Cider Class: Learning About Apples

The first day at my cider class up in Mt. Vernon focused a little bit on marketing and a lot on trees.

Gary Moulton of WSU Mt Vernon gave us a presentation on the care of apple trees, including nutrition, disease, grafting, and pruning of cider apple trees. It isn’t that it is really all that different between growing apples to eat and apples for cider production, but eating apples need to be symmetrical in shape and blemish free, while cider apples just need to taste good since they will be ground up. Therefore, maintenance is aimed more at tree health for taste, not looks.

Indeed, even picking cider apples is done differently than picking apples for eating. Normally, apples are picked a little green to withstand shipping and storage. However, when they are picked green, they contain more starch, which is not fermentable. If the apples are allowed to stay on the tree longer, the starch is converted to sugars, which are fermentable, and in addition the apple is much more flavorful to give a much better taste to the cider.

So what is a cider apple? I had mentioned before that they are apples in which they have been breed for the production of cider and generally don’t taste all that great when eaten. Apples varieties have been tested for their acidic and tannin components. Therefore, cider apples are classified by how much acid and tannin one has:

• High tannin, low acid – bittersweet
• Low tannin, low acid – sweet
• High tannin, high acid – bittersharp
• Low tannin, high acid – sharp

However, these descriptors do not indicate how much sugar is in the apple. In fact, most grocery store apples are low in tannin and high in acid, making them sharp, not sweet, apples. Most grocery store apples are usually refered to as “dessert” apples, and can be used to make ciders, though they are not as good and do better when blended with a higher tannin apple. Since the acid is high in dessert apples, they are usually blended with bittersweet apples, allowing the two to have a balance between acid and tannin.

In this part of the country, dessert apples are readily available and easy to buy, so all three of the cideries we visited had an acre of bittersweet apples growing, like Dabinetts and Kingston Black. They would grow the bittersweet apples and then buy the sharp dessert apples to make their product. Interestingly, both Red Barn Cider and Sea Cider went with dwarf rootstock to have about 1,000 trellised trees per acre, while Merridale Estate Cider had semi-dwarf trees. Red Barn Cider said that they used M9 and Bud 9 rootstock and planted them 6' x 12' apart, thought would probably increase to 14' in the future.These small trees allowed them to not use ladders on the trees and do all work on them from the ground.

One of the highlights of learning about apples was a taste test that Moulton brought us of cider made from a single variety of apples fermented dry as part of the WSU research. The first cider was Jonagold, which is a dessert apple, and therefore sharp tasting and thin due to low tannins. The second cider was a Brown Snout, which is a mild bittersweet apple. It had a better aroma, was darker in color, and more mouthfeel as it was thicker and creamier and very pleasant. The last cider we had was a Medaille D’Or, which was a very bitter bittersweet apple. It was very bitter, and Moulton compared it to drinking an IPA. It definitely had more tannins, as I had the dry mouth cotton feel from it. While horrible to drink alone, I could very easily imagine it blended with other apples to tone it down while it gave interest to other more bland apples. And in the cider world, blending is at the heart of cider production, just like a cook gathers together different ingredients for a sauce.

Apple Tree Size vs. Cider Yield

“How many trees do you need [to make cider]?” Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols ask in their book Cider: Making, Using, and Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider on page 128. Giving caution to the weather and breed of apples, both affecting crop size, they give the following approximations:

1 bushel of apples = 45 lbs of apples
1 dwarf tree = 1 bushel of apples
1 semidwarf tree = 4-5 bushels
1 bushel of apples = 2-3 gallons of cider
Therefore, it would take 25 dwarf trees to make 50-75 gallons of cider.

Due to tree spacing and size vs. crop size, I put the question to the Cider Workshop of what size tree yielded the most fruit per land unit. The group did not feel comfortable answering my question head on, but there was a general consensus that they liked working with smaller trees.

Going back to the “small” orchard of Gene Yale in Chicago, IL, who had 97 mini-dwarf apple trees growing on a small 2500 square foot lot. Yale estimates that each tree produces one quarter to one third of a bushel small 2500 square foot lot in Chicago but has 97 apple trees.

1 mini-dwarf tree = 1/4 to 1/3 bushel of apples
97 trees, assuming annual production, would then yield about 25 bushels
25 bushels of apples = 50-75 gallons of cider
This is the same amount as 25 dwarf trees but in less space!

Too read more on apple tree size and crop yield, read Oregon State University’s free paper on Growing Tree Fruits and Nuts in Your Home Orchard.

A "Small" Apple Orchard

Yesterday, I mentioned how rootstock can be used to control the height and the amount of space a apple tree requires. Nothing can sum that up better than Gene Yale's orchard. Take a look!

Yale lives on a small 2500 square foot lot in Chicago but has 97 apple trees! Yale uses Dwarf M27/M111 rootstock and then uses pruning methods to keep them at 5 or six feet tall. Between how he planted them and their size, Yale’s yard looks a lot like a rose garden.

My front yard is quite small, and sometimes I think about turning it into an English cottage garden rather than a lawn, but I think that this technique would look really nice, plus I would have the benefit of apples to eat!

Rootstock

Most fruit trees, if left to their own devices, will grow to be quite large. For instance, pear and apple trees grow to be about 40 feet tall, and require an additional 40 feet of space around them. They take up a lot of space, and they require a ladder to prune or harvest them.

The way that apple and pear trees are made to grow smaller is by using different rootstocks. Since apples and pear seeds are not like their parents, sticks called scions from a parent tree are grafted onto different rootstock to control their size. Some rootstocks will dwarf a tree down to only 6 feet tall! Apple rootstock sizes are usually classified as standard (taller than 15 ft), semidwarf (up to 14 feet), and dwarf (less than 9 ft).

In addition to not getting so tall, the trees do not get as wide and require as much space. Therefore, in an area required for a 40 ft tree, one could plant nine dwarf trees or five semi dwarf trees.

Besides looking at how tall a tree might get when planning on buying a tree on rootstock, take into account the rootstock needs. Some rootstock prefer one kind of soil over another, prefer a specific range of pH soils, require more water, or thrive better at different temperatures. Some rootstock are even more disease resistant than others.

Other benefits to size controlling rootstock also take less time to mature than standard root stock. Since they are smaller, they require less equipment such as tall ladders and pole trimmers. Their small size also means that the care of one tree can be done in less time. And, since apples and pears are not self pollinating, other trees that can pollinate to bear fruit are closer, making pollination more likely to happen.

My two custom grafted apple trees were done onto M9. Out of what the Home Orchard Society offered when I ordered these trees, I felt this would reach the most ideal height for what I wanted. For an actual orchard, they would probably be too tall, but we wanted a little bit of shade on our house, so we opted for something a bit bigger.

For more information regarding size controlling rootstock, including other kinds of fruit, please read the Washington State University’s free paper titled Fruit Handbook for Western Washington.

Apple & Pear Breeding

Both apple and pear trees are made from grafting one kind of tree, called the scion, to a rootstock which will determine the size of the tree. This is because most apples and all pears are not self-fertile when they bloom. It takes another breed of apple to pollinate an apple, and it takes another breed of pear to pollinate a pear. If pollination does not occur, no fruit will grow.

Because of this cross-pollination, the seeds in the fruit contain the genetic make-up of two different breeds of trees, so the seed will not grow and be the same breed of tree that the fruit came off of, but a new breed. And just like how sibling animals are not exact genetic clones of each other, neither are two seeds from the same apple or pear. Worse yet, I’ve heard that about only 1 in 300 seeds grow up to be an edible fruit tree. Why, I was reading on Home Orchard Society’s forum about someone planting a cherry pit, and 10 years later, the tree has not produced fruit. They did not beat the odds. Makes you wonder how Johnny Appleseed managed to plant all those seeds, but he did.

Since there are fewer pear varieties than apples, the focus is usually on planting the big four – Bartlett (AKA Williams in Europe), Anjou, Comice, and Bosc. Do to their blooming periods, Bartlett and Anjou are planted together, and Comice and Bosc are planted together. Bosc blooms late in the season, and therefore cannot be pollinated by the early blooming Bartlett and Anjou.

Order a Home Orchard Society Make-A-[Fruit]Tree by December 31, 2009

I forgot that I need to give a plug for the Home Orchard Society. They are a group who are centered out of Portland, Oregon. They have several forums on their website, along with some other useful things such as Mason Bees, some eBooks about rootstock, apple diseases, and apple blooming, along with some articles on other topics.

Why I really needed to put the plug in was because they will take custom orders for trees for $12 up until December 31, 2009. You tell them what kind of tree you want, and you tell them what kind of rootstock you want it on, and they will build it for you. You just have to go pick it up at their annual Fruit Propagation Fair/Scion Exchange in March at the Hillsboro Fairgrounds. Take a look at http://www.homeorchardsociety.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3020

Should have blogged about this earlier in case this would be a good Christmas present…