Cider apple
Schafsnase
A German shape-name — “sheep’s nose” — covering several long, tapering old cultivars used in Most, and one of the clearest cases in this file of a name that is not an identification.
Also written Schafnase, Schafsnasen.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Bulk juice, Acid lift
- Origin
- Germany, various
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Schafsnase. 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 | Moderate | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
A composite description across the fruit that carry the name, with deliberately wide bands. This profile describes a group and should not be read as a statement about any individual tree.
Long, tapering, ribbed fruit of variable flavour. What the name reliably predicts is the shape; what it predicts about the juice is very little.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Schafsnase, 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
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Schafsnase. 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
- Late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Juice and pressing
- Variable, because the name covers several cultivars
- Generally moderate acid and no tannin, in the German pattern
How it is used
- Most and cooking in German meadow orchards
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
A single-varietal bottling would require knowing which Schafsnase was in the tank.
About Schafsnase
Schafsnase is included in this file not because it is an important cider apple but because it is an important warning. The name means sheep’s nose and describes a long, tapering, narrow-ended fruit shape. Several unrelated German cultivars have that shape, several have acquired the name independently, and German pomology recognises red and yellow Schafsnasen as distinct things.
A record like this one strains the rule that CiderHQ keeps one record per fruit and not one per name, because here the name does not correspond to a fruit at all. The alternative — a record for each Schafsnase — would require an identification that the published record does not support. What is offered instead is a single entry that states plainly what the name covers and how little it predicts.
The practical consequence for a reader is simple. A German orchard survey or a producer’s cultivar list naming Schafsnase is telling you about a shape. If the analysis matters, the fruit needs identifying by other means, and a blend profile built on the name alone is a group average rather than a description of anything in the tank.
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
The name describes fruit shape and has been applied independently in different regions to unrelated cultivars. There is no single origin because there is no single fruit.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Rote Schafsnase | Regional name | Germany. A red form; German practice recognises several distinct Schafsnasen and does not treat them as one cultivar. |
| Gelbe Schafsnase | Regional name | Germany. A yellow form, likewise distinct. |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*.
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 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.
- Do you need to sort apples before pressing
- Why is apfelwein associated with frankfurt — Hessen kept a dense landscape of scattered orchard trees around Frankfurt and a network of pressing works to work them, and the drink became a city institution with its own glass, its own jug and its own taverns.
- What is most the drink — In Austria, southern Germany and Switzerland *Most* is fermented apple or pear juice — the local cider. Confusingly, *Süßmost* is the unfermented juice, so the word alone does not tell you whether there is alcohol in the glass.
- What is most in germany — In Baden-Württemberg, Most is farm apple wine made from mixed standard-orchard fruit. The region holds the largest meadow-orchard landscape in Europe, and the word means something different again in Austria and Switzerland.
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.
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.