Cider apple
James Grieve
A Scottish-raised dual-purpose apple of clean, bright acid, widely grown in Britain and pressed for acid and freshness in modern cider.
Also written James Grieve Apple.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Early (September)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Aroma, Early season
- Origin
- Edinburgh
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
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: good acid, 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 | Pronounced | |
| Body | Light |
Description of a bright, acidic dual-purpose apple with good aroma. No cider analysis attaches. 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.
Brings clean, bright acid and a fresh apple aroma, and bruises easily enough to demand careful handling.
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.
Specific gravity1.045 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 acid0.690 % 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.
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 “James Greive”
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
- Early
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
September. The fruit is soft-skinned and marks readily; press it promptly.
Comes into bearing early and crops reliably, and is hardy enough for the north.
Soft fruit that does not hold. Handling losses are significant.
Mid-season flowering and a reliable pollinator.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Canker | high | Notably canker-prone, which limits its life on wet ground. |
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Good acid
- Negligible tannin
- Fresh aroma
- Soft fruit, easily bruised
How it is used
- A British dual-purpose apple grown from Scotland to the south coast
- Pressed for acid and freshness in modern cider blends
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Bottled alone occasionally. Bright, clean and short, with nothing structural behind the acid.
About James Grieve
James Grieve is a Scottish apple that became a British one. It is hardy, crops early and reliably, and gives a bright, clean, acidic juice with a fresh aroma — a straightforwardly useful combination for a cidermaker working with dessert and culinary fruit rather than bittersweets.
The fruit is soft and marks easily, which matters more than it sounds. A crop of James Grieve handled roughly arrives at the mill already browning, and while that is not fatal it costs colour and freshness in the finished cider. It is a cultivar that repays care in picking and penalises bulk handling.
Its inclusion in a British cider record is a reminder that Scotland has an orchard tradition too, thinner than England’s and largely built on hardy dual-purpose fruit. James Grieve is its most widely travelled product.
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
Raised by James Grieve in Edinburgh and introduced around the end of the nineteenth century. A documented origin with a named raiser and a nursery introduction.
Parentage · not established
Commonly given as a seedling of Pott’s Seedling or Cox’s Orange Pippin. Not established.
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.
Discovery
A very early red dessert apple raised in Essex, used by cidermakers to start the season with something aromatic and sharp.
Katy
A Swedish-raised dessert apple widely grown in Britain and one of the most used dessert cultivars in modern British single-varietal cider.
Cheddar Cross
A very early sharp raised at Long Ashton, giving acid at the start of the season when little else is ready.
Sops in Wine
An old English name for red-fleshed apples that stain the juice, applied to several distinct cultivars and identifying none of them reliably.
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.
Styles it is characteristic of
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 you blend cider
- Can you make cider from cox apples — Yes, as an aromatic sharp in a blend. Cox carries about 0.60 per cent acid and only 0.07 per cent tannin on the Long Ashton figures, so it brings acid and aroma and no structure at all.
- 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.
- How are cider apples picked
- 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.
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.