Cider apple
Somerset Lasting
A hard-fleshed Somerset cider apple named for how long it keeps, letting a farm mill press fruit well into the winter.
Also written Lasting, Somerset Lasting Apple.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Very late (November onwards)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Late season, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Somerset
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Bittersweet
Low acid, high tannin. The class that has no real equivalent in dessert fruit and that defines West Country cider.
Basis: Below about 0.45% w/v acid and above about 0.2% w/v tannin.
A mild bittersweet, placed on description rather than on a verified analysis of this cultivar. Some accounts treat it as a sweet.
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 | Low | |
| Tannin | Moderate | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Medium |
Description of the fruit as a mild keeping bittersweet, with no verified analysis attached to the cultivar.
Adds light tannin and modest sugar to a late or winter pressing.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Somerset Lasting, 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.
Total acid0.180–0.300 % w/v
Long Ashton, Somerset, England, Long Ashton-era analyses as compiled in later West Country pomology · Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001. ISBN 9781874336877
A wide range from a compiled figure rather than a verified per-cultivar analysis. One site, one climate, and an uncertain chain of transmission.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. Measured in percent weight per volume.
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.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Very late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
November, and usable for weeks afterwards — the whole point of the fruit.
Exceptional keeping is the defining characteristic and the source of the name.
Late-flowering. No pollination group is recorded for this cultivar.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Light tannin
- Low acid
- Available long after the crop is gathered
How it is used
- Winter pressing on Somerset farms
- Stored in lofts and barns for use after the main season
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Kept for its storage life rather than its juice.
About Somerset Lasting
Somerset Lasting is named for a property that has no modern equivalent. A farm making its own cider pressed when it had time, not when the fruit was ready, and a cultivar that could sit in a loft until January without rotting was worth planting for that reason alone. Refrigeration and year-round juice supply have made the trait almost irrelevant, and the cultivar has become correspondingly rare.
The juice is a mild bittersweet — light tannin, low acid, moderate sugar — and no source records an analysis that can be confidently attributed to this cultivar rather than to the general run of Somerset keeping apples. This record therefore carries a described-confidence blend profile and a single wide, compiled measurement, which is as far as the evidence goes.
The bare name "Lasting" was used across Somerset for keeping apples in general, so old farm records mentioning it prove very little about which tree was planted.
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 Somerset farm cider apple of unrecorded origin, named for a property rather than a person or place.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Lasting | Regional name | Somerset. Used alone in Somerset for keeping cider apples generally, so it does not identify this fruit. |
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.
Brown Snout
A Herefordshire mild bittersweet named for the russet patch at its eye, valued for compact growth and regular cropping rather than for concentration.
Dabinett
The most widely planted English cider apple: a small, late-ripening bittersweet whose soft, full tannin ferments into a cider that needs almost nothing added to it.
Michelin
A Norman bittersweet raised near Yvetot in the 1870s that became, in England rather than in France, one of the most widely planted cider apples in the world.
Somerset Redstreak
A mild bittersweet planted at very large scale in the late twentieth century for its heavy, regular cropping on bush trees, and a fruit whose commercial importance exceeds its character.
Yarlington Mill
A vigorous Somerset bittersweet, conical and red-striped, giving a cider with more aromatic lift than most of its class and a reputation for fruitiness that the tannin figures do not explain.
Bulmer’s Norman
A large, vigorous French-derived bittersweet imported by H P Bulmer and planted across Herefordshire for heavy cropping and mild, plentiful juice.
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
- How long can apples be kept before pressing
- 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 somerset cider
- What is chisel jersey
- Why is cider made in the west country — Because the climate suits apples and disappoints wheat and barley: mild, wet winters, heavy soils and a long growing season. Where grain was hard to grow, orchards took its place and cider took beer’s.
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.
Somerset Rural Life Museum — cider collections
South West Heritage Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.