Cider apple
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.
Also written McIntosh Red, Mac.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Established as a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Aroma, Acid lift, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Dundela, Dundas County, Ontario
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
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 New York State trial plantings.
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 | Dominant | |
| Body | Light |
Cornell acid figures from New York fruit, with the aroma band set at the top on the strength of a uniquely consistent descriptive record.
Unmistakably perfumed — a sweet, almost strawberry-like fruit aroma over bright acid, with a soft, quickly collapsing flesh.
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.
- 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
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.
Total acid0.600–0.900 % w/v
Geneva, New York State, 2010s · Cornell University, School of Integrative Plant Science
Reported as malic acid. McIntosh loses acid rapidly in store — faster than most cultivars — so fruit pressed in December is materially less sharp than fruit pressed at picking.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. 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.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
Ripens in late September in Quebec and northern New England, and drops readily once ripe. Pre-harvest drop is a genuine management problem and a genuine source of pressing fruit.
Softens quickly and loses aroma and acid in store; it is a fruit to press soon after picking.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Apple scab | high | Severely scab-prone, which is the central disease problem of Quebec and northeastern orchards and the reason so much breeding effort has gone into scab-resistant McIntosh relatives. |
| Winter cold injury | low | Hardy, which is why it replaced Baldwin across New England after the 1933–34 winter. |
| Fire blight | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- A powerful, immediately recognisable fruit aroma that survives fermentation better than almost any other apple in this file.
- Good acid at picking, falling appreciably in store.
- Essentially no tannin.
- Modest sugar, so it does not raise gravity.
How it is used
- The dominant market and processing apple of Quebec, Ontario and northern New England for a century.
- The aromatic base of most Quebec cider and of most Quebec ice cider.
- Pressed as drops and culls in very large volume.
On its own
Established as a single-varietal cider
Very widely made, particularly in Quebec, and it works on aroma alone: a light, perfumed, sharply fresh cider with no structure and a short finish. It is what most people in the northeast think cider tastes like.
About McIntosh
McIntosh is to eastern Canada what a bittersweet is to Somerset: not one cultivar among many but the assumed default, the fruit that shapes what the local cider is expected to taste like. It was found on a farm in eastern Ontario around 1811, spread through the St Lawrence valley and into New England, and after the 1933–34 winter killed the Baldwin orchards it became the standard northeastern apple outright.
Its cider contribution is aroma, and it is worth being precise about how unusual that is. Most fruit aromas are stripped out by fermentation; what a drinker smells in a finished cider is usually made by the yeast rather than carried in from the apple. McIntosh is one of a small number of cultivars whose own perfume — sweet, floral, faintly strawberry-like — survives the process intact and dominates the finished drink. That is why a Quebec cider is recognisable as a Quebec cider.
What it does not bring is structure. There is no tannin, the sugar is modest, and the acid, though good at picking, falls quickly in store. A McIntosh cider is bright, aromatic, light-bodied and short, and every Quebec producer who wants more than that is blending something else in — a russet for gravity, a crab for acid and colour, or European fruit for grip. In ice cider the concentration process amplifies both the aroma and the acid, which is a large part of why the style works so well with this fruit.
The tree is severely scab-prone in a humid climate, and that single weakness has shaped North American apple breeding for fifty years. Liberty, Nova Easygro and a long line of scab-resistant selections exist because growers wanted McIntosh quality without McIntosh spray programmes, and the cider revival has inherited the results.
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
John McIntosh found the seedling on his farm; the site was marked and the story is unusually well documented for a chance seedling of that date.
Parentage · not established
Fameuse is the usual proposed parent on the grounds of geography and fruit character. The relationship is widely accepted and not formally established.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| McIntosh Red | Historic spelling | Ontario and New England. The original full name, now generally shortened. |
Why it matters
- The single most important cultivar to Canadian cider, and the aromatic signature of the Quebec ice cider style.
- Its scab susceptibility drove decades of North American breeding for disease resistance, which produced Liberty and much else.
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Parent
Fameuse
The traditional and widely accepted but unconfirmed parent, from the same part of the St Lawrence valley.
Offspring
Cortland
Ben Davis crossed with McIntosh at Geneva.
Offspring
Empire
McIntosh crossed with Red Delicious at Geneva.
Offspring
Spartan
Raised at Summerland, British Columbia, from McIntosh.
Offspring
Lobo
A McIntosh seedling raised at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Styles it is characteristic of
Ice cider
Cider made from apple juice concentrated by freezing, fermented slowly and stopped while a large residual sugar remains, giving a dessert-strength drink of high acid and high sweetness.
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.
Quebec ice cider
Ice cider made under Quebec’s reserved designation, which sets out how the juice may be concentrated, what may be added and what the finished product must contain.
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 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.
- 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 is ice cider — Ice cider is made by concentrating apple juice by freezing before fermentation, so that the ferment starts from a very high sugar level and stops sweet. It is a Quebec speciality with a protected definition there.
- Can you use windfall apples for cider — Traditional cider making relies on fruit gathered from the ground, and there is nothing wrong with it if it is sound. Rotten fruit is a different matter: brown rot carries patulin into the juice and should be discarded, not pressed.
- How is ice cider made — Apple juice is frozen and the sugar-rich liquid separated from the ice, either by freezing pressed juice or by leaving fruit on the tree into winter. Fermentation then stops of its own accord well before the concentrated sugar is used up.
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.
Cornell Cider Research and Extension programme
Cornell University, School of Integrative Plant Science · university · passage verified 2026-08-24
Runs cultivar trials in New York State and publishes juice chemistry for European cider varieties grown in a North American climate — the single most useful counterweight to treating English figures as universal.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.
University of Vermont cider research
University of Vermont Extension · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.