Cider apple
Reinette Obry
A French sharp apple measured twice by English programmes forty years apart, and one of the few cultivars where two independent tables agree closely.
Also written Reinette Obri, Obry.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift
- Origin
- France
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Sharp
High acid, low tannin. Includes both purpose-grown sharps and many culinary apples.
Basis: Above about 0.45% w/v acid and below about 0.2% w/v tannin.
Long Ashton recorded 0.63% acid and 0.13% tannin — above the 0.45% acid threshold and well below the tannin one, which is the definition of a sharp.
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 | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Two independent English analyses that agree closely: the Long Ashton composite at 0.63% acid and 0.13% tannin, and a National Association of Cider Makers compilation at 0.60% acid, 0.09% tannin, SG 1.045 and pH 3.50.
A clean, sharp juice with almost no tannin — the classic corrective to a bittersweet-heavy blend.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Reinette Obry, 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.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total acid2 readings, spanning 0.600–0.630 % w/v | 0.630 % w/v | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England | 1905–1975Historic analysis | Andrew Lea |
| 0.600 % w/v | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology | |
| Total tannin2 readings, spanning 0.090–0.130 % w/v | 0.130 % w/v | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England | 1905–1975Historic analysis | Andrew Lea |
| 0.090 % w/v | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology | |
| pH | 3.50 pH | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology |
| Specific gravity | 1.045 SG | England — the source does not name the orchards | 1922–1977Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology |
2 properties here have been measured more than once. The readings are shown as they were taken and are deliberately not averaged — climate, season, ripeness at picking, the age of the tree and the analytical method all move these numbers, and a single figure would hide every one of them. Where a spread is given below a property, it is the distance between separate studies, not the variation within any one of them.
How these were measured
- 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.
- 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.
- Published in the two-figure form the table uses (a printed 51 meaning 1.051) and written here in full.
- Titration, reported as malic acid, on juice from freshly harvested fruit.
- Method not stated in the compilation; the Long Ashton work behind it used Löwenthal permanganate titration.
- Meter on juice from freshly harvested fruit.
- 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 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.
- A National Association of Cider Makers compilation crediting three bodies of work — MAFF/ADAS acidity and pH from freshly harvested fruit, Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties reported in 1977, and the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. The compilation does not say which row came from which, so no row can be dated more precisely than the span of the three.
- A National Association of Cider Makers compilation crediting three bodies of work — MAFF/ADAS acidity and pH from freshly harvested fruit, Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties reported in 1977, and the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. The compilation does not say which row came from which, so no row can be dated more precisely than the span of the three. Several cultivars appear more than once in this table under sample numbers, and the repeats are far apart: Bramley’s acid is 1.21, 1.05 and 1.43 per cent in three rows. Read any single row as one pressing of one parcel of fruit.
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 “Reinette Obry”, mid season
Filed here as sharp.
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.
Typical English apple juice analyses
England — the compilation does not name the orchards · 1922–1977 · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
English fruit-growing country, and no closer than that: the source gives neither site nor season for any individual row, which is a real limit on what the figures can be asked to do.
- Held as
- Listed as “Reinette Obry”
Juice from freshly harvested fruit. Acidity and pH credited to MAFF/ADAS; the remainder to Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties (1977) and to the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. Specific gravity is printed in a two-figure form and written out in full here.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
Mid-season in the Long Ashton table.
Reinettes as a group are long-keeping, firm-fleshed apples, which is most of what the name conveys.
Not recorded in any source CiderHQ has verified.
Juice and pressing
- Acid between 0.60 and 0.63% w/v across two independent analyses
- Tannin between 0.09 and 0.13% w/v
- pH 3.50 and specific gravity 1.045 in the second analysis
How it is used
- Blended into bittersweet-dominated musts to raise acid and drop pH.
- Recorded in an English juice-analysis compilation alongside dessert and culinary varieties, which is where a sharp French reinette naturally sits.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Sharp with little tannin gives a thin cider on its own. Fruit of this class earns its place by what it does to a blend.
About Reinette Obry
Reinette Obry is a French sharp apple, and it appears here because two separate English programmes measured it and agreed. The Long Ashton composite gives 0.63 per cent acid and 0.13 per cent tannin; a National Association of Cider Makers compilation of English juice analyses, drawing on Ministry work and on Long Ashton trials reported in 1977, gives 0.60 per cent acid, 0.09 per cent tannin, a gravity of 1.045 and a pH of 3.50.
Agreement of that closeness is rarer in this data than a reader might expect. The same compilation records Bramley three times — 1.21, 1.05 and 1.43 per cent acid — and the modern surveys routinely find a variety differing more between two of its own seasons than between itself and a different variety. Two independent analyses landing within three hundredths of a per cent is therefore evidence of something: either that this cultivar is unusually stable, or that both readings came from similar fruit in similar conditions, and the record cannot say which.
What it is for is acid. A West Country blend built on bittersweets carries very little acid and sits at a pH where spoilage organisms are comfortable, and the traditional correction is to add sharp fruit. A reinette at 0.6 per cent acid and pH 3.5 does that job without bringing tannin that would compete with the bittersweets already in the vat.
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 reinette. The reinette group is large, old and only loosely defined — the word denotes a russeted, firm, long-keeping dessert-type apple rather than a family with a common ancestor — and Obry is presumably the name of a grower or a place.
Why it matters
- One of the very few cultivars for which CiderHQ holds two independent English analyses that agree — 0.63 against 0.60 per cent acid, 0.13 against 0.09 per cent tannin — which is worth as much as either figure alone.
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.
Bramley’s Seedling
England’s dominant cooking apple, a triploid of very high acid and negligible tannin, and by volume one of the most important fruits in modern British cider.
Browns Apple
The standard Devon sharp: a bright red, heavy-cropping, high-acid apple with almost no tannin, and the fruit most English blends reach for when they need lift.
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.
Granny Smith
An Australian chance seedling of the 1860s that became one of the most planted apples on earth, and — because it is reliably sharp when almost nothing else commercial is — a genuine workhorse of commercial cider worldwide.
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.
McIntosh
The defining apple of eastern Canada and northern New England — an Ontario seedling of about 1811 whose perfumed, high-acid juice is the aromatic foundation of most Quebec and northeastern cider.
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.
- What is juice blending
- 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.
Typical Apple Juice Analysis (NACM Short Report 4.11)
National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology · research institute · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 1922–1977
Fifty-seven rows of English dessert and culinary apple juice analyses — gravity, acid, pH, tannin — credited jointly to MAFF/ADAS, to Long Ashton cider-making trials reported in 1977, and to the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922, without saying which row came from which. That vagueness is why it is held at traditional-record tier. Its value is twofold: it is the only set on the site measuring eating and cooking apples the same way the cider fruit was measured, and six of its rows are repeat samples of cultivars already in the table, which makes within-cultivar spread visible in a single document.
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.