Cider apple
Morgan Sweet
A large, early, pale Somerset sweet apple, historically sold as an eating apple and pressed for the earliest cider of the year.
Also written Morgan’s Sweet, Morgans Sweet.
- Classification
- Sweet — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Very early (Late August to early September)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Early season, Sugar and body, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Somerset
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Sweet
Low acid and low tannin. Fruit that contributes sugar, alcohol and body but little structure or sharpness.
Basis: Below about 0.45% w/v acid and below about 0.2% w/v tannin.
A sweet: low acid and low tannin. Unambiguous within the scheme.
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 | Low | |
| Tannin | Negligible | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Long Ashton acid and tannin ranges for the cultivar.
Gives sweet, soft juice with almost no acid or tannin, and ferments quickly to something light.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Morgan Sweet, 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
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 acid0.180–0.320 % w/v
Long Ashton, Somerset, England, Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985 · Titration of pressed juice, reported as malic acid · National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol
Low acid from fruit grown at one Somerset site, and low enough that a ferment built on it needs sharp fruit or careful sulphiting.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. Measured in percent weight per volume.
Total tannin0.050–0.140 % w/v
Long Ashton, Somerset, England, Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985 · National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol
Very low. Given as a range in line with the treatment of all Long Ashton figures here.
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.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Very early
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Late August into September. Traditionally the first apple of the Somerset season, and it will not wait.
A very heavy cropper on a large tree.
Goes soft and mealy within days. It was sold and pressed immediately.
Early to mid flowering. No pollination group is recorded.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
| Bitter pit and bruising | high | Large soft fruit that marks easily; handling losses were always significant. |
Juice and pressing
- Very low acid
- Negligible tannin
- Good sugar
- Available in late August
How it is used
- The earliest Somerset cider fruit, pressed for cider drunk within weeks
- Sold as a market eating apple in Bristol and the south Wales valleys
- Carried across the Severn in quantity for the Welsh mining towns
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Pressed alone for very early cider by producers who want something ready for the autumn. The result is soft, sweet-fruited and low in acid, and it does not keep.
About Morgan Sweet
Morgan Sweet had two lives. In the orchard it was the first apple of the Somerset year, pressed in late August for cider that would be drunk before Christmas. In the market it was an eating apple, sent across the Severn by the ton to the south Wales valleys, where the mining towns bought early fruit in quantity. Both uses depended on the same thing: it ripens weeks before anything else and it does not keep.
As a cider fruit it is the sweet class in its purest form. Very low acid, effectively no tannin, good sugar, a soft pleasant character, and no structure at all. Fermented alone in August warmth at a high pH, it is genuinely vulnerable to spoilage, and a maker using it either blends sharp fruit in or sulphites carefully. That is not a criticism of the cultivar so much as a statement of what the sweet class is for.
It is one of the few English cider apples with a documented commercial trade attached to it rather than just an orchard use, and the Severn trade to the Welsh valleys is a genuine piece of regional economic history rather than orchard folklore.
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 Somerset apple long grown in the county and in south Wales. The surname attribution is traditional and unverifiable.
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.
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.
Fuji
A Japanese cross of Ralls Janet and Red Delicious released in 1962, exceptionally sweet and dense and very low in acid, now among the most planted apples in the world and a very large contributor of sugar to modern cider.
Gala
A New Zealand cross of Kidd’s Orange Red and Golden Delicious that became one of the most planted apples in the world — sweet, low in acid, and a very large but structurally unhelpful contributor to modern cider.
Court Royal
A large, pale West Country sweet giving a mild, sugary juice, historically grown as much for the size of the crop as for what it contributed to a blend.
Hangdown
A Devon mild bittersweet named for its weeping habit, sitting close enough to the tannin threshold that sources place it on both sides of it.
Reine des Hâtives
A French early sweet apple grown in English cider orchards, and the lowest-acid fruit in the Long Ashton composite table.
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
- When are cider apples harvested — In the northern hemisphere the cider harvest runs from about September to November, with late bittersweets such as Dabinett and Vilberie coming in last. Cider fruit is generally picked riper than dessert fruit, and often gathered from the ground.
- Why is sulphite added to cider — Sulphur dioxide suppresses spoilage bacteria and wild yeast before fermentation and protects the finished cider from oxidation. How much of it is active depends strongly on pH, which is why low-acid juice is harder to protect.
- What is a traditional west country cider blend — Predominantly bittersweet fruit for body and tannin, with a proportion of sharp fruit for acidity and sometimes a smaller share of bittersharps for both. The exact composition varied by farm and by what was in the orchard.
- What is somerset cider
- What is welsh 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.
Long Ashton Research Station cider fruit analyses
National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol · research institute · registered as competent for this subject · covers 1903–2003
The foundational body of cider-fruit science in English. Long Ashton produced the acid-and-tannin classification that divides cider apples into sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp, and analysed hundreds of cultivars grown at its Somerset site. Its figures are historic measurements of specific fruit at a specific place, not universal constants — a distinction CiderHQ preserves in every measurement record that cites it.
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.
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.
Somerset Rural Life Museum — cider collections
South West Heritage Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.