Cider apple
Rheinischer Bohnapfel
The classic German Mostapfel: a very late, very acid, enormously productive Rhineland cultivar that carried more Apfelwein and Viez through the twentieth century than any other single fruit.
Also written Bohnapfel, Großer Rheinischer Bohnapfel, Grosser Bohnapfel, Grosser Rheinischer Bohnapfel.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Very late (November onwards)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Bulk juice, Late season
- Origin
- The Rhineland, Germany
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Rheinischer Bohnapfel. That is common outside Europe: the English, French and Spanish systems were each built for their own fruit, and a cultivar grown where none of them applies simply has no class. What the fruit contributes to a blend is described below regardless — the class is a shorthand for that, not a substitute.
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 | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Medium |
Long-standing and consistent description in German Most practice as a very acid, low-tannin, high-yielding fruit. No registered classification scheme covers German cider fruit, so this profile rests on description rather than on a classification.
Hard, small to medium, and very sour, with a dense flesh that stays firm for months. There is nothing sweet or aromatic about it; it is a fruit for the press.
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 Rheinischer Bohnapfel. 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
- Very late
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
Picked in late October and November, after most German fruit is in, and commonly shaken down rather than hand-picked in Streuobst meadows.
Heavy and reasonably regular, and it makes an enormous tree. A mature standard Bohnapfel in a meadow orchard can carry a very large crop.
Exceptional. It will hold into spring, and historically it was pressed through the winter rather than all at once.
Late-flowering, which is one reason it crops reliably in a continental climate with late spring frosts.
Juice and pressing
- Very high acid, which keeps the must at a pH where a slow ferment is comparatively safe
- Almost no tannin, in common with essentially all German cider fruit
- Moderate sugar, so it is often blended with sweeter fruit to lift the must weight
- Presses well even after months in store
How it is used
- The backbone of Rhineland and Moselle Viez and of Hessian Apfelwein
- A standard tree of the Streuobstwiese meadow orchards of western Germany
- Juice and vinegar production as well as fermented drink
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
It has been used alone, and the result is a very dry, very sharp, thin Apfelwein — which is a recognisable German style rather than a failure. German practice more often blends it to soften the acid.
About Rheinischer Bohnapfel
Rheinischer Bohnapfel is the fruit that made German cider possible on a large scale, and it does so by being extreme in one direction only. Its acid is very high, its tannin is negligible, its tree is enormous and its crop is heavy and dependable. In the Streuobstwiesen — the scattered high-stem orchards over grass that once covered much of western and southern Germany — it was the tree a farmer planted if the fruit was destined for the press rather than the table.
German cider fruit has no place in this file’s classification systems, and the empty `classifications` array is deliberate rather than an oversight. Neither the Long Ashton scheme, the French families nor the Asturian classes were fitted to German fruit, and German practice does not use them. What German makers measure is Mostgewicht — must weight, in degrees Oechsle — and acidity, and they talk about Mostäpfel as a use category rather than sorting them into acid-and-tannin quadrants. Borrowing an English scheme to fill the field would be inventing a classification nobody made.
The absence of tannin is the defining constraint of the German tradition, and it has a well-known workaround. Frankfurt Apfelwein has historically had Speierling — the fruit of the service tree, Sorbus domestica — added to it in small quantity for exactly the astringency that German apples cannot supply, and a cider made with it may be labelled as such. That a whole tradition reached outside the genus for tannin is the clearest possible statement of what its apples do and do not carry.
Its long keeping shaped how it was used. A fruit that holds until March lets a farm or a small Kelterei press through the winter, and the Bohnapfel’s acid falls slowly enough in store that late-pressed juice is still usefully sharp. It has lost ground in modern plantings — a very vigorous standard tree is expensive to manage and impossible to pick mechanically — and its future is tied to whether the meadow orchards it belongs to are maintained for conservation reasons.
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
Consistently attributed to the Rhineland and in cultivation for well over two centuries. No raiser is recorded and the frequently repeated eighteenth-century date should be read as an approximate first record rather than an origin.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Bohnapfel | Regional name | Rhineland. The short form in everyday use. It is the same fruit, and CiderHQ keeps one record rather than two. |
| Großer Rheinischer Bohnapfel | Historic spelling | Rhineland. The full nursery name. |
Why it matters
- Probably the most-planted cider fruit in German-speaking Europe for much of the twentieth century
- A central tree of the Streuobstwiese, a traditional orchard habitat of major conservation importance in Germany and Austria
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Traditional blend partner
Trierer Weinapfel
The other Moselle Viez cultivar; the two are the standard pair of that tradition.
Similar role
Boskoop
The other very acid, very productive apple used in German Most, though Boskoop is a dessert and culinary fruit as well.
Similar role
Brettacher
The Württemberg equivalent: a big, acid, long-keeping Most apple.
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.
Blanquina
A pale-skinned Asturian cultivar of high reputation, and — like Raxao, with which it is usually named — an acid-block fruit rather than a semi-acid one.
Regona
The most acid cultivar the Asturian designation characterises, at 7,1 g/L, and one of the most planted: a late, hard, acid-bitter fruit that supplies the backbone of *sidra natural*.
Txalaka
The most widely recognised Basque cider apple: a hard, sharp, late cultivar from Gipuzkoa that supplies much of the acid backbone of *sagardoa*.
Fuentes
The second-most acid cultivar the Asturian designation characterises: a vigorous, heavy-cropping tree whose juice runs to 6,2 g/L of acid, and which and which sits at the opposite end of the register from the sweet block.
Glockenapfel
A large, bell-shaped, very acid Alpine apple that keeps until spring, grown across Switzerland and southern Germany for cooking, storage and *Most*.
Idared
An Idaho cross of Jonathan and Wagener released in 1942, exceptionally long-keeping and reliably sharp, and one of the most heavily pressed apples in the northern-hemisphere juice trade.
Styles it is characteristic of
Apfelwein
The dry, sharp, still apple wine of Hesse, fermented out from culinary and local fruit and served in ridged glasses from a stoneware jug.
Most
The farmhouse fermented fruit drink of Austria and southern Germany, made from apples, pears or both, and belonging to a meadow-orchard landscape as much as to a recipe.
Viez
The cider of the Moselle and Saarland, dry and still in the local manner, drunk from a distinctive lidded pot and named from a word for the second pressing.
Suure Most
The Swiss farmhouse cider of the plateau, typically dry and still, drawn from meadow-orchard fruit and distinguished in local usage from the unfermented sweet juice of the same name.
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 does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
- How do you blend cider
- Is boskoop good for cider — It is one of the apples most often recommended for German and Dutch cider, on high acid rather than on tannin. Belle de Boskoop is a large, russeted, long-keeping culinary apple, and its role in a blend is the same as any sharp: acid and a lower pH.
- 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 long can apples be kept before pressing
- What is apfelwein — Apfelwein is the dry, still, tart apple cider of Hessen in Germany, known locally as Ebbelwoi and served from a stoneware jug into a ridged glass. Despite the name it is a cider, not a wine in any technical sense.
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.
Hochschule Geisenheim University — beverage technology
Hochschule Geisenheim · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
German beverage-technology research covering apple wine and fruit juice processing, including the enzymology of clarification.
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
University of Reading / Defra, Brogdale · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The UK national reference collection for apple and pear cultivars. The authority CiderHQ uses for whether two names are the same fruit, which is the central duplicate-resolution problem in cider data.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.