Cider apple
Sweet Sixteen
A 1978 Minnesota release with a distinctive aniseed and cherry-like aroma, hardy to the upper Midwest and Quebec, and used by northern cider makers as an aromatic component.
Also written Sweet 16.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Aroma, Sugar and body
- Origin
- University of Minnesota fruit breeding programme, Excelsior, Minnesota
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Sweet Sixteen. 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 | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Dominant | |
| Body | Medium |
Description of a strongly and unusually aromatic hardy cultivar. No juice analysis is registered.
A pronounced aniseed or fennel note over a cherry-like fruitiness — genuinely unlike any other apple in this file.
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.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Sweet Sixteen. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Winter cold injury | low | — |
| Apple scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- A powerful and unusual aromatic signature that survives fermentation.
- Moderate acid and good sugar.
- No tannin.
How it is used
- A hardy dessert apple across the upper Midwest.
- Used in small proportion by northern cider makers for aroma.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
The aroma is strong enough to carry a cider, and divisive enough that not every drinker will want it to. There is no structure behind it.
About Sweet Sixteen
Sweet Sixteen is the aromatic outlier of the Minnesota programme. It carries a distinct aniseed or fennel note with a cherry-like fruitiness underneath, which is not something apples usually do, and the character comes through fermentation strongly enough to define a cider made with any quantity of it.
Northern makers use it in small proportion for that reason. The acid is only moderate and there is no tannin, so it cannot structure a blend; what it does is give a northern cider an identifiable aroma in a region where the alternative is McIntosh perfume or nothing.
It belongs with Chestnut Crab, Frostbite and Honeycrisp in the group of cold-hardy Minnesota material that the Quebec and northern New England cider trade has built on. That group exists because a land-grant university spent a century breeding fruit that would survive a continental winter, and the cider revival in those regions is a direct beneficiary of work done with no thought of cider at all.
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 · a recorded cross
Northern Spy crossed with the Minnesota selection later released as Frostbite. Recorded as a cross by the breeding programme that made it, which is strong evidence about what was intended and weaker evidence about which pollen took; no genotyping study CiderHQ has read confirms it.
The breeding programme recorded making this cross. Strong evidence about what was intended; weaker evidence about which pollen actually took, which only genotyping settles.
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.
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
- 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.
- What is modern american cider like
- What is quebec ice cider
- Why is quebec known for ice cider — Because the winters are cold enough and long enough to concentrate apple juice by freezing reliably, which is the one thing ice cider needs and most cider regions cannot supply.
- Why was cider so important in new england — Apples grew where grapes and barley struggled, water was often unsafe, and every farm could press. Cider was the ordinary drink of colonial New England until temperance and then industrial brewing displaced it.
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
University of Vermont cider research
University of Vermont Extension · university · 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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.