Glossary · Fruit
Keeping quality
Definition
How long harvested fruit stays sound before it must be milled. Good keepers can be held for weeks and let a mill spread its pressing; poor keepers must be pressed within days of collection.
- Subject
- Fruit
In more detail
Keeping quality organises the whole harvest. Early cultivars are rarely good keepers and are pressed as they come; late bittersweets often keep for a month or more and can be sweated. A mill with a mixture of early, mid and late fruit can run a season of eight or ten weeks with one press.
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Fruit
Sweating
Holding harvested fruit in a heap or a shed for days or weeks before milling, so that starch converts to sugar, flesh softens and moisture is lost.
Fruit
Ripeness
The stage at which fruit has completed starch conversion, reached its characteristic sugar and softened enough to press. For cider fruit it is judged later than for dessert fruit, often at or after natural drop.
Orchard
Windfall
Fruit that has fallen from the tree before deliberate harvest. In cider orchards windfalls are a normal part of the crop; the question is how long they have lain and in what condition.
Fruit
Brown rot
A fungal rot of apples and pears, chiefly *Monilinia fructigena*, producing an expanding brown lesion with concentric rings of buff spore pustules. Affected fruit is unfit for milling.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
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.
Cider and perry production technical training material
Peter Mitchell / Cider and Perry Academy · reference work · registered as competent for this subject
Searched again on 2026-08-25 and it remains the one printed source here that a bibliographic check cannot fix, because it is not a published work with an edition. It is course material issued to participants of a training programme, so there is no catalogue record to verify, no ISBN, and no lawful public copy. Its state stays `registered` for that reason rather than through inattention.