Stembridge Cluster

How it is classified

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 drink will be.

Adds mild tannin and bulk juice from a heavy crop of small fruit.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Stembridge Cluster, 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.

Put Stembridge Cluster into a blend

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.

Where it sits among the varieties each programme measured

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.

Watched in the orchard

What named research programmes recorded about this fruit at their own sites. Bloom, harvest and cropping belong to a place and a run of seasons rather than to a cultivar, so they are reported site by site rather than merged.

In the orchard

Harvest window

Mid

Flowering

Not recorded

Vigour

Moderate

Cropping

Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate

Keeping

Moderate

October. The clustered habit makes hand-picking quick and shaking less effective.

Sets fruit in tight clusters, which gives heavy weight per branch and small individual apples. Thinning is impractical and the tree tends to alternate as a result.

No pollination group is recorded.

Disease and pest susceptibility

Juice and pressing

• Low acid
• Mild tannin
• Small fruit with a high skin-to-flesh ratio

How it is used

• A bulk component of south Somerset farm blends

On its own

About Stembridge Cluster

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.

Related cultivars

Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.

• Often confused with

  Stembridge Jersey

  The other Stembridge apple, and the one more often meant when the hamlet is cited.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Hangdown

  A Devon mild bittersweet named for its weeping habit, sitting close enough to the tannin threshold that sources place it on both sides of it.

• Backwell Red

  A north Somerset bittersweet from the village of Backwell, close to Long Ashton itself, giving moderate tannin from a heavy-cropping tree.

Where it grows

• Somerset

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 are cider apples picked
• 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
• 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.

• National Fruit 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.