Cider apple
Hauxapfel
A large, heavy-cropping Württemberg Most apple, planted for tonnage in southern German meadow orchards.
Also written Haux, Hauxapfel von Württemberg.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Bulk juice, Sugar and body
- Origin
- Württemberg, Germany
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Hauxapfel. 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 | Moderate | |
| Tannin | Negligible | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Description in Württemberg practice as a large, productive Most apple. No registered classification scheme covers German fruit.
Large and mild with moderate acid; a fruit grown for how much of it a tree carries rather than for what it tastes like.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Hauxapfel, 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 Hauxapfel. 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
- Late
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
Heavy and reasonably regular, which is the whole point of it.
Juice and pressing
- High juice yield
- Moderate acid
- Negligible tannin
How it is used
- Bulk Most production in Baden-Württemberg
- Juice pressing
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Nothing about it suggests a single-varietal bottling and nobody makes one.
About Hauxapfel
Hauxapfel is a volume cultivar. It makes a very large tree, it crops heavily and fairly regularly, its fruit are big and give up juice readily, and its juice is unremarkable. In a Streuobstwiese worked for the press, those are exactly the properties that justify a tree taking up space.
The German cider industry has always had a substantial juice component alongside its fermented one, and cultivars like this one serve both. Apfelsaft — pressed, pasteurised, unfermented apple juice, often sold as naturtrüb cloudy juice — is a much larger market in Germany than in Britain or France, and the same orchards supply it. That dual market is part of why German orchard fruit is less specialised than Norman or Somerset fruit.
There is no classification for it, and this file’s German records say so consistently rather than borrowing one. What is recorded is what German practice records: use category, season, tree habit and cropping.
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 surname attached to a fruit, which usually means a tree noticed and propagated by a named grower. The particulars are not recorded.
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.
Douce Moën
The workhorse of Breton cider orchards: a large, pale, very low-acid bittersweet that crops heavily, presses generously, and carries more Breton cider than any other single cultivar.
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.
Somerset Redstreak
A mild bittersweet planted at very large scale in the late twentieth century for its heavy, regular cropping on bush trees, and a fruit whose commercial importance exceeds its character.
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.
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.
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
- What is pressing yield — Pressing yield is the proportion of fruit weight recovered as juice. It varies from under half on a poorly loaded basket press to around seventy per cent on a well-run rack-and-cloth or belt press.
- What is apfelwein — Apfelwein is the dry, still, tart apple cider of Hessen in Germany, known locally as Ebbelwoi and served from a stoneware jug into a ridged glass. Despite the name it is a cider, not a wine in any technical sense.
- Which apple is most planted for german most — Brettacher is among the most planted in southern Germany — a large, acid, exceptionally long-keeping Württemberg apple found as a chance seedling in the early twentieth century.
- What is most the drink — In Austria, southern Germany and Switzerland *Most* is fermented apple or pear juice — the local cider. Confusingly, *Süßmost* is the unfermented juice, so the word alone does not tell you whether there is alcohol in the glass.
- What is most in germany — In Baden-Württemberg, Most is farm apple wine made from mixed standard-orchard fruit. The region holds the largest meadow-orchard landscape in Europe, and the word means something different again in Austria and Switzerland.
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.
Hochschule Geisenheim University — beverage technology
Hochschule Geisenheim · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
German beverage-technology research covering apple wine and fruit juice processing, including the enzymology of clarification.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.