Cider apple
Spartan
A 1936 release from the federal research station at Summerland, British Columbia — a dark red McIntosh derivative that became a mainstay of the British Columbia crop and of British supermarket shelves.
Also written Spartan.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bulk juice, Sugar and body, Aroma
- Origin
- Dominion Experimental Station, Summerland, British Columbia
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Spartan. 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 | Negligible | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Description of a moderately sweet, aromatic McIntosh derivative. CiderHQ holds no juice analysis for British Columbia fruit.
Sweet and lightly perfumed with a firm, dense flesh and only moderate acidity.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Spartan, 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 Spartan. 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
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Good
Very heavy-setting and needs thinning, or the fruit is too small to sell.
Keeps considerably better than McIntosh, which was much of the point of the breeding.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Apple scab | moderate | Less severe than McIntosh, and the dry interior climate of the Okanagan where most Spartan is grown suppresses it further. |
| Fire blight | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid, generally below what a blend needs on its own.
- Good sugar and a dense juice.
- A restrained McIntosh-family aroma.
- No tannin.
How it is used
- A major British Columbia market apple and a long-standing British import.
- Pressed as culls in the British Columbia and Pacific Northwest juice trade.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Pleasant, soft and low in acid; it needs sharpening and gains nothing from being bottled alone.
About Spartan
The Okanagan valley of British Columbia is a dry, irrigated, high-sunshine fruit region much more like eastern Washington than like Quebec, and the federal station at Summerland bred for it. Spartan was the station’s most successful release: a dark, dense, sweet McIntosh derivative that stored and shipped far better than its parent and became a familiar apple in Britain as well as Canada.
Its cider role is the ordinary one for a commercial dessert apple. Culls and surplus go to the press, and the juice contributes sugar, a little aroma and not enough acid. British Columbia cider makers blending Spartan bring acid from elsewhere, and the province’s better cider is generally made with European cultivars grown deliberately for the purpose.
Its published parentage has been quietly corrected. Spartan was released as McIntosh crossed with Newtown Pippin, and the Newtown side has not survived DNA scrutiny. This record keeps the McIntosh parent and marks the parentage as not established, which is the honest position when half a documented cross has been disproved and no replacement identified.
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.
Parentage · not established
Released as McIntosh crossed with Newtown Pippin. DNA evidence has not supported the Newtown side, and the second parent is now regarded as unknown. The McIntosh parentage is not in doubt.
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Parentage
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.
Golden Delicious
A West Virginia chance seedling of about 1890 that became one of the most planted and most bred-from apples in history — high in sugar, low in acid, and by volume one of the largest single inputs to cider worldwide.
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.
Cortland
A 1898 Geneva cross of Ben Davis and McIntosh, released in 1915, whose flesh browns unusually slowly — a property that made it a salad apple and makes its juice unusually resistant to oxidative browning.
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.
Douce Moën
The workhorse of Breton cider orchards: a large, pale, very low-acid bittersweet that crops heavily, presses generously, and carries more Breton cider than any other single cultivar.
Golden Russet
The highest-gravity fruit in widespread North American cider use — a small bronze russet from New York whose juice regularly presses above 1.060 and which many revival makers treat as their benchmark cultivar.
Styles it is characteristic of
Ice cider
Cider made from apple juice concentrated by freezing, fermented slowly and stopped while a large residual sugar remains, giving a dessert-strength drink of high acid and high sweetness.
Quebec ice cider
Ice cider made under Quebec’s reserved designation, which sets out how the juice may be concentrated, what may be added and what the finished product must contain.
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 apples is quebec cider made from — McIntosh above all. It is to eastern Canada what a bittersweet is to Somerset — the assumed default — and its perfumed, high-acid juice is the aromatic foundation of most Quebec and northeastern cider.
- What is modern american cider like
- Is cider made in ontario — Yes, and it is Canada’s largest apple-growing province. The modern cider sector there has been built largely on dessert fruit rather than on cider cultivars, which is a different starting point from Quebec’s.
- Is washington cider made from cider apples — Some of it. Washington is the dominant American apple state and its irrigated eastern valleys grow dessert fruit at enormous scale, while the cider cultivar work sits west of the Cascades in the maritime Skagit Valley.
- What is british columbia cider like — Two things, because the province has two orchard climates: the irrigated desert valleys of the interior and the wet coastal south-west. They grow different fruit and make different 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.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.
Washington State University cider research programme
Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center · university · passage verified 2026-08-24
The single most useful open cider dataset CiderHQ has found. The programme’s cultivar performance database gives juice chemistry, orchard behaviour, bloom and harvest timing and cider-maker tasting notes for 73 cultivars grown at one maritime site over fifteen years, and — unusually — publishes its classification thresholds alongside its figures, so the classification can be checked rather than taken on trust. It also states outright that its results diverge from the English ones. Read in full on 2026-08-24 and transcribed into `data/trials/wsu-mount-vernon.ts`; four published figures were found to be impossible and are withheld there with their reasons.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.