HARD CANDY CIDER

SKILLCULT APPLE BREEDING PROJECT

This page is for sharing information on my seedling apple variety Hard Candy Cider.

Hard Candy Cider is a cross between Grenadine and Lady Williams. The seed was pollinated in 2011. It is a fall ripening apple. This is a cider or processing apple, not a desert apple. It has a lot of tannin in the skin, and the texture is not great. Its distinguishing characteristic is its strong, complex flavor. The flavor is like taking a bunch of diffrent fruit flavored hard candies and mixing them together. The flavors I have been able to pick out are watermelon and purple grape. It can be very strong, intriguing and delicious. My hope is that the flavor will survive, pressing, oxidation and fermentation to result in a highly flavored cider. We will find out someday. It definitely comes through in the juice. The sugar level is sort of medium. Acidity is decent. Tannins are not super high, but significant and higher than you’d want in a dessert apple. It has enough of everything that I think it might make a good single varietal cider.

Out of all the apples I’ve fruited here so far that seem to have potential for cider, this might end up being the most legitimate for cider making. It took 10 years to fruit, now we wait another number of years for someone to grow enough fruit to make some cider with it. And of course, it’s easy to make bad cider, so someone has to actually make good cider with it, then we find out what’s really up with Hard Candy Cider.

I’ll be crossing this with other cider apples, high sugar apples and mostly with highly flavored apples like Whitwick Pippin, Appleoosa and Jellybean Cider