Cider apple
Petit Jaune
A small yellow Breton sharp grown for one purpose: putting acid back into blends built on fruit that has almost none.
Also written Petit Jaune de Bretagne.
- Classification
- Sharp — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Early (September)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Early season
- Origin
- Brittany
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 2
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
French cider apple families
Sharp · Acidulée
High acid with low tannin.
Basis: Tannin below 2 g/L and acidity 3 to 4.5 g/L as H₂SO₄.
Sharp rather than the more extreme aigre, though some Breton records place it in the acid family.
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 | Present | |
| Body | Light |
French sharp family placement; bands follow the class definition.
Sharp and clean, with a lemony edge and no tannin at all to soften it.
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.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Petit Jaune. 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
- Early
- Flowering
- Pollination group 2
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Early, which lets a Breton mill start pressing before the bitter fruit is ready — and means the juice is usually held rather than blended fresh.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- High malic acid
- Lowers blend pH materially even at modest proportions
- Little else to contribute
How it is used
- Acid correction in Breton blends dominated by Douce Moën and Douce Coëtligné
- Early-season pressing before the main crop
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Thin, sharp and without structure. It is a corrective, and treating it as anything else misunderstands why Breton growers keep a few trees of it.
About Petit Jaune
Petit Jaune is a functional cultivar. Breton cider fruit is overwhelmingly low in acid, and a blend built from the sweet and bitter families alone ferments at a pH where sulphite works poorly and lactic bacteria work well. A few trees of a sharp apple in the corner of an orchard are an insurance policy, and Petit Jaune is one of the oldest examples of that policy in Brittany.
Its earliness compounds the usefulness. It comes down weeks before the bitters, so a farm mill can make a start on it, and the juice can be held cold or lightly sulphited until the main crop arrives. This is a different logic from the English one, where sharps and bittersweets more often ripen together and are milled as a mixed load.
The name is unreliable. “Little yellow” is a description rather than an identity, and Breton orchards contain several small yellow sharp apples that have been called Petit Jaune by somebody. Where a modern Breton producer names it, they are usually working from a nursery accession rather than from a hedge tree, and the two are not certain to be the same fruit.
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 descriptive name — “little yellow” — of the kind that attaches to fruit propagated locally for generations before anyone writes it down. More than one small yellow Breton apple has carried it.
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.
Guillevic
A pale green Breton sharp with an unusually distinct aroma, and the only French cider apple with a substantial single-varietal tradition attached to a protected quality mark.
Judeline
A modern French bred cider cultivar released alongside Judor, sharp-leaning and scab-resistant, intended for the same low-input orchards.
Judor
A modern French bred sharp apple carrying scab resistance, released from the national breeding programme to give growers an acid cultivar they could crop without a heavy spray schedule.
Locard Vert
A hard green Norman sharp that hangs very late and stores through the winter, one of a small family of Locards distinguished mainly by colour.
Foxwhelp
The oldest named English cider apple still grown, a Herefordshire bittersharp of extraordinary acidity whose identity has fractured into a family of sports, seedlings and impostors.
Xuanina
An Asturian cultivar the designation files in the acid block on figures that are not, themselves, high in acid — and whose published characterisation duplicates another variety’s exactly.
Styles it is characteristic of
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.
- 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.
- How do you adjust the acidity of cider
- How long can apple juice sit before i ferment it — Only hours at room temperature before wild fermentation begins. Chilled and sulphited it can be held for a day or two; beyond that it needs freezing, pasteurising or fermenting.
- What is juice blending
- What does cidre de bretagne igp actually guarantee — That the apples were grown and the cider made in the area, and that the fruit met a measured tannin floor. It permits concentrate to 40 per cent of the must, added water and injected gas, all of which the French appellations of origin forbid.
- What does cidre fermier mean
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.
Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC)
IFPC · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The French technical institute for cider production. The authority for the French cultivar classification families, for keeving as an industrial process, and for the pectin and nitrogen chemistry that keeving depends on.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.