Meana

How it is classified

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.

Bitter first and acid behind it, which is an unusual combination anywhere and a rare one in Asturias — most of the region’s fruit carries acid with almost no phenolic weight.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Meana, 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.

Put Meana into a blend

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.

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.

In the orchard

Harvest window

Late

Flowering

Pollination group 3

Vigour

Moderate

Cropping

Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate

Keeping

Moderate

The Consejo Regulador records ripening in the second to third ten days of October (“2ª – 3ª decena de octubre”).

Disease and pest susceptibility

Juice and pressing

• High phenolics for Asturian fruit at 2,0 g/L, more than double the regional floor
• Substantial acid alongside them, at 4,6 g/L
• The combination gives a blend grip and structure that the acid cultivars cannot

How it is used

• Gravity and softness in sidra natural blends

On its own

About Meana

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.

Related cultivars

Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.

• Often confused with

  Panquerina

  Both sit near the sweet and semi-sharp boundary and both are described inconsistently.

• Similar role

  Fuentes

  Interchangeable as a sweet component.

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.

• Corchu

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as bitter-acid — 4,67 g/L of acid above the register’s median, with 1,77 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the second ten days of November.

• Hewe’s Crab

  The historic cider crab of Virginia — small, hard, very high in acid and unusually tannic for an American apple, and probably a hybrid between a cultivated apple and a native crab.

• 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.

• Durona de Tresali

  A very hard, very late Asturian cultivar from the parish of Tresali, in the acid-bitter block, and one of the last fruits of the season to be pressed.

• Sauergrauech

  An old Bernese cider apple, sharp and unusually astringent for the region, and one of the few Swiss cultivars that a cider maker would recognise as purpose-grown press fruit.

• Stoke Red

  A small, dense, dark-red Somerset bittersharp carrying both high acid and substantial tannin, and the most reliable alternative to Kingston Black for a single-varietal cider.

Where it grows

• Asturias

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 does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
• How do you blend cider
• What is sidra natural — Sidra natural is the still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, bottled without added carbonation and poured from a height to rouse it. It is tart, funky and made to be drunk in small measures poured one at a time.
• What is asturian 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.

• Servicio Regional de Investigación y Desarrollo Agroalimentario (SERIDA)

  Principado de Asturias · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24

  The Asturian regional agri-food research service, and the technical authority behind the Asturian cultivar classification and the analysis of sidra natural. SERIDA’s own site has not been opened; what CiderHQ has read is SERIDA’s varietal characterisation as republished by the Consejo Regulador of DOP Sidra de Asturias, which credits it explicitly. The Asturian measurements therefore cite the Consejo rather than SERIDA — citing the body that did the work, at a document CiderHQ has not seen, would be exactly the kind of borrowed authority this register exists to prevent.

• Denominación de Origen Protegida Sidra de Asturias

  Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias · designation authority · passage verified 2026-08-24

  The regulating council for Asturian cider. Read on 2026-08-24, and it turned out to carry far more than a permitted-variety list: an agronomic and technological characterisation of each admitted variety, with total acidity, total polyphenols, vigour, flowering, ripening, cropping and susceptibility to fungal disease. The characterisation is credited to SERIDA’s fruit-research programme. Two things it settles are corrections to what CiderHQ previously held: Asturias sorts cider fruit into nine technological blocks rather than five, and it publishes acidity as sulphuric acid rather than malic. The figures are transcribed into `data/trials/serida-asturias.ts` and cite this source, because this is where they were read.