and Perry Academy · reference work · registered as competent for this subject
Searched again on 2026-08-25 and it remains the one printed source here that a bibliographic check cannot fix, because it is not a published work with an edition. It is course material issued to participants of a training programme, so there is no catalogue record to verify, no ISBN, and no lawful public copy. Its state stays `registered` for that reason rather than through inattention.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.