Cider apple
Yates
A very small, very dark Georgia apple from the 1840s, aromatic and noticeably tannic, and one of the few cultivars that made cider possible in the Deep South.
Also written Yates, Red Warrior.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Aroma, Late season
- Origin
- Fayette County, Georgia
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Yates. 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 | Moderate | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Medium |
Consistent southern description of an intensely flavoured, astringent little apple, corroborated by modern maker accounts. No juice analysis is registered.
Intensely aromatic for its size, with a firm astringency and a spicy, almost perfumed character.
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.
- 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.
- 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 Yates. 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
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
Sets very heavily, with fruit that stays small even when thinned.
Keeps remarkably well for such a small fruit, which mattered in a climate where most apples do not.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Fire blight | low | Tolerant, which is a precondition for growing apples at all in the humid Southeast. |
| Cedar apple rust | low | — |
Juice and pressing
- Real astringency, which places Yates in the small group of American cultivars that can supply structure.
- Moderate to firm acid.
- A concentrated, spicy aroma out of proportion to the fruit size.
- Low juice yield — the fruit is very small and the skin-to-flesh ratio is high.
How it is used
- A Deep South farm apple, dried, eaten and pressed.
- Used by modern southeastern producers as a tannin and aroma component.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Some southeastern producers bottle it alone, and it has the acid and grip to carry it. Yield is the limiting factor rather than quality.
About Yates
Growing apples in Georgia is difficult. The summers are hot and humid, fire blight and cedar apple rust are severe, and most northern cultivars simply fail. The apples that persisted in the Deep South are the ones that could tolerate all of that, and Yates is the outstanding example: tiny, dark red, tough-skinned, disease-tolerant, and productive enough that a single tree could supply a household.
For cider it is unexpectedly valuable. The juice is astringent in a way that almost no American dessert-derived apple is, and it carries a concentrated spiced aroma that survives fermentation. In a region whose other options are soft, sweet, low-acid summer apples, Yates does the structural work that a maker elsewhere would ask a bittersweet to do. Southeastern producers reaching for a regional identity reach for this fruit.
The cost is yield. The apples are barely larger than a large crab, the skin-to-flesh ratio is high and the juice per tonne is poor. This is the same economic problem that faces Harrison and Hewe’s Crab, and it is one reason the American revival leans so heavily on imported European cultivars: the surviving American fruit that supplies structure tends to be small, and small fruit does not pay.
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 · documented
Attributed to Matthew Yates of Fayette County; the attribution is consistent across southern American pomology.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Jates | Historic spelling | Georgia. |
| Red Warrior | Regional name | Georgia and Alabama. |
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.
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.
Kermerrien
The Breton bitter apple most often named on a bottle: firmly tannic, distinctly aromatic, and one of the few French cider cultivars with a genuine claim to standing alone.
Limbertwig
Not one cultivar but a family of related southern Appalachian apples sharing a drooping growth habit and a dense, aromatic, moderately tannic juice — the most distinctive fruit group the American South contributed to cider.
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.
Hewe’s Crab
The historic cider crab of Virginia — small, hard, very high in acid and unusually tannic for an American apple, and probably a hybrid between a cultivated apple and a native crab.
Kingston Black
The most celebrated English single-varietal cider apple: a small dark-red bittersharp carrying acid and tannin in one fruit, and a tree difficult enough that its reputation has always outrun its plantings.
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.
- Why does cider smell of apple skin
- 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.
- What is american heritage cider
- What is a limbertwig apple — Not one cultivar but a family of southern Appalachian apples sharing a drooping habit of growth and a dense, musky, moderately tannic flesh. Royal, Kentucky, Green, Red and Old Fashioned Limbertwig are distinct fruits, not synonyms.
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.
Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own
Ben Watson, The Countryman Press, first edition 1999; third edition 2013 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: first published 1999 by The Countryman Press, with five editions recorded and a 2008 printing scanned by the Internet Archive as ciderhardsweethi0000benw. The scan is access-restricted to the print-disabled collection. The site had registered this without a year; it now carries one, and the first-edition date matters because a general trade book on cider written in 1999 predates almost the whole of the North American cider revival it is sometimes cited about.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
Cider: Making, Using and Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider
Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols, Storey Communications, 1997; first published as Sweet & Hard Cider by Garden Way, 1980 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, and the verification changed what CiderHQ knows about it. The work first appeared in 1980 as Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, & Enjoying It (Garden Way, Charlotte, Vermont) and was retitled for the 1997 Storey edition the site had registered; nine editions are recorded in total. That matters for a source cited on North American practice, because a passage in the 1980 text and a passage in the 1997 one are not interchangeable and neither is the 2003 revision. Two scans exist in the Internet Archive — sweethardciderma0000prou for the 1980 edition and cidermakingusing0000prou for the 1997 — both access-restricted to the lending library and the print-disabled collection, so neither is openable by retrieval.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.