Tool
How do these cultivars compare?
1112 analyses of 232 cultivars across 11 studies. Pick the study first — because a comparison only means something when every figure in it came from the same laboratory, the same years and the same orchard.
73 of these cultivars were measured by more than one study, and they disagree. A table that picked one figure each would show differences that are partly between cultivars and partly between a pre-war English titration and a modern American one, with no way to tell them apart. Comparing inside one study removes that confusion entirely, at the cost of a shorter list — and the disagreement between studies is not hidden but shown separately whenever you select one cultivar on its own.
1 — Whose analysis?
Cultivars can only be compared inside one piece of work. Pick it first, and every figure you then see was produced by the same people, in the same years, by the same method. What each of these measured, and what it cannot be asked.
2 — Which cultivars?
Up to 6. Choose one on its own to see every other study that measured it.
Pick a cultivar to compare.
What a comparison like this can and cannot settle
It cannot tell you what a cultivar is. A cultivar’s acid, tannin and sugar are not properties of the variety in the way its parentage is. They move with the season, the site, the rootstock, the crop load and how ripe the fruit was when it went under the mill, and a figure is an observation of one orchard in one set of years. Two studies of the same apple disagreeing is the normal case, not a defect in one of them.
It can tell you where a cultivar sat among its neighbours. That is a more robust statement, and it is the one the table makes. The absolute figures move between studies; the ordering within a study mostly survives, because everything in it was grown and analysed under the same conditions. “High in tannin among the thirty-six Long Ashton measured” is checkable. “High in tannin” is not.
Nothing here ranks the cultivars. The standings say where a figure fell, and a figure falling high or low is not a figure being good or bad. A high-acid apple is what a low-acid blend needs; a low-tannin one is what a sharp single varietal is missing. What a blend of them would be is a different question and has its own tool.
The studies are not samples of anything. They analysed the fruit somebody chose to analyse — heavily weighted towards named cider cultivars in research collections and national registers. A cultivar’s absence from this tool means nobody in the corpus published an analysis of it, not that it is unimportant.
Next
- Blend explorer — what a mixture of these cultivars would be, and which way changing the proportions pushes it.
- Juice analysis interpreter — the same corpus read the other way round: your own readings placed against what has been recorded.
- How CiderHQ stores a measurement — why the context travels with the number, and what the site refuses to do with two of them.
- Explore the cultivars — by classification, season and use rather than by figure.