Cider apple
Redfield
A red-fleshed apple released from the New York State station at Geneva in 1938, very high in acid and pigment, now the standard American source of colour in a rosé cider.
Also written Redfield.
- Classification
- Bittersharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Tannin and structure
- Origin
- New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Bittersharp
High acid and high tannin together — the rarest and, for a single-varietal cider, the most useful class.
Basis: Above about 0.45% w/v acid and above about 0.2% w/v tannin.
Assessed in Fruit grown in trial plantings at Geneva, New York State.
Assigned by the programme that raised the cultivar. Much of the measured phenolic load is anthocyanin rather than the procyanidin fraction that drives bitterness in a bittersweet.
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 | Very high | |
| Tannin | Moderate | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Cornell acid figures from the station that released the cultivar, with the phenolic axes set from description of a strongly pigmented, astringent juice.
Harshly acid and astringent, with a deep crimson juice; it is used for what it looks like as much as for what it tastes like.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Redfield, 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 acid0.900–1.300 % w/v
Geneva, New York State, 2010s · Cornell University, School of Integrative Plant Science
Reported as malic acid. Very high, and the reason Redfield is used in small proportion despite being wanted for its colour.
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
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Apple scab | high | — |
| Fire blight | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Intense anthocyanin pigment, stable enough to survive fermentation and give a genuine rosé colour.
- Very high acid.
- Real astringency, much of it from the pigmented phenolic fraction.
- Low sugar.
How it is used
- Grown ornamentally for its pink blossom and red foliage for most of its existence.
- Adopted since the 2010s as the American colour source for pink and rosé ciders.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Made occasionally as a novelty. The acid is punishing and the astringency unbalanced; it is a colour and acid component, not a soloist.
About Redfield
Redfield was bred at Geneva in the 1930s as an ornamental and a curiosity, from the Central Asian red-fleshed apple that stands behind almost every pigmented apple in cultivation. For sixty years nobody had much use for it. Then the market for pink and rosé ciders arrived, and a fruit whose anthocyanin survives fermentation became commercially interesting for the first time.
What it supplies is colour, acid and astringency, in that order of importance. The pigment is genuinely stable — this is not a juice that browns to beige in the tank — and a modest proportion in a blend gives a clear rosé. The acid is high enough that the proportion has to stay modest, and the astringency arrives with the colour because the anthocyanins are themselves phenolic.
It also illustrates a point about classification. Cornell classes Redfield bittersharp under the Long Ashton scheme, which is defensible on the two axes the scheme measures. But the tannin figure that puts it there is largely anthocyanin, and anthocyanin does not taste like the procyanidins that give an English bittersweet its bitterness. Two juices can measure the same total phenolic content and taste nothing alike, which is one of the acknowledged limitations of the scheme and a good reason to read the numbers rather than the label.
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
An institutional release with the cross on record — one of the few cultivars in this file whose parentage is genuinely established.
Parentage · a recorded cross
Wolf River crossed with Malus niedzwetzkyana, the red-fleshed Central Asian apple from which almost all red-fleshed cultivars derive their pigment. Neither parent has a CiderHQ record. Recorded as a cross by the breeding programme that made it, which is strong evidence about what was intended and weaker evidence about which pollen took; no genotyping study CiderHQ has read confirms it.
The breeding programme recorded making this cross. Strong evidence about what was intended; weaker evidence about which pollen actually took, which only genotyping settles.
Why it matters
- The cultivar that allowed North American producers to make a naturally coloured rosé cider without adding fruit or colouring.
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.
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.
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.
Porter’s Perfection
A very late Somerset bittersharp with high acid and moderate tannin, cropping heavily in its on years and barely at all in its off ones.
Skyrme’s Kernel
A Herefordshire bittersharp with high acid and firm tannin, one of the county’s few genuine vintage-quality cider apples.
Geneva Crab
A red-fleshed ornamental crab from the New York station, high in acid, tannin and pigment, and used by North American makers as a concentrated colour and structure addition.
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 is juice blending
- What is modern american cider like
- Why is quebec known for ice cider — Because the winters are cold enough and long enough to concentrate apple juice by freezing reliably, which is the one thing ice cider needs and most cider regions cannot supply.
- Why was cider so important in new england — Apples grew where grapes and barley struggled, water was often unsafe, and every farm could press. Cider was the ordinary drink of colonial New England until temperance and then industrial brewing displaced it.
- Is michigan a cider state — A large one, built on a different foundation from the others. Lake-moderated shorelines support apple growing at scale, but the crop is dessert and processing fruit, so Michigan cider starts from culinary apples rather than from a bittersweet repertoire.
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
Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own
Ben Watson, The Countryman Press, first edition 1999; third edition 2013 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: first published 1999 by The Countryman Press, with five editions recorded and a 2008 printing scanned by the Internet Archive as ciderhardsweethi0000benw. The scan is access-restricted to the print-disabled collection. The site had registered this without a year; it now carries one, and the first-edition date matters because a general trade book on cider written in 1999 predates almost the whole of the North American cider revival it is sometimes cited about.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.