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History · 1811–2020

How measurement changed cider

When did cider making become a science?

In short

Gradually, one measurement at a time. In 1811 Thomas Andrew Knight judged a new cider apple by the specific gravity of its juice. In the 1860s a French government congress set a minimum juice density and tannin content for cider fruit. From the 1890s the Bath and West Society funded experiments in Somerset that led to the National Fruit and Cider Institute at Long Ashton in 1903.

Each new measurement changed what could be argued about. Gravity made sugar comparable between fruit. Acid and tannin made a classification. Isolating an organism turned a spoiled cask into a cause. Since the 1990s, chemistry and genetics have shown what the old classes were only approximating.

Gravity: the first number

Knight was a Herefordshire landowner who bred apples. His Pomona Herefordiensis of 1811 judges cider fruit by eye and by use, as earlier writers had, but it also uses a hydrometer. Of his own seedling the Siberian Harvey he wrote that the specific gravity of its juice "greatly exceeded that of any other variety, being 1091", and concluded that it would probably give a richer cider than any then known.

That is the whole method of later cultivar evaluation in one sentence: measure the juice, compare the number with other fruit, and predict the cider. What Knight lacked was a series. He says he had only once had enough fruit to test the juice, and that the sample seemed unfavourable, and one reading from one season cannot separate a cultivar from its year.

A standard for cider fruit

The French went further first. According to the Herefordshire account published by Henry Graves Bull in 1886, the French government appointed a congress for the study of cider fruits in 1864. Centred on Rouen, it took definite form at Caen that year and then met in a different cider district each year. It laid down a general rule: the juice of cider and perry fruit should have a minimum density of 1.075, with at least half a per cent of tannin.

That is a standard, not just a measurement: a line a fruit could fail. Bull's own Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club in Hereford had by then spent nine years gathering orchard information. The English work that followed would choose acid, not density, as its first line.

Somerset: from experiments to an institute

The English programme began on a farm. The government report of 1903 on the Bath and West Society's investigations from 1893 to 1902 describes a laboratory at Butleigh, run by F. J. Lloyd, turned to cider after a cheese school had finished. In the words of the landowner, quoted in the report, "The following year, 1894, I induced the Bath and West of England Society to take the matter up in earnest".

The National Fruit and Cider Institute at Long Ashton grew out of that work. Its first report, covering 1903 to 1910, took the three classes growers already recognised — sharps, sweets and bitter-sweets — and supported them with a chemical standard. Acid above .45 per cent made a sharp; below it, tannin above or below .2 per cent divided bitter-sweets from sweets. The fourth class, bittersharp, appears in the reports later. The classification history page gives the dates.

Spoilage gets a cause

Cider sickness, a spoilage of sweet, low-acid ciders, was investigated by the Institute's first director, B. T. P. Barker. In a 1913 paper he described isolating the organism, which grew so slowly that the usual plating method had to be modified: "The organism is a small motile bacterium, which is facultatively anaerobic". He also noted that high acidity tends to prevent the disorder, which is why it was commoner where low-acid fruit predominated.

This is the step from craft explanation to causal explanation. A fault with a named organism and a known condition, low acidity, can be prevented by blending rather than suffered. The same chain of reasoning runs through modern guidance on acid and pH.

Keeving explained in chemistry

Keeving, the French and West Country practice of making a naturally sweet cider by letting a pectin gel carry nitrogen out of the juice, was an inherited skill long before it was explained. In the 1949–50 season Long Ashton ran large-scale trials. F. W. Beech and S. W. Challinor reported that maceration raised the pectin in the juice and that defecation lowered both its nitrogen and its pectin.

Lower nitrogen means a slower, less complete fermentation, and that is how a keeved cider stays sweet. The practice did not change. The reason for it became something that could be measured and controlled.

Polyphenols and genes

Tannin at Long Ashton was a single number. A 1999 INRA study of French cider apples measured the polyphenols class by class, using HPLC after thiolysis. In all sixteen apples studied, procyanidins were the predominant class, and the bitter varieties were the most concentrated. The average chain length varied by variety, with two sharp varieties far above the rest. A total tannin figure cannot show either fact, though both bear on how bitter or astringent a fruit is.

Genetics then asked what makes a cider apple a cider apple at all. A 2015 study genotyped 48 cider and 48 dessert varieties and found the genome-wide differentiation between them was low, although 17 regions showed signs of divergent selection, several near known regions for polyphenol content. In 2020 a University of Bristol study genotyped 245 cultivars and used the data to recover the parentage of the Long Ashton breeding selections.

What this page leaves outThis is a history of measurement, built only from documents CiderHQ has read in full text. Several often-repeated milestones are missing on purpose. Pasteur's fermentation work is sometimes cited as the start of cider science, but CiderHQ found no cider-specific work of his to cite. Nineteenth-century French cider chemistry beyond the congress was not available in a readable copy.

How this developed

Certainty is marked on each entry. Where the popular account runs ahead of the evidence, that is said rather than smoothed over.

  1. 1811

    Juice gravity as evidence

    Knight records the specific gravity of the juice of his seedling the Siberian Harvey as 1091, higher than any other variety he knew.

  2. 1864

    The French cider-fruit congress

    The French government appoints a congress for the study of cider fruits, which sets a minimum juice density of 1.075 and at least half a per cent of tannin.

  3. 1893–1902

    The Butleigh experiments

    Experiments on cider making in Somerset, taken up by the Bath and West Society from 1894, reported to Parliament in 1903.

  4. 1903–1910

    Three classes on chemical limits

    The National Fruit and Cider Institute supports the recognised sharps, sweets and bitter-sweets with acid and tannin limits.

  5. 1913

    The organism of cider sickness

    Barker describes the bacterium responsible and the protective effect of high acidity.

  6. 1950

    Keeving measured

    Beech and Challinor report the pectin and nitrogen changes behind keeving.

  7. 1999

    Polyphenols by class

    French cider apples analysed by HPLC after thiolysis show procyanidins as the predominant polyphenol class in every variety studied.

  8. 2015–2020

    Cider apples genotyped

    Studies of cider and dessert apples, and of 245 cultivars including the Long Ashton selections, bring genetics to cultivar identity and parentage.

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