Cider apple
Kidd’s Orange Red
A New Zealand cross of Cox’s Orange Pippin and Red Delicious raised in the 1920s, aromatic and richly flavoured, and the fruit through which Cox’s aroma entered the modern global apple crop.
Also written Kidd’s Orange, Kidd’s Orange Red.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Aroma, Sugar and body
- Origin
- Greytown, in the Wairarapa, New Zealand
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Kidd’s Orange Red. 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 | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Dominant | |
| Body | Medium |
Description of a strongly aromatic Cox derivative. CiderHQ holds no juice analysis for this cultivar from any growing region.
Richly aromatic in the Cox manner — nutty, honeyed and slightly spiced — with more sugar and less acid than its English parent.
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.
- Ripe apple — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
- Apple blossom — A light, sweet floral note from terpene alcohols and 2-phenylethanol, distinct from the fruit character of the same tree.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Kidd’s Orange Red. 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
- Mid
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
Mid-season in a New Zealand autumn, which falls in March and April. The window label is a season position rather than a month.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Apple scab | moderate | — |
| Powdery mildew | moderate | Inherited from the Cox side, along with the aroma. |
Juice and pressing
- A powerful aromatic character — among the strongest available from a dessert apple.
- Good sugar with only moderate acid.
- Very little tannin.
How it is used
- A New Zealand market apple with a strong following in Britain as an import.
- A breeding parent of exceptional consequence.
- Used by New Zealand cider makers for aroma.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
The aroma is strong enough to carry a cider on its own, and the moderate acid means it needs care in the vat and generally a sharp partner in the blend.
About Kidd’s Orange Red
James Hutton Kidd bred apples in the Wairarapa in the first half of the twentieth century, working with Cox’s Orange Pippin — the most aromatic English dessert apple — and the large, red, entirely unaromatic American Delicious. Kidd’s Orange Red was the first success of that programme, and it kept far more of the Cox aroma than anyone had reason to expect.
For a New Zealand cider maker it is the aroma cultivar. There is no tannin and only moderate acid, so it cannot structure a blend, but a proportion of it gives a cider a nose that the Braeburns and Galas cannot supply. Its cider use is analogous to McIntosh in Quebec or Newtown Pippin in Virginia: the local fruit that carries perfume.
Its greater consequence was as a parent. Kidd crossed it with Golden Delicious and produced Gala, and Gala went on to become one of the two or three most planted apples on earth and the parent of a long line of further cultivars. That means the aroma of an Oxfordshire dessert apple from the 1820s reaches modern global orchards — and modern global cider — by way of a private breeding programme in rural New Zealand.
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 Hutton Kidd, who recorded the cross. A rare case of a documented private breeding programme in the southern hemisphere.
Parentage · a recorded cross
Cox’s Orange Pippin crossed with Red Delicious. Cox is an English cultivar and is not recorded in this family, so only the Red Delicious parent appears in the slug list. 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.
Why it matters
- The bridge by which Cox’s Orange Pippin’s aroma entered the modern global apple crop, through Gala and Gala’s many descendants.
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.
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.
Wickson Crab
A Californian dessert crab raised by Albert Etter, exceptional for carrying very high sugar and very high acid at the same time, and now one of the most sought-after cider cultivars in North America.
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.
Manttoni
A Basque cultivar of good reputation with balanced acid and pronounced aroma, one of the cultivars a *sagardotegi* will name when describing a serious blend.
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
- Where does a ripe apple aroma in cider come from — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
- What makes a cider taste of apple blossom
- Why does cider made from gala apples taste flat — There is not enough acid to give it shape or to protect the ferment, no tannin to give it length, and the aroma is too slight to carry it alone. Gala is a very good apple to grow and a poor one to ferment; the acid has to come from somewhere else.
- Why is red delicious a poor cider apple — Very low acid, no tannin, almost no aroma and modest sugar — and the high juice pH makes an uncorrected ferment a genuine spoilage risk rather than merely a dull one. Seventy years of selecting for colour rather than flavour is the reason.
- What is australian cider
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.
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.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.