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Cider apple

Redstreak

The apple that made seventeenth-century Herefordshire cider famous, celebrated for a century and then lost — and the clearest case in English pomology of a name outliving its fruit.

Also written Red Streak, Redstrake, Scudamore’s Crab.

Classification
Bittersharp — Long Ashton classification
Harvest
Mid (Late September to mid October)
Single varietal
Established as a single-varietal cider
Blend role
Vintage quality
Origin
Herefordshire, associated with Holme Lacy
Species
Malus domestica
Vigour
Moderate
Biennial bearing
Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
Keeping
Good

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.

A retrospective placement based on seventeenth-century descriptions of the cider, not on any analysis. The original clone was not available to the Long Ashton programme, and this classification should be read as an informed reconstruction rather than a measurement.

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.

Contribution to a blend, scored 1–5 as a band. The filled segment is the typical value; the paler segments are the range.
AxisTypicalRange
AcidHigh
TanninFirm
SugarHigh
BitternessModerate
AstringencyNoticeable
AromaPronounced
BodyFull
Based on: its recorded classification

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of the cider the fruit made. No analysis of the original cultivar exists and none can now be made, so every band here is a reconstruction from prose. These bands were authored from description; published analyses of this fruit have since been transcribed onto the record from named trial programmes and are shown above. The bands are not derived from those figures, which is why this profile is marked as classified rather than measured.

Described by seventeenth-century writers as giving a strong, keeping cider of unusual quality; what that meant in modern sensory terms cannot now be established.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Redstreak, 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 Redstreak 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.

Measured on the fruit

Measured on the fruit itself, before anything was done to it. These figures hold whatever was later made from the juice.

Reported analyses of Redstreak, by property and source — measured on the fruit
PropertyReadingWhereWhenSource
Fruit diameter67 mmWSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA2002–2017Modern analysisWashington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center

Measured on the juice

Measured on juice as pressed, before fermentation. This is where most cider analysis lives and what the classification schemes are defined on.

Reported analyses of Redstreak, by property and source — measured on the juice
PropertyReadingWhereWhenSource
Brix11.7 °BxWSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA2002–2017Modern analysisWashington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
pH3.18 pHWSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA2002–2017Modern analysisWashington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Specific gravity1.048 SGWSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA2002–2017Modern analysisWashington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Total acid0.950 % w/vWSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA2002–2017Modern analysisWashington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Total tannin0.090 % w/vWSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA2002–2017Modern analysisWashington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
How these were measured
  • Permanganate titration against indigo carmine, reported as tannic acid equivalent
  • Titration, reported as malic acid equivalent
  • Published as 2.64 inches; converted at 25.4 mm to the inch

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.

WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial

Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center, Mount Vernon, Skagit Valley, Washington · 2002–2017 · Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center

Maritime, with cool summers and mild wet winters — the closest North American analogue to the English West Country, and the reason the programme planted European cider fruit here rather than east of the Cascades.

Mean full bloom
9 May
Harvest
7 September
Bloom density
3.6 of 5
Productivity
3.3 of 5
Growth habit
Spreading
Bearing
Tip Bearing
Alternate bearing
Semi alternate
Blind wood
2.5 of 5
Rootstocks
MM.106

Filed here as sharp.

The identity of this tree is not settled

WSU holds this accession as “Redstreak”, origin England. Its juice — 0.09% tannin against 0.95% acid — is a sharp, which matches neither the seventeenth-century Herefordshire Redstreak nor Somerset Redstreak, both described as bittersweet. Either the accession is not true to name or the fruit behaves unrecognisably at this site. The identity is not established, and the figures should not be read as Redstreak’s.

Published here, not republished by CiderHQ
  • juice yield, published as 532 mL/lb. That is 1173 litres of juice from a tonne of fruit, which no press can reach — the rest of the trial runs between 350 and 825 L/t. The figure is withheld as a publication error rather than scaled to something plausible.

Juice characteristics measured on 250 mL of pressed juice; juice yield from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Bloom density, productivity and blind wood are the site’s own subjective 1–5 ratings. Figures are means across the seasons each cultivar was in the trial.

In the orchard

Harvest window
Mid
Flowering
Not recorded
Vigour
Moderate
Cropping
Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
Keeping
Good

Described as a mid to late season fruit. Precise timing is not recoverable.

Eighteenth-century writers complain that Redstreak orchards declined and cropped poorly as they aged, which is part of how the cultivar disappeared.

Reported as a good keeper, which was part of its value.

Not recorded. The original clone is not available for observation.

Disease and pest susceptibility

Recorded susceptibility. Pressure differs enormously by region and by season, so these are tendencies rather than predictions.
IssueSusceptibilityNote
Canker and general declinehighContemporary and later writers describe Redstreak orchards deteriorating. Whether this was disease, virus accumulation in propagated stock, or exhaustion of the clone is not established.

Juice and pressing

How it is used

On its own

Established as a single-varietal cider

Historically the single-varietal English cider — seventeenth-century Redstreak cider was made and sold as such, and it is the earliest documented case of an English cider named for its apple. No modern example can be made, because the fruit is gone.

About Redstreak

For roughly a century, Redstreak was the most important apple in England. Seventeenth-century Herefordshire gentry planted it deliberately, John Beale wrote a book largely about the orchards that grew it, and the Royal Society took an interest in the cider it made. The economic argument was explicit: England spent money on French wine, and a strong keeping cider from a superior apple might replace some of it. Redstreak was the apple that argument rested on.

It then vanished. Eighteenth-century writers describe Redstreak orchards declining and the fruit losing its quality, and by the nineteenth century the cultivar was effectively gone. Explanations offered at the time and since include disease, the accumulation of virus in vegetatively propagated stock, and a vaguer notion that a variety can "wear out" — which is not a mechanism modern pomology recognises. What is certain is that no verified original Redstreak survives, and that trees offered under the name in later centuries are not demonstrably it.

This record therefore does something the others do not: it describes a fruit nobody can taste. The classification is a reconstruction from prose written by people with an interest in praising it, the blend profile is inference from description, and there are no measurements because no analysis was ever possible. Presenting any of it with more confidence would be a fabrication dressed as history.

The modern nuisance is the name. Somerset Redstreak — a twentieth-century bulk bittersweet planted by the hundred acres — is routinely shortened to Redstreak in orchard talk and occasionally in print, and writing that treats it as a survival of the Herefordshire fruit is simply mistaken. They share a descriptive name and nothing else.

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

Seventeenth-century writers credit Viscount Scudamore with raising or propagating it at Holme Lacy in the 1620s or 1630s. The attribution is contemporary rather than reconstructed, which makes it stronger than most cider apple origin stories, and it still rests on a small number of sources with a shared interest in promoting Herefordshire cider.

Other names this fruit is known by. Each is a name for the same cultivar, not a separate one — which is why none of them has a page of its own.
NameKindNote
Scudamore’s CrabHistoric spellingHerefordshire. Named for Viscount Scudamore of Holme Lacy, credited in seventeenth-century writing with propagating it. Used interchangeably with Redstreak in that period.
Somerset RedstreakDisputed identityA wholly different and much later Somerset cultivar. The names are frequently and wrongly treated as the same fruit.

Why it matters

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.

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.

Where to go next

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.

Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.