Cider apple
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.
Also written Yarlington, Yarlington Mills, Yarlinton Mill.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bittersweet base, Tannin and structure, Aroma, Late season
- Origin
- Yarlington, near Wincanton, Somerset
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
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 full bittersweet on both axes, though its aroma has led to it being described as though it were a milder fruit than the tannin figure implies.
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 | Very low | |
| Tannin | Firm | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Full |
Long Ashton acid and tannin ranges, with the aroma band raised above what the analysis would suggest because the cultivar’s fruit-and-spice character is consistently reported by growers and judges.
Brings a fruity, faintly spiced aroma on top of a firm bittersweet structure, which is unusual in a class that is generally aromatically mute.
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
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.
Measured on the fruit
Measured on the fruit itself, before anything was done to it. These figures hold whatever was later made from the juice.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fruit diameter | 70 mm | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Fruit weight | 60 g | New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York, USA | late 1970sHistoric analysis | AVI / Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989, edited by Donald L. Downing (ISBN 0-442-22117-7) |
| Juice yield | 527 L/t | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
Measured on the juice
Measured on juice as pressed, before fermentation. This is where most cider analysis lives and what the classification schemes are defined on.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total acid3 readings, spanning 0.195–0.230 % w/v | 0.150–0.240 % w/v | Long Ashton, Somerset, England | Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985Historic analysis | National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol |
| 0.230 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center | |
| 0.220 % w/v | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England | 1905–1975Historic analysis | Andrew Lea | |
| Total tannin3 readings, spanning 0.210–0.320 % w/v | 0.220–0.320 % w/v | Long Ashton, Somerset, England | Long Ashton analyses, 1903–1985Historic analysis | National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol |
| 0.210 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center | |
| 0.320 % w/v | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England | 1905–1975Historic analysis | Andrew Lea | |
| Brix | 11.9 °Bx | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| pH | 4.10 pH | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Specific gravity | 1.048 SG | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
Measured on the finished drink
Measured on the finished drink, after fermentation. Not comparable with the juice figures above: fermentation, fining and time move all of these, and phenolics in particular fall substantially.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pH (finished cider) | 4.14 pH | New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York, USA | late 1970sHistoric analysis | AVI / Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989, edited by Donald L. Downing (ISBN 0-442-22117-7) |
| Total acid (finished cider) | 0.160 % w/v | New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York, USA | late 1970sHistoric analysis | AVI / Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989, edited by Donald L. Downing (ISBN 0-442-22117-7) |
| Total tannin (finished cider) | 0.102 % w/v | New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York, USA | late 1970sHistoric analysis | AVI / Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989, edited by Donald L. Downing (ISBN 0-442-22117-7) |
2 properties here have been measured more than once. The readings are shown as they were taken and are deliberately not averaged — climate, season, ripeness at picking, the age of the tree and the analytical method all move these numbers, and a single figure would hide every one of them. Where a spread is given below a property, it is the distance between separate studies, not the variation within any one of them.
How these were measured
- Titration of pressed juice, reported as malic acid
- Permanganate titration against indigo carmine, reported as tannic acid equivalent
- Titration, reported as malic acid equivalent
- Published as 2.74 inches; converted at 25.4 mm to the inch
- Juice pressed from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Published as 239 mL/lb; converted at 2.204623 lb to the kilogram
- Titration with alkali, reported as malic acid. Composite figure across many seasons; the source states neither the sample count nor the year of any individual analysis.
- Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figure across many seasons; the source states neither the sample count nor the year of any individual analysis.
- Mean fruit weight as published. The compiler notes that a typical New York dessert apple weighs about 140 g, so most of these are small fruit — which is normal for cider cultivars and is itself the point of the column.
- Titration, reported as malic acid. Analysis of finished cider.
- Meter on finished cider.
- Method not stated by the source, which is a real limitation: different tannin methods give wildly different figures on the same sample.
- Single-site, single-climate fruit. Read it as a position relative to the Long Ashton thresholds, not as a value to expect from another orchard.
- Recorded as a range because the underlying per-cultivar tables are not verified against the original station reports.
- A composite of Long Ashton analyses reaching CiderHQ through three hands: the station’s own work, a printed compilation (Bulmer’s Pomona, 1987, and Beech and Carr, 1977), and a transcription of that compilation. CiderHQ has seen only the transcription.
- A composite of Long Ashton analyses reaching CiderHQ through three hands: the station’s own work, a printed compilation (Bulmer’s Pomona, 1987, and Beech and Carr, 1977), and a transcription of that compilation. CiderHQ has seen only the transcription. A permanganate figure. It is not comparable with a Folin–Ciocalteu total-phenolics figure for the same fruit, and the two can differ by a factor of two.
- Reaches CiderHQ through a transcription of a 1989 food-technology chapter, which itself printed unpublished 1980 work from the station. Unlike the chemistry in this dataset it is a measurement of the fruit rather than of the finished cider, so it is comparable with other fruit weights.
- Measured on finished cider after a spontaneous fermentation, not on juice. It is not comparable with a juice figure for the same cultivar, and the gap between the two is not a disagreement between laboratories — it is what fermentation did.
- Measured on finished cider after a spontaneous fermentation, not on juice. It is not comparable with a juice figure for the same cultivar, and the gap between the two is not a disagreement between laboratories — it is what fermentation did. The compiler notes these tannin figures run at roughly half the Long Ashton juice figures for the same cultivars, and cannot say how much of that is fermentation, how much is Geneva, and how much is method.
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.
WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial
Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center, Mount Vernon, Skagit Valley, Washington · 2002–2017 · Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Maritime, with cool summers and mild wet winters — the closest North American analogue to the English West Country, and the reason the programme planted European cider fruit here rather than east of the Cascades.
- Mean full bloom
- 13 May
- Harvest
- 26 September
- Bloom density
- 3.7 of 5
- Productivity
- 3.7 of 5
- Growth habit
- Spreading
- Bearing
- Standard
- Alternate bearing
- No
- Blind wood
- 2 of 5
- Rootstocks
- MM.106
Filed here as bittersweet.
Juice characteristics measured on 250 mL of pressed juice; juice yield from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Bloom density, productivity and blind wood are the site’s own subjective 1–5 ratings. Figures are means across the seasons each cultivar was in the trial.
Long Ashton composite cider apple analyses
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England · 1905–1975 · Andrew Lea
Maritime and mild, with wet autumns and few hard frosts — the climate the English cider cultivars were selected in, and the reason their acid and tannin figures here are the ones the rest of the world has spent a century comparing its own fruit against.
- Held as
- Listed as “Yarlington Mill”, late season
Filed here as bittersweet.
Marked in the source as one of the cultivars “generally regarded as having that elusive and hard-to-define character of vintage quality”. The compiler marks fourteen of the forty-two that way, and does not say who regards them so or on what evidence.
Recorded by the programme from professional cidermakers in the region. One panel, one place, one set of seasons — a description of these ciders rather than of the cultivar everywhere.
Freshly expressed juice, not finished cider. Acid by straight titration against alkali, reported as malic acid; tannin by Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figures across seventy years of analyses: the source gives neither a sample count nor the year of any individual reading.
NYSAES Geneva cider cultivar analyses
New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York · late 1970s · AVI / Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989, edited by Donald L. Downing (ISBN 0-442-22117-7)
Humid continental, with a hotter summer and a colder winter than any European cider region. The compiler suggests the growing conditions may be part of why the phenolic figures sit so far below the English ones, and is careful not to claim it.
- Held as
- Listed as “Yarlington Mill”
Analysis of finished cider after a spontaneous fermentation. Acid by titration as malic; pH by meter; tannin by an unstated method; fruit weight as a mean. The data appear to come from a single season, and the original work was unpublished.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Late
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Late October into November, often the last of the main Somerset bittersweets to be gathered.
Strongly biennial and slow to come into bearing, a combination that makes it expensive to establish and a poor choice for a grower who needs early returns.
Stores well enough to be held and milled after the earlier fruit has gone through.
Late-flowering, with the frost tolerance that implies. Sets fruit reliably in most seasons.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | high | Among the more scab-prone Somerset bittersweets; wet springs show on the fruit. |
| Canker | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Good sugar, giving a useful potential alcohol without blending
- Aromatic in a way most bittersweets are not
- Tannin that grips more than Dabinett’s at a similar measured level
How it is used
- A principal component of traditional Somerset blends
- Planted widely alongside Dabinett in twentieth-century bush orchards
- Frequently bottled as a named varietal by small producers
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Bottled alone more often than most bittersweets because its aroma gives it something to say on its own. It still finishes low in acid, and single-varietal examples are commonly described as broad rather than balanced.
About Yarlington Mill
Yarlington Mill is a tall, upright, vigorous tree carrying small conical fruit striped in dull red, and it is one of the few bittersweets that a taster can identify blind. The reason is aroma. Most bittersweet juice is aromatically flat — the class is defined by what tannin does, not by what the fruit smells of — and Yarlington Mill instead carries a fruity, slightly spiced note that survives fermentation and shows in a finished cider. The Long Ashton figures give no hint of this, which is a useful reminder that a two-axis classification was never designed to predict flavour.
In a blend it does two jobs at once. Its tannin is firmer and more astringent on the palate than Dabinett’s at a comparable measured level, so it adds grip and ageing capacity; and its aroma lifts a blend that would otherwise be defined by weight alone. West Country makers who describe a house style as fruity rather than austere are usually leaning on it. The cost is that it is easy to overdo: a blend that is mostly Yarlington Mill can finish drying and one-dimensional in a way that a Dabinett-led blend does not.
It is a difficult tree to establish. It comes into bearing slowly, crops biennially once it does, and takes scab readily in a wet spring. Growers put up with all of this because the fruit is worth it and because the late flowering is genuinely valuable on frost-prone Somerset ground. On a modern bush orchard it needs more attention than Dabinett and repays it unevenly.
The origin story — a seedling rooted in the wall of the mill stream at Yarlington, taken up by a Mr Bartlett — is repeated everywhere and verifiable nowhere. What can be said is that the name is stable, that the fruit has been recognisably the same thing across the twentieth century, and that its promotion by Long Ashton rather than any nineteenth-century enthusiasm is what put it into orchards at scale.
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
Said to have grown from a seedling in the wall of the mill stream at Yarlington and to have been propagated by a Mr Bartlett. The mill exists and the name is unambiguous; the seedling-in-a-wall detail is orchard tradition and cannot be checked.
Parentage · not established
Chance seedling. No parentage recorded.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Stoke Red seedling | Disputed identity | An occasional and unsupported parentage claim, not a name in use. |
Why it matters
- One of the two cultivars that define the modern Somerset bittersweet blend
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Similar role
Dabinett
The standard pairing; Yarlington Mill supplies aroma and grip where Dabinett supplies softness.
Often confused with
Stoke Red
Both are Somerset red-striped fruit and are occasionally muddled in old orchards, though Stoke Red is a bittersharp and tastes nothing like it.
Traditional blend partner
Kingston Black
Used together where a maker wants both structure and acid without adding culinary fruit.
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.
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.
Chisel Jersey
A hard, high-tannin Somerset bittersweet used in small proportion for structure, and one of the fruit most often reached for when a blend needs backbone rather than bulk.
Harry Masters’ Jersey
A medium bittersweet from the Yarlington district, valued for tannin that is full without being harsh, and among the more reliable croppers in a class that is generally unreliable.
Ashton Brown Jersey
A late, full bittersweet selected at Long Ashton from Somerset material, giving high tannin and a long finish from a tree that crops poorly.
Nehou
A Norman bittersweet long grown in English orchards, giving high tannin from a small, late, hard fruit and cropping better than most of its class.
Black Vallis
A dark-skinned Somerset bittersweet from the Frome district, giving firm tannin from a heavy-cropping tree.
Styles it is characteristic of
West Country farmhouse cider
Cider made on the farm from tannic bittersweet fruit, wild-fermented in wood and sold still and unfiltered, in a tradition whose variability is one of its defining features.
Herefordshire cider
Cider from the county with England’s largest cider orchard area, protected as a geographical indication and spanning farmhouse practice, bottle-fermented cider and industrial-scale production.
Single-varietal cider
Cider made wholly or overwhelmingly from one apple cultivar, presented so that the fruit’s own character is the subject of the drink.
Somerset cider
Cider from the Somerset levels and the surrounding hills, built on a locally selected bittersweet fruit population and a tradition of full-bodied, tannic, still cider.
Three Counties cider
The shared cider and perry tradition of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, defined by a common fruit inventory and by the perry pear orchards that survive nowhere else in comparable numbers.
Traditional draught cider
Cider dispensed from cask, bag-in-box or gravity without added gas, in the form that British cider has historically been drunk in pubs and at the farm gate.
Blended cider
Cider assembled from several cultivars, parcels or vintages so that the finished balance is a made decision rather than an inherited one.
Scrumpy
A colloquial West Country word for rough farm cider that has never had a fixed definition and now carries as much marketing weight as descriptive meaning.
Vintage cider
Cider from the fruit of a single named harvest, made and sold as an expression of that season rather than of a house style.
Welsh cider
Cider from Wales, rebuilt over recent decades from a nearly lost tradition, with protected names for traditional Welsh cider and perry and a fruit inventory shared with the English border counties.
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.
- What is dabinett — The most widely planted English cider apple: a late bittersweet with soft, full tannin that ferments into a cider needing very little added to it. Long Ashton measured it at 0.18 per cent acid and 0.29 per cent tannin.
- What is kingston black — Kingston Black is a Somerset bittersharp with an unusual balance of acid and tannin, long regarded as capable of making a complete cider unblended. It is difficult to grow well, which is why it is scarcer than its reputation suggests.
- 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 maceration in cider making — Maceration is letting milled pomace stand before pressing, so that enzymes soften the tissue and phenolics and aroma move from the skins into the juice. It raises both colour and tannin, and raises the risk of oxidation with them.
- Is single variety cider better than a blend — Neither is inherently better and CiderHQ does not rank them. A single varietal shows one cultivar’s character and depends entirely on that fruit being balanced; a blend is how most makers reach balance deliberately.
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.
Long Ashton Research Station cider fruit analyses
National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol · research institute · registered as competent for this subject · covers 1903–2003
The foundational body of cider-fruit science in English. Long Ashton produced the acid-and-tannin classification that divides cider apples into sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp, and analysed hundreds of cultivars grown at its Somerset site. Its figures are historic measurements of specific fruit at a specific place, not universal constants — a distinction CiderHQ preserves in every measurement record that cites it.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.