Cider apple
Steirischer Maschanzker
A small, long-keeping Styrian apple of great age, central to Austrian orchard tradition and used in Most as well as at the table.
Also written Maschanzker, Steirischer Maschanzger, Mascancapfel.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Aroma, Sugar and body
- Origin
- Styria, Austria, with a wider central European history
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Steirischer Maschanzker. 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 | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Description in Austrian orchard practice as a small, aromatic, long-keeping dual-purpose apple. No registered classification scheme covers Austrian fruit.
Small, firm and finely aromatic, with moderate acid and a texture that holds for months; better eaten in January than in October.
Aroma
Descriptors associated with this fruit. Each names a character with a known cause, and association is not a promise — what reaches the glass depends on the ferment as much as on the apple.
- Ripe apple — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
- Apple skin — The dry, faintly waxy and slightly bitter aroma of the fruit’s surface rather than its flesh, carried by cuticular waxes, hexyl esters and skin-concentrated phenolics.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Steirischer Maschanzker. 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
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
Picked late and eaten later. Its flavour develops substantially in store, which is characteristic of the old keeping apples.
Exceptional, and historically the point of the cultivar.
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid with good aroma
- No tannin
- Modest juice yield from small fruit
How it is used
- Winter eating and storage, its primary historic use
- Most in Styria and the Austrian Mostviertel
- A cultural emblem of Styrian orchard tradition
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Aromatic enough to be worth making alone, and small Austrian producers do; the fruit is worth more stored than pressed, which limits how often it happens.
About Steirischer Maschanzker
The Maschanzker is one of the anchors of Austrian orchard identity, and its interest is as much cultural as pomological. It is small, it keeps astonishingly well, it develops its aroma in store rather than on the tree, and it has been grown in Styria for centuries — long enough that its own history has become uncertain.
The chief uncertainty is its relationship to the Borsdorfer, a name attached to a small, fine, keeping apple across central Europe since the late Middle Ages. The two are frequently equated, and the equation may be right, but names of that antiquity have been applied to many fruits and the identification rests on similarity of description rather than on any continuous record. CiderHQ records the claim as disputed.
In Most it is a minority component and a valued one, bringing aroma to a tradition that, like the German one, has almost no tannic fruit and relies on perfume and acid balance for its interest. Austrian Most country — the Mostviertel above all — is better known for perry than for cider, and its apple cultivars have been less studied than its pears.
It carries no classification here, for the same reason the German records do not: no registered scheme was fitted to central European fruit, and Austrian practice describes Mostobst by use, must weight and acidity rather than by acid-and-tannin family.
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
One of the oldest named apples in central Europe. Its relationship to the Borsdorfer group, and whether the fruit grown in Styria today is the fruit described in early modern sources, are both open questions.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Maschanzker | Regional name | Styria. The short form, in general Austrian use. |
| Borsdorfer | Disputed identity | The Maschanzker is frequently identified with the old central European Borsdorfer. The identification is repeated widely and is not settled; CiderHQ records it as disputed rather than asserting it. |
Why it matters
- One of the oldest continuously grown named apples in central Europe
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.
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.
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.
Wickson Crab
A Californian dessert crab raised by Albert Etter, exceptional for carrying very high sugar and very high acid at the same time, and now one of the most sought-after cider cultivars in North America.
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.
Manttoni
A Basque cultivar of good reputation with balanced acid and pronounced aroma, one of the cultivars a *sagardotegi* will name when describing a serious blend.
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 should i store cider — Cool, dark and at a steady temperature. Light causes light-strike in clear glass, warmth accelerates oxidation, and temperature swings push cider past the closure of a bottle that is not tightly sealed.
- Where does a ripe apple aroma in cider come from — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
- How long can apples be kept before pressing
- Why does cider smell of apple skin
- What is errezil — A Basque apple better known as a dessert variety — Reineta de Errezil — that also appears in cider orchards there. Basque cider is built on a repertoire of its own, largely distinct from the English, French and Asturian ones.
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.
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.