Cider apple
Reine des Hâtives
A French early sweet apple grown in English cider orchards, and the lowest-acid fruit in the Long Ashton composite table.
Also written Reine des Hatives, Queen of the Earlies.
- Classification
- Sweet — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Early (September)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Early season, Sugar and body
- Origin
- Normandy, France
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- 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.
Long Ashton recorded 0.11% acid and 0.17% tannin — below both thresholds, and the lowest acid figure of any cultivar in the composite table.
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 low | |
| Tannin | Moderate | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
The Long Ashton composite: 0.11% acid, 0.17% tannin.
An almost acidless early juice with a trace of tannin — soft, quick to press and quick to spoil.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Reine des Hâtives, 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 acid0.110 % w/v
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England, 1905–1975 · Titration with alkali, reported as malic acid. Composite figure across many seasons; the source states neither the sample count nor the year of any individual analysis. · Andrew Lea
A composite of Long Ashton analyses reaching CiderHQ through three hands: the station’s own work, a printed compilation (Bulmer’s Pomona, 1987, and Beech and Carr, 1977), and a transcription of that compilation. CiderHQ has seen only the transcription.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. Measured in percent weight per volume.
Total tannin0.170 % w/v
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England, 1905–1975 · Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figure across many seasons; the source states neither the sample count nor the year of any individual analysis. · Andrew Lea
A composite of Long Ashton analyses reaching CiderHQ through three hands: the station’s own work, a printed compilation (Bulmer’s Pomona, 1987, and Beech and Carr, 1977), and a transcription of that compilation. CiderHQ has seen only the transcription. A permanganate figure. It is not comparable with a Folin–Ciocalteu total-phenolics figure for the same fruit, and the two can differ by a factor of two.
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.
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.
Long Ashton composite cider apple analyses
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England · 1905–1975 · Andrew Lea
Maritime and mild, with wet autumns and few hard frosts — the climate the English cider cultivars were selected in, and the reason their acid and tannin figures here are the ones the rest of the world has spent a century comparing its own fruit against.
- Held as
- Listed as “Reine des Hatives”, early season
Filed here as sweet.
Freshly expressed juice, not finished cider. Acid by straight titration against alkali, reported as malic acid; tannin by Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figures across seventy years of analyses: the source gives neither a sample count nor the year of any individual reading.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Early
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Early in the Long Ashton table, with Ellis Bitter, Major and Nehou.
Early fruit generally, and low-acid fruit particularly, has to be milled quickly.
Not recorded in any source CiderHQ has verified.
Juice and pressing
- The lowest acid in the Long Ashton composite table at 0.11% w/v
- Tannin of 0.17% w/v, just below the bitter threshold
- A juice that needs an acid partner as a matter of safety as well as of taste
How it is used
- Pressed early, before the main crop.
- Blended with sharp fruit, which a juice at this acid effectively requires.
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
A juice at 0.11% acid sits at a pH where the microbiology is genuinely unforgiving, and there is nothing on the palate to carry a cider either. This is a blending component in the strictest sense.
About Reine des Hâtives
Reine des Hâtives is a French early apple that found its way into English cider orchards among the Normandy introductions of the last century and a half, and Long Ashton’s composite table records it at 0.11 per cent acid — the lowest figure of any of the forty-two cultivars there, and about a fifth of Kingston Black’s.
A juice that low in acid is a specific problem rather than a general one. Acid does two things in cider: it makes the drink taste of something, and it holds the pH down where spoilage organisms struggle. Fruit at 0.11 per cent delivers neither, which is why the sweet class in the Long Ashton scheme has always been understood as a source of sugar and body to be blended into something sharper rather than as a cider in its own right. The traditional West Country practice of building a blend around bittersweets and correcting it with sharps exists in large part because of fruit like this.
Its early ripening is the compensating virtue. A mill that can start work in September has more of the season available to it, and a low-acid early sweet blended straight into a sharp gives a cider that would be difficult to make from the main crop alone. The tannin figure of 0.17 per cent sits just under the bitter threshold, so the fruit brings a little grip with the sugar without qualifying as a bittersweet.
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 French cultivar — the name means roughly “queen of the earlies” — that entered English cider orcharding among the Normandy introductions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Long Ashton and Bulmers both imported French bittersweets and sweets in that period, which is why several French names appear in an English composite table.
Why it matters
- At 0.11% acid it marks the low end of the entire English cider fruit range, which makes it the clearest illustration of why the sweet class exists as a blending category rather than as a cider in its own right.
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.
Morgan Sweet
A large, early, pale Somerset sweet apple, historically sold as an eating apple and pressed for the earliest cider of the year.
Burrow Hill Early
An early Somerset cider apple associated with Burrow Hill near Kingsbury Episcopi, giving usable juice at the very start of the season.
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.
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 i balance acid and tannin in a blend — Acid and tannin do different jobs and cannot substitute for each other: acid gives freshness and microbiological safety, tannin gives structure and length. A blend short of acid tastes flabby however tannic it is.
- How do you blend cider
- What is the difference between french cidre and english cider — French cidre is usually sweeter, weaker and more carbonated, because fermentation is arrested while sugar remains. English cider is more often fermented dry and finished still or lightly sparkling, and is stronger for it.
- How long can apples be kept before pressing
- 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 normandy 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.
Cider Apple Compositional Data
Andrew Lea · reference work · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 1905–2014
Registered separately from the same author’s Science of Cidermaking, and at a lower tier, because its evidential character is different. The Science of Cidermaking is a chemist writing about work he did; this page is that chemist transcribing other people’s tables, and CiderHQ can vouch for the transcription without vouching for what lies behind it. It carries three tables: the Long Ashton composite for forty-two cultivars, credited to Bulmer’s Pomona (1987) and Beech and Carr (1977); a late-1970s New York analysis credited to unpublished work printed in a 1989 food-technology chapter; and a 2014 Virginia polyphenol study. Every figure CiderHQ takes from it records that chain.
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.
Expert reference Evidence standard for this record. What that means.