Cider apple
Smokehouse
A Pennsylvania Dutch apple from Lancaster County, crisp and moderately sharp, pressed for cider and vinegar through the whole of the region’s farming history.
Also written Smoke House, Millcreek.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Bulk juice, Acid lift
- Origin
- Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Smokehouse. 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 |
Descriptive record only; no analysis of Smokehouse juice is held in CiderHQ’s register.
Crisp and juicy with a clean moderate sharpness and a light, sweet aroma.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Smokehouse, 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 Smokehouse. 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
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Fire blight | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid, moderate sugar and a free-running juice.
- Essentially no tannin.
How it is used
- Pressed for farm cider and for cider vinegar across the Pennsylvania Dutch country.
- Eaten fresh and cooked; a general-purpose farm apple rather than a specialist one.
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Pleasant and unremarkable juice with nothing to structure a cider around. It was always part of a mixed pressing.
About Smokehouse
Smokehouse is a Pennsylvania farm apple and its cider record is a farm record: it was pressed because it was in the orchard, alongside whatever else was in the orchard, and a good deal of the resulting liquid became vinegar rather than cider. The Pennsylvania Dutch counties kept that pattern of use longer than most of the eastern United States, and Smokehouse survived in it.
The juice is honest and undistinguished — moderate acid, moderate sugar, no tannin, a light fresh aroma. It cannot carry a cider and does not pretend to. Recording it matters because the American cider picture is not made only of celebrated cultivars; it is mostly made of fruit like this, and a file that included only Harrison and Hewe’s Crab would give a false impression of what was actually in the press.
There is no juice analysis for it anywhere in CiderHQ’s register, and the blend profile above says so by being marked described. That is the ordinary state of the American heritage record outside the small number of cultivars a research programme has taken an interest in.
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 · documented
Traditionally said to have grown beside a smokehouse on a Lancaster County farm, which is the origin of the name.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Millcreek Vandevere | Regional name | Pennsylvania. Reflects the belief that Smokehouse arose as a Vandevere seedling. |
| English Vandevere | Disputed identity | Applied to Smokehouse in some nineteenth-century American nursery listings, and to a distinct Vandevere apple in others. Vandevere is itself a name carried by more than one fruit in the mid-Atlantic states, so the equation cannot be resolved from the listings alone and CiderHQ records it as claimed rather than acting on it. |
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.
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, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own
Ben Watson, The Countryman Press, first edition 1999; third edition 2013 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: first published 1999 by The Countryman Press, with five editions recorded and a 2008 printing scanned by the Internet Archive as ciderhardsweethi0000benw. The scan is access-restricted to the print-disabled collection. The site had registered this without a year; it now carries one, and the first-edition date matters because a general trade book on cider written in 1999 predates almost the whole of the North American cider revival it is sometimes cited about.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
Cider: Making, Using and Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider
Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols, Storey Communications, 1997; first published as Sweet & Hard Cider by Garden Way, 1980 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, and the verification changed what CiderHQ knows about it. The work first appeared in 1980 as Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, & Enjoying It (Garden Way, Charlotte, Vermont) and was retitled for the 1997 Storey edition the site had registered; nine editions are recorded in total. That matters for a source cited on North American practice, because a passage in the 1980 text and a passage in the 1997 one are not interchangeable and neither is the 2003 revision. Two scans exist in the Internet Archive — sweethardciderma0000prou for the 1980 edition and cidermakingusing0000prou for the 1997 — both access-restricted to the lending library and the print-disabled collection, so neither is openable by retrieval.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.