Cider apple
Sheep’s Nose
A name given to several distinct elongated English apples, at least one of which is a Three Counties cider fruit — an identity problem rather than a single cultivar.
Also written Sheeps Nose, Sheep’s Snout, Sheepsnose.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Bulk juice
- Origin
- England, various counties
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
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.
Fruit grown under this name in the Three Counties is generally described as a sharp. Because the name covers several cultivars this placement describes one usage and cannot be treated as settled.
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 | Moderate | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Description of fruit grown under this name, with wide bands throughout because the name covers more than one cultivar and the accounts do not agree.
Contributes acid in a mixed blend; the specific character depends on which Sheep’s Nose is meant.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Sheep’s Nose, 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 Sheep’s Nose. 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
- Mid
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
October, though this varies with which fruit is intended.
Not recorded, and the name covers more than one cultivar.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid
- Low to moderate tannin
- Characteristically elongated fruit
How it is used
- A component of mixed farm blends in several English counties
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Not a defined enough entity to make a named varietal from.
About Sheep’s Nose
Sheep’s Nose is a shape, not a cultivar. Long, tapering apples have been called this in Herefordshire, in Devon, in Derbyshire and elsewhere, and the resulting fruits are not related to each other. Some are culinary, some are cider fruit, and at least one is a dessert apple.
The record here covers the Three Counties usage, where the name attaches to a sharp cider fruit used in mixed farm blends. It carries wide bands and no measurements, because narrowing them would require deciding which apple is meant and there is no basis for deciding.
The general point matters more than this particular fruit. A substantial fraction of English apple names describe an appearance, and descriptive names get reinvented independently in different places. Where a record cannot resolve which fruit a name denotes, saying so is more useful than picking one.
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 is descriptive and has been applied independently in Herefordshire, Devon, Derbyshire and elsewhere to apples with an elongated, tapering shape. It does not denote one cultivar and no single origin can be given.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Sheep’s Snout | Historic spelling | A variant of the same descriptive name, applied to the same range of long-shaped apples. |
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.
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.
Baldwin
The dominant New England apple of the nineteenth century until a single catastrophic winter destroyed the orchards; a firm, moderately sharp keeper still used in northeastern cider blends.
Braeburn
A New Zealand chance seedling found near Motueka in the 1950s, sharper and denser than most modern dessert apples, and one of the better commercial cultivars available to a cider blender.
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 are the three counties in cider — Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire — the block of country where England’s cider and, above all, its perry have historically concentrated.
- 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 herefordshire cider
- Where are perry pears grown
- What is devon 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.
A Somerset Pomona: The Cider Apples of Somerset
Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001. ISBN 9781874336877 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001, ISBN 9781874336877. The author was Long Ashton’s cider pomologist, which is why this work is registered for Somerset cultivar identity at all — it is the nearest thing to a successor to the station’s own descriptions. No copy was opened. Not digitised in any open collection.
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.