Cider apple
Öhringer Blutstreifling
A deep red-striped Württemberg apple named for the town of Öhringen, dual-purpose and long grown in southern German meadow orchards for Most.
Also written Ohringer Blutstreifling, Blutstreifling.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Aroma, Sugar and body
- Origin
- Öhringen, Württemberg, Germany
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Öhringer Blutstreifling. 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 | Light | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Description in Württemberg orchard practice. No registered classification scheme covers German fruit.
Sweet-tart with a good aroma and a deeply red-striped skin that colours the must a little.
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.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Öhringer Blutstreifling. 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
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
Juice and pressing
- Balanced acid and sugar
- Lightly coloured must
- Aromatic
How it is used
- Most in Baden-Württemberg
- Eating fruit and juice
- A meadow-orchard standard
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Pleasant but slight alone; it is used in blends.
About Öhringer Blutstreifling
Öhringer Blutstreifling is a Württemberg meadow-orchard apple named for its town and its striping. Its role in Most is to bring aroma and a balanced sweetness to blends whose acid comes from harder fruit, and it doubles as an eating apple in the way most German orchard cultivars do.
The persistence of these regional dual-purpose cultivars is a consequence of how German orchards were owned. Streuobstwiesen were often held in small parcels by families who did not farm full-time, planted with a mixture of cultivars for a mixture of uses, and worked by hand. That structure preserved a great deal of cultivar diversity and preserved almost no specialisation, which is why German cider fruit looks so different from Norman cider fruit.
The bare name Blutstreifling means blood-striped and is applied to several red apples, so a description that uses only the short form is not an identification. The Öhringen qualifier is what fixes it.
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.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Blutstreifling | Regional name | Baden-Württemberg. The bare form — “blood-striped” — is a description and is applied to more than one red-striped apple. |
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.
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 is most the drink — In Austria, southern Germany and Switzerland *Most* is fermented apple or pear juice — the local cider. Confusingly, *Süßmost* is the unfermented juice, so the word alone does not tell you whether there is alcohol in the glass.
- What is most in germany — In Baden-Württemberg, Most is farm apple wine made from mixed standard-orchard fruit. The region holds the largest meadow-orchard landscape in Europe, and the word means something different again in Austria and Switzerland.
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.
Hochschule Geisenheim University — beverage technology
Hochschule Geisenheim · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
German beverage-technology research covering apple wine and fruit juice processing, including the enzymology of clarification.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.