Region
Frankfurt
The city where Hessian apple wine acquired its public institutions: the tavern quarter, the fixed vessels and measures, and a drinking culture that is urban rather than agricultural.
Known locally as Frankfurt am Main.
Climate and land
The first thing to know about a cider region, because it sets what the fruit can be. Ripening date, the acid that survives to the press and the sugar that reaches the vat are all decided here, and they are what makes one tradition's answers wrong for another's fruit.
Frankfurt sits in the Main valley at the heart of the Rhine-Main basin, one of the mildest and driest climates in Germany, sheltered by the Taunus to the north-west and warmed by its low elevation and by the heat retained in a large built-up area. The growing season is long and the summers warm and sunny, so fruit in the surrounding meadow orchards ripens fully and reliably. The city itself grows almost none of it: the orchards that supply Frankfurt taverns are on the slopes and in the villages around the basin, particularly to the north and east, where land was too poor or too broken for intensive arable. Frost in the low ground during blossom is the principal agricultural risk, and dry summers can stress trees on the thinner upland soils. Frankfurt’s role in the system is consumption and pressing, not growing.
The orchards
How the fruit is actually grown here — tree form, planting, what else the ground is used for, and who owns it.
- The city is a market rather than a growing area; fruit comes from meadow orchards in the surrounding districts and is bought in by Keltereien and by taverns that press their own.
- Some taverns and small producers within the city and its outer districts maintain their own orchards, but the volume relationship runs outward to the countryside.
- Urban expansion in the twentieth century removed a substantial area of meadow orchard from the city’s immediate surroundings.
- Community and conservation planting of standard fruit trees around the city is now a landscape and habitat activity, and supplies fruit only incidentally.
The words used here
Each of these names something the tradition does. They are given in the local language because that is the form a reader will meet them in — on a label, on a cider-house door, or in a conversation about how the cider is poured.
| Term | Language | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Apfelweinlokal | German | An apple wine tavern: a premises serving apple wine by the jug with a fixed regional menu, generally at shared tables. |
| Sachsenhausen | German | The Frankfurt district on the south bank of the Main where the apple wine taverns concentrated, and the place the drink’s public identity was formed. |
| Handkäs mit Musik | German | A small sour-milk cheese dressed with chopped onion, oil and vinegar. The standard accompaniment; the Musik is the onion dressing. |
| Schoppen | German | The three-hundred-millilitre measure in which apple wine is counted and sold. |
| sauer gespritzt | German | Apple wine cut with sparkling mineral water, a standard order rather than an improvisation. |
History
How cider making here came to take the shape it has.
- Frankfurt’s apple wine culture developed as vine growing in the immediate area declined, and by the eighteenth century the drink was established as the ordinary drink of the city.
- The Sachsenhausen district on the south bank of the Main became the recognised tavern quarter, and its concentration of apple wine houses gave the drink a public and urban identity distinct from farm production.
- The apparatus of service — the Bembel, the Geripptes, the Schoppen measure, the accompanying food — was standardised through this tavern culture rather than through any regulation.
- Consumption declined through the later twentieth century as beer and wine gained ground, and the tavern sector contracted, though it did not disappear.
- The drink has since been actively promoted as a marker of city identity, including a heritage tram route named for it, which is a modern tourism construction built on a genuine institution.
Culture
What the drink is for here, and the occasions and rooms it belongs to. This is not decoration around the cider — in several of these places it is the part that decides how the cider is made.
- The Apfelweinlokal is a specific kind of premises: long shared tables, a limited fixed menu, jug service and a clear expectation that people will sit together.
- Ordering is by the jug rather than the glass, and the size of jug is stated in Schoppen.
- The two standard dilutions — with sparkling water or with lemonade — are ordinary menu items and are not treated as compromising the drink.
- The food is specific and unchanging: sour milk cheese with onions, green sauce with eggs and potatoes, ribs and Schnitzel. The pairing logic is acid against fat and salt.
- Local speech has several names for the drink, and using them is a marker of familiarity with the city rather than of any distinction between products.
About Frankfurt
Frankfurt is the reason Hessian apple wine has a public face. The drink is made in the countryside and drunk everywhere in the region, but its vessels, its measures, its food and its tavern form were codified in a city district, and that urban codification is what gives the tradition its unusual precision. There is a right jug, a right glass, a right measure and a right dish, and none of it is written into law.
It is worth being clear about the geography. Frankfurt grows very little of the fruit it drinks. The meadow orchards that supply it are in the villages and on the slopes around the basin, and the city’s function is to press, ferment and consume. When apple wine is described as a Frankfurt drink, that is a statement about where it is drunk and how it is served, not about where the apples grow.
The tavern institution deserves description on its own terms. Long shared tables, jug service, a limited menu built around sour cheese and green sauce, and the ordinary acceptance of diluting the drink with water or lemonade are all part of one arrangement. It is a form of urban public sociability that happens to be organised around a fermented drink, and it works quite differently from a British pub or a Basque cider house.
The tradition contracted through the later twentieth century and has since been promoted as part of the city’s identity, including a heritage tram route named for the drink. That promotion is modern; the institution underneath it is not, and the useful thing for a reader is to be able to tell the two apart.
The fruit grown here
Cultivars recorded as grown in this region, historically or currently. Each card says what the fruit is.
Cider apple
Rheinischer Bohnapfel
The classic German *Mostapfel*: a very late, very acid, enormously productive Rhineland cultivar that carried more Apfelwein and Viez through the twentieth century than any other single fruit.
Cider apple
Boskoop
A large, russeted, extremely acid Dutch apple found at Boskoop in the mid-nineteenth century, grown across northern Europe as a culinary fruit and used heavily in German and Swiss *Most*.
Cider apple
Kaiser Wilhelm
A large Rhineland apple raised in the 1860s and named for the German Emperor, grown as a dessert and cooking fruit and pressed for *Most* where the crop exceeds the table.
What is made here
Styles this region is where they come from, or where they are characteristically made.
Apfelwein
The dry, sharp, still apple wine of Hesse, fermented out from culinary and local fruit and served in ridged glasses from a stoneware jug.
Dry cider
Cider fermented out or finished so that little fermentable sugar remains, leaving acid, tannin and alcohol to carry the palate.
Still cider
Cider with no perceptible dissolved carbon dioxide, presented as a fermented fruit drink whose texture rests on body, acid and tannin alone.
Apple wine
A fermented apple drink made to wine strength, usually by raising the starting gravity, and presented and taxed as a wine rather than as a cider.
Unfiltered cider
Cider packaged without filtration, retaining suspended yeast and fine solids and the body and aroma that come with them.
Methods traditional here
Processes that belong to this region's practice rather than being applied to it from outside.
Broyage
Milling
Reducing whole fruit to a pulp so that the press has cell walls it can drain, rather than intact apples it can only bruise.
Filtration
Passing cider through a porous medium to reach a stated visual brightness, at a real cost in colloidal material, body and aroma.
Inoculated fermentation
Starting a ferment by pitching a chosen yeast culture so that one known strain, rather than the fruit’s resident population, does the work.
Belt pressing
Continuous pressing in which enzyme-treated pomace is carried between two converging porous belts and progressively dewatered around a series of rollers.
Juice clarification
The deliberate use of enzyme, fining agents or mechanical separation to produce a bright juice before fermentation, and what that costs the ferment.
Kegging
Filling cider into a sealed keg for gas dispense or into a vented cask for gravity and handpump service — two formats whose difference is not the container but whether the cider ever meets air.
Tank maturation
Resting cider in stainless steel or a lined vessel, where the point of the container is that it contributes nothing and admits almost no oxygen.
Protected designations that apply here
What a name is legally reserved for in this area. A designation protects a name; it is not a quality mark.
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.
- Can you make cider from shop bought apple juice — Yes, provided the juice contains no preservative — check for potassium sorbate or benzoate on the label. Pasteurised juice ferments perfectly well once yeast is added, because pasteurisation removes the organisms but not the sugar.
- How are apples milled for cider
- Do i need a filter to make cider
- How do i carbonate cider in a keg
- How is apple juice clarified before fermentation
- How is cider matured
Where to go next
- Cider and perry in Germany — The national picture this region sits inside, including how cider is legally defined there.
- All cider regions — The other traditions, each described in its own terms.
- Protected designations — What the law reserves a name for, and what it does not promise.
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.
Hochschule Geisenheim University — beverage technology
Hochschule Geisenheim · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
German beverage-technology research covering apple wine and fruit juice processing, including the enzymology of clarification.
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
eAmbrosia — the EU geographical indications register
European Commission · designation authority · registered as competent for this subject
The single authoritative register of EU PDO, PGI and TSG names, carrying each product specification. Cider and perry designations across France, Spain and elsewhere resolve here.