Dataset

The Long Ashton cider apple table

The acid and tannin figures behind almost every English cider apple classification, compiled from analyses made between 1905 and 1975 — and reaching CiderHQ third-hand, which is stated on every number.

Where do the acid and tannin figures for English cider apples come from?

From the Long Ashton Research Station, which analysed cider fruit systematically from 1903 until it closed in 2003. The per-cultivar acid and tannin figures quoted for English cider apples almost anywhere — in nursery catalogues, on producer websites, in modern handbooks — trace back to tables the station published across those decades.

CiderHQ has not opened those tables. What it holds is a transcription, published by a chemist who worked at the station on apple phenolics, of a compilation printed in Bulmer’s Pomona and in Beech and Carr, of analyses the station made between 1905 and 1975. That is three hands between the fruit and this site, and every figure says so.

The programme

Transcribed from the source as published. Nothing in this panel is CiderHQ’s wording.

Site: Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England
Period: 1905–1975
Cultivars transcribed: 43
Measurements: 86
Values withheld: None
Classifies under: long-ashton

Climate. Maritime and mild, with wet autumns and few hard frosts — the climate the English cider cultivars were selected in, and the reason their acid and tannin figures here are the ones the rest of the world has spent a century comparing its own fruit against.

Method. Freshly expressed juice, not finished cider. Acid by straight titration against alkali, reported as malic acid; tannin by Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figures across seventy years of analyses: the source gives neither a sample count nor the year of any individual reading.

What the source says about itself

A transcription, not the station’s own tables. The chain runs Long Ashton → Bulmer’s Pomona (1987) and Beech and Carr (1977) → a transcription published by a former Long Ashton chemist → CiderHQ, which has opened only the last link. Treat the figures as the best available record of what the station found, not as the record itself.

One cultivar, four measurement programmes, four sets of numbers — and the fourth is not a juice analysis at all. This is why CiderHQ never averages across studies.

Described in full

Shape: Four stacked panels, one per programme, each naming the place, the period and the substrate that was analysed. Within each panel the figures that programme published for Kingston Black are listed with their units. The fourth panel is set apart by a dashed border and a heading that reads "finished cider, not juice".
WSU Mount Vernon, Skagit Valley, Washington, 2002–2017, juice: pH 3.51, total acid 0.61% w/v, total tannin 0.15% w/v, specific gravity 1.055, 13.3 °Bx. A maritime North American site chosen as the closest analogue to the English West Country, averaged across the seasons the cultivar was in trial.
USDA-PGRU Geneva, New York, 2017, juice: pH 4.23, titratable acidity 2.1 g/L, total phenolics 1,080 mg/L, 12.5 °Bx. One season, one harvest, in a continental climate with hotter summers and colder winters than the Skagit Valley. The pH is 0.72 units above the Mount Vernon figure for the same cultivar.
Long Ashton, Somerset, 1905–1975, juice: Total acid 0.58% w/v, total tannin 0.20% w/v. A seventy-year composite from the station whose figures underlie the English classification. Its tannin figure is a third higher than Mount Vernon’s for the same fruit.
Geneva, New York, late 1970s, finished cider: Finished pH 3.56, finished total acid 0.58% w/v, finished total tannin 0.062% w/v. Set apart because it is a different quantity with the same name: fermentation, fining and time remove phenolic material, so this tannin figure is roughly a third of the Long Ashton juice figure and cannot be read as disagreeing with it.
What the figure argues: The pH spread across the three juice analyses is 3.51 to 4.23, which is large enough to change what a maker would do about it, and none of the three is an error. A measurement is a statement about a fruit and a place and a season and a method. Averaging the four would produce a number that no orchard ever grew and no laboratory ever measured.

What it adds

It is the scheme measured against itself. The English classification is defined on exactly the two numbers this table prints — acid above or below 0.45%, tannin above or below 0.2% — so a reader can see a cultivar’s class and the figures that produced it in one place, rather than being asked to take the class on trust.
It covers the fruit the English tradition is actually built on. Forty-three cultivars, and they are the ones a West Country blend is made from rather than the ones a germplasm collection happens to hold.
It spans seventy years. Where a single-season dataset gives a snapshot, this gives an average of many, which is a different kind of number and useful for a different question.

What it cannot be asked

Stated as limits rather than as apology. A dataset with known bounds is more useful than one presented as complete.

It is a compilation of compilations. Nobody at CiderHQ has read the station’s own tables, and the provenance line is attached to each measurement rather than stated once, so that deleting it would mean deleting forty-three separate statements rather than one.
No single figure here can be dated. A cultivar’s entry is a composite of analyses made somewhere in a seventy-year window, and the table does not say which years contributed to which row.
It carries no dispersion. A mean without a spread cannot tell a reader whether a cultivar is consistent or wildly variable, and the between-season variation in cider fruit is large enough that this matters.
Tannin is a permanganate number. It responds to phenolic material in bulk and does not separate the polymerised fraction that is actually astringent from the phenolic acids that are not.

Why these figures are not universal

These are Somerset figures. Long Ashton sat in a maritime English climate with cool summers and a long, damp autumn, and a cider apple’s acid and phenolic load are as much a statement about that as about the fruit. The same cultivars measured in the Skagit Valley, the Finger Lakes and the Shenandoah Valley give materially different numbers, and the differences are not errors in any of the four. A figure from this table describes what the fruit did at Long Ashton, and a grower elsewhere should expect their own orchard to disagree with it.

What was measured

Every property in the transcription, with how many cultivars carry it. A property measured on some cultivars and not others is a gap in the source, not in the transcription.

Properties recorded across 43 cultivars in The Long Ashton cider apple table
Property	Cultivars	Reported in
Total acid	43	Percent weight per volume
Total tannin	43	Percent weight per volume

Total tannin across every cultivar in this dataset that carries it — 43 of them, from 0.640 down to 0.060 % w/v. Every figure here comes from this one programme, measured by one method in one place, which is the only arrangement under which a comparison like this is sound. Nothing on this chart may be read against another dataset’s column.
Cultivar	Total tannin (% w/v)	Where it sits in this study’s range
Médaille d’Or	0.640
Sandford Jersey	0.620
Nehou	0.600
Vilberie	0.520
Reine des Pommes	0.470
Major	0.410
Chisel Jersey	0.400
Tremlett’s Bitter	0.340
Harry Masters’ Jersey	0.320
Yarlington Mill	0.320
Stoke Red	0.310
Dabinett	0.290
Somerset Redstreak	0.280
Balls Bittersweet	0.280
Cimetière	0.280
Bulmer’s Norman	0.270
Lavignée	0.270
Ellis Bitter	0.240
Brown Snout	0.240
Brown Thorn	0.240
Breakwell’s Seedling	0.230
Michelin	0.230
Ashton Brown Jersey	0.230
Broxwood Foxwhelp	0.220
Bulmer’s Foxwhelp	0.220
Collington Big Bitters	0.210
Binet Rouge	0.210
White Jersey	0.200
Kingston Black	0.200
Perthyre	0.180
Reine des Hâtives	0.170
Sweet Alford	0.150
Taylor’s	0.140
Sweet Coppin	0.140
Tom Putt	0.140
Browns Apple	0.130
Reinette Obry	0.130
Worcester Pearmain	0.120
Court Royal	0.110
Frederick	0.090
Bramley’s Seedling	0.080
Cox’s Orange Pippin	0.070
Golden Delicious	0.060

Ordering only. Where a figure was published as a range the midpoint is used to place the row, and the range itself — not the midpoint — is what appears on the cultivar’s own page.

What it can be read beside

The commonest way to misuse this corpus is not to misread one figure but to put two side by side that were never measuring the same thing. This is the judgement, stated.

Whether The Long Ashton cider apple table may be read in one column with the site’s other datasets
Dataset	Verdict	Why
Typical English apple juice analyses	Comparable	Same analytical conventions — acid as malic in percent weight per volume, tannin by permanganate — and the two together are the site’s clearest answer to what separates a cider apple from an eating apple: bittersweet tannin runs 0.20 to 0.64%, dessert and culinary fruit 0.03 to 0.20%.
The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial	Partly comparable	WSU reports in the same units and classifies under the same scheme, which makes the columns line up. What does not line up is the place: WSU says plainly that some cultivars classify differently in the Skagit Valley than they did in England, and seventeen of its seventy-three do.
The Geneva finished-cider analyses	Not comparable	Geneva measured finished cider; this table measured juice. The compiler noticed the Geneva tannins running at about half these figures and offered three explanations without being able to separate them. A fourth is that fermentation, fining and time remove phenolic material, and that the two were never measuring the same liquid.
The Virginia polyphenol characterisation	Not comparable	Winchester reports total polyphenols by Folin–Ciocalteu in gallic acid equivalents. Permanganate tannin and Folin–Ciocalteu phenolics respond to different molecules, and putting 0.64% beside 926 mg/L in one column would be comparing two assays rather than two fruits.

Where a dataset is not listed, no judgement has been recorded and the safe reading is that the two have not been checked against each other. CiderHQ never averages across studies: how evidence is handled sets out why.

Cultivars in this dataset

Each carries this programme’s figures on its own page, alongside whatever else has measured it.

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.

Long Ashton Research Station cider fruit analyses
National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol · research institute · registered as competent for this subject · covers 1903–2003
The foundational body of cider-fruit science in English. Long Ashton produced the acid-and-tannin classification that divides cider apples into sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp, and analysed hundreds of cultivars grown at its Somerset site. Its figures are historic measurements of specific fruit at a specific place, not universal constants — a distinction CiderHQ preserves in every measurement record that cites it.
Cider Apple Compositional Data
Andrew Lea · reference work · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 1905–2014
Registered separately from the same author’s Science of Cidermaking, and at a lower tier, because its evidential character is different. The Science of Cidermaking is a chemist writing about work he did; this page is that chemist transcribing other people’s tables, and CiderHQ can vouch for the transcription without vouching for what lies behind it. It carries three tables: the Long Ashton composite for forty-two cultivars, credited to Bulmer’s Pomona (1987) and Beech and Carr (1977); a late-1970s New York analysis credited to unpublished work printed in a 1989 food-technology chapter; and a 2014 Virginia polyphenol study. Every figure CiderHQ takes from it records that chain.