Oligomer

Related terms

Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.

• Chemistry

  Polymer

  A molecule built from many repeating units. Polymeric procyanidins, long chains of flavan-3-ols, bind salivary proteins efficiently and are the fraction of cider tannin perceived as astringency rather than bitterness.

• Chemistry

  Procyanidin

  A chain of flavan-3-ol units — mainly epicatechin, with catechin as a terminal unit — and the principal tannin of cider apples. Chain length determines whether it tastes bitter or astringent.

• Chemistry

  Mean degree of polymerisation

  The average number of monomer units in the procyanidin chains of a sample. It is the analytical figure that predicts whether a fruit’s tannin will read as bitter or as astringent.

• Sensory

  Bitterness

  One of the basic tastes, detected by receptors chiefly on the posterior tongue. In cider it comes principally from short-chain procyanidins and from certain phenolic acids.

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.

• Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement (INRAE)

  INRAE · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24

  French national agricultural research. Its Angers programme produced much of the published work on apple procyanidin chain length and on the relationship between polymer size, bitterness and astringency.

• Peer-reviewed literature on apple phenolics and cider sensory perception

  Various journals · peer-reviewed literature · registered as competent for this subject

  Registered as a class rather than as one paper, because the mechanisms CiderHQ describes — tannin chain length driving the split between bitterness and astringency, salivary protein precipitation, enzymatic browning — are established across many studies rather than resting on any single one. Individual papers are cited where a specific number is quoted.