Sweet Red

This apple is an old variety that grows at the Apple Farm in Fairfield. For years, no one as known its origin or its real name. The trees were there in the orchard when Steve and Marilyn Meyerhans purchased the farm decades years ago. We’ve long been attempting to identify the variety. That effort is documented in a full chapter of John’s book, Apples and the Art of Detection. Recently we’ve DNA profiled the apple although those results don’t yet make sense. The current hypothesis is that Sweet Red is a synonym of an old Connecticut variety, Ramsdell Sweet. Like the other historic sweet varieties, it has practically no acidity to it, which means that to modern taste buds it may taste strange when eaten fresh. Over the years some OOAL crew have been huge fans of it right off the tree, however, so give it a bite. It cooks slowly, so try it in pastries that cook the fruit before putting it in the crust. A good addition to any cider.