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Why cider apples taste unpleasant raw

Why do cider apples taste so bad if you bite one?

In short

Because they are full of tannin. A traditional bittersweet cider apple carries several times the phenolic content of a dessert apple, and those compounds do two things at once: they bind bitter receptors on the tongue, and they precipitate the proteins in saliva so the mouth is left dry and rough.

Neither sensation is a defect. In a fermented drink the same material becomes structure, grip, colour and ageing capacity, and it is present at a fraction of the concentration a mouthful of fruit delivers.

Some cider varieties are also low in acid, which removes the sharpness that would otherwise balance the astringency, and many are hard, dry-fleshed or gritty. The combination is what people describe as spitting it straight back out.

Two different sensations, commonly confused

Bitterness is a taste. It is detected by receptors concentrated towards the back of the tongue, and it is what smaller phenolic molecules — the shorter procyanidin oligomers, and compounds such as phloridzin — produce when they bind those receptors.

Astringency is not a taste at all. It is a tactile sensation: longer-chain tannins bind to the proline-rich proteins in saliva and precipitate them, stripping away the lubricating film that normally coats the mouth. What is felt is friction, and the mouth reports it as drying, roughness or a puckering grip.

The two behave differently over time. Bitterness rises and fades with the mouthful. Astringency builds across repeated exposure, because saliva takes time to replace what has been precipitated, and it is felt after swallowing rather than during. A cider apple delivers both simultaneously at high intensity, which is a combination few foods produce.

Why the fruit is like this

Phenolic compounds are not made by the tree for anyone’s benefit. They are part of the plant’s chemistry of defence and of tissue repair, deterring browsing and, through the enzyme polyphenol oxidase, sealing damaged tissue by browning it. Fruit that is bitter and astringent is fruit that discourages being eaten before its seeds are ready.

Dessert apple breeding has run in the opposite direction for a very long time. Selecting for palatability means selecting against astringency, generation after generation, and the result is fruit whose phenolic content is low enough that most people never notice it at all — except in the skin, and in the browning of a cut surface.

Cider apple selection never applied that pressure. Growers kept the varieties that made the drink they wanted, and a fruit that was unpleasant in the hand but excellent in the vat was kept for the second reason. Several traditional varieties carry names that make the point plainly enough.

What fermentation changes, and what it does not

Fermentation does not destroy tannin. Some phenolic material is lost — adsorbed onto yeast, precipitated with protein, oxidised, or dropped out with the lees during racking — but the majority survives into the finished cider, and it is meant to.

What changes is the context. A raw apple delivers its tannin in a single concentrated mouthful of solid tissue. A cider delivers it dissolved in a much larger volume of liquid that also carries alcohol, acid, carbon dioxide in many cases, and a residue of sugar in some. Alcohol contributes a sweet warmth that offsets bitterness, acid provides a contrasting sharpness, and the sheer dilution brings the phenolics down to a concentration that reads as structure rather than assault.

Time changes it further. During maturation, tannins polymerise — short chains link into longer ones and eventually into aggregates large enough to fall out of solution. The practical effect is that bitterness declines and astringency initially rises before both soften. This is a large part of why a young, tannic cider is harsher than the same cider a year later.

The exceptions

Not every cider apple is inedible. Sharps and many multipurpose varieties are perfectly pleasant to eat, if sour; a good deal of North American and eastern English cider is made from fruit that would be at home in a fruit bowl. The class that is genuinely unpalatable is the bittersweets and the more extreme bittersharps.

Even within that class, the fruit changes with time off the tree. Several traditional varieties are deliberately left to sweat in a heap for days or weeks, during which starch converts to sugar and the flesh softens. A sweated bittersweet is still bitter, but it is a different fruit from the rock-hard thing that came off the tree.

On eating windfall fruitRotting apples can carry patulin, a mould toxin produced chiefly by Penicillium expansum, and visibly rotten fruit is removed before milling for that reason. This is a matter of fruit condition rather than of variety.

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