Dataset

Typical English apple juice analyses

A short compilation of dessert and culinary apple juices — the fruit a reader actually has in the kitchen, measured the same way as the cider fruit, which makes it the site’s clearest answer to what a cider apple is not.

How is a cider apple different from an eating apple, in numbers?

Chiefly in one column. English dessert and culinary apples in this table run from 0.03 to 0.20 per cent tannin. The Long Ashton bittersweets run from 0.20 to 0.64. Acid and sugar overlap heavily between the two groups; tannin barely overlaps at all, and that is the whole difference.

The table is also the cheapest demonstration on the site of how far a single figure can be trusted. Six rows are repeat samples of a cultivar already listed, and the repeats are not close: Bramley reads 1.21, 1.05 and 1.43 per cent acid, with gravity from 1.040 to 1.051, under one compiler in one table.

The programme

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

Site: England — the compilation does not name the orchards
Period: 1922–1977
Cultivars transcribed: 18
Measurements: 67
Values withheld: None
Classifies under: long-ashton

Climate. English fruit-growing country, and no closer than that: the source gives neither site nor season for any individual row, which is a real limit on what the figures can be asked to do.

Method. Juice from freshly harvested fruit. Acidity and pH credited to MAFF/ADAS; the remainder to Long Ashton cider-making trials with dessert and culinary varieties (1977) and to the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922. Specific gravity is printed in a two-figure form and written out in full here.

What the source says about itself

Recorded at traditional-record tier. The underlying work is institutional research, but the compilation does not attribute row to source, and CiderHQ has opened only the compilation.

What it adds

It measures the comparison group. Hundreds of cider cultivar analyses are of limited use without something measured the same way on fruit that is not a cider apple, and this is that.
It shows within-cultivar spread without needing two sources. The disagreeing rows sit in the same compilation, so nothing about the gap can be attributed to different laboratories or conventions.
It is the evidence behind the standing advice that a cider made from dessert fruit will be thin rather than merely different — the tannin is not there to be extracted.

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.

The provenance is tangled and is recorded as such. The compilation credits MAFF/ADAS, a 1977 Long Ashton cider-making trial and the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922, without saying which row came from which. No row can be dated more closely than 1922 to 1977.
Only the cultivars CiderHQ already holds records for are transcribed. The rest of the table is real data about apples with no page here, and transcribing it would have meant creating records to hold numbers, which is the wrong way round.
Served over plain HTTP from the archive that holds it, with no https equivalent to move the citation to.

Why these figures are not universal

These are English orchard figures spanning half a century, and the compilation does not name the orchards. A Cox grown in Kent in a hot season and a Cox grown in Herefordshire in a wet one are not the same juice, and the three Bramley rows in this very table are the proof: a spread of 0.38 percentage points of acid within one cultivar under one compiler. Treat a row as one sample of a range rather than as the value for the fruit.

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 18 cultivars in Typical English apple juice analyses
Property	Cultivars	Reported in
Specific gravity	18	Specific gravity
Total acid	18	Percent weight per volume
Total tannin	18	Percent weight per volume
pH	13	pH

Total tannin across every cultivar in this dataset that carries it — 18 of them, from 0.140 down to 0.030 % 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
Bramley’s Seedling	0.140
Tom Putt	0.140
Bramley’s Seedling	0.130
Browns Apple	0.120
Worcester Pearmain	0.110
Egremont Russet	0.100
Bramley’s Seedling	0.090
Discovery	0.090
Reinette Obry	0.090
Worcester Pearmain	0.090
Grenadier	0.080
Golden Delicious	0.060
Cox’s Orange Pippin	0.050
Golden Delicious	0.050
Golden Noble	0.050
James Grieve	0.050
Cox’s Orange Pippin	0.040
Newton Wonder	0.030

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 Typical English apple juice analyses may be read in one column with the site’s other datasets
Dataset	Verdict	Why
The Long Ashton cider apple table	Comparable	The intended pairing. Same conventions, same country, overlapping period, and the two together answer the question either alone cannot.
The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation	Not comparable	Geneva reports titratable acidity in grams per litre and phenolics by a permanganate method in milligrams per litre; this table reports acid as percent weight per volume malic and tannin as percent permanganate. The units differ and so does what the phenolic column contains.

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.

Typical Apple Juice Analysis (NACM Short Report 4.11)
National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology · research institute · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 1922–1977
Fifty-seven rows of English dessert and culinary apple juice analyses — gravity, acid, pH, tannin — credited jointly to MAFF/ADAS, to Long Ashton cider-making trials reported in 1977, and to the Long Ashton Annual Report for 1922, without saying which row came from which. That vagueness is why it is held at traditional-record tier. Its value is twofold: it is the only set on the site measuring eating and cooking apples the same way the cider fruit was measured, and six of its rows are repeat samples of cultivars already in the table, which makes within-cultivar spread visible in a single document.
The Archive of Cider Pomology
Hereford Cider Museum Trust / National Association of Cider Makers · historical source · retrieved 2026-08-25 · covers 1989–2012
The single most useful discovery of Mega Sprint 4. When the Ministry closed Long Ashton’s cider work, the National Association of Cider Makers took over cider pomology research; the resulting archive is held at the Hereford Cider Museum and publishes some seventy-five research reports openly, including compilations of Long Ashton material that had otherwise reached the present only through books. It is the route by which CiderHQ finally obtained per-cultivar perry pear figures, having failed to reach the 1963 volume they originate in.