Scott, some of the things you say confuse me. If you are tasting your apples, what are you looking for? Here's what I look for: A bittersweet will be totally bitter and totally sweet, without any acidity whatsoever. A bittersharp will be totally bitter and acidic, but the sugar content can be all over the map here. So it's more like a culinary or dessert apple with lots of bitterness that you can't taste until the bitter compounds hit the back of your mouth and throat. I think pure bitters are essentially non-existent. A sweet will be essentially sugar, without any acidity, e.g. essentially tannin free. Eating one is a rather odd experience, it's like eating an acidless lime or acidless orange, like sugar water. A sharp is your average culinary and dessert apple. Even Golden delicious falls into the sharp category. The whole point of these categorizations is so that I can combine the proper ratios of sweet to sharp, to bitter. (the latter usually about 10%) So regarding bittersweets, it means you don't want any "sharp" component to it. If you taste a good bittersweet, it will taste bitter and sweet, with no acidity. I have not heard of apples loosing their bitterness as a result of high heat, but I suppose that's possible. I would expect that they will just have a higher sugar content, that's all, and you will therefore need to reduce the amount of pure sweets you add to your cider batches. So now that we have the technical details out of the way, I highly recommend "Amere de Berthecourt", it's a bittersweet apple, incredibly prolific and vigorous fantastic bittersweet in the purest sense - e.g. there isn't a trace of sharpness in it. I grow it here in California and it's got plenty of bitter tannins in it. You bite into it, and you think at first it's totally bland, until the bitter tannins hit the back of your mouth, at which point it's very difficult to actually swallow. This is the effect that you want. This apple originates from Maine-et-Loire, France and it is available in the US. The french selections are infinitely superior to the British apples, mainly because they have been selected for their precociousness. Kingston Black is pretty much a wild apple, it's not worthy as a cider apple because it is such a shy bearer. If you were making cider commercially, you'd go broke if you tried to grow kingston black. A few notes on heat: heat doesn't necessarily increase the sugar contents in apples - usually the onset of Winter cold does a much better job at drawing the sugars into the apples. So if you're trying to increase the bitterness content to add the "body" to the cider, then heat is in your favor because it will keep the sugars from building too high, that is, as long as the variety in question isn't heat sensitive - e.g. it doesn't go mealy from hot weather. The trouble with some British apples is that they do go mealy from heat exposure. Amere de B. is an early apple, so it will ripen when it's still warm out, and therefore not draw the sugars as much. And it appears to be very heat resistant, e.g. it doesn't go mealy. Now here's an interesting note on tannins: my understanding of tannins is that tannins contribute all sorts of flavors, not just bitters. So you can have a high level of tannins yet have no bitterness at all. What is strange is that the technical classifications according to Barker's Classification of Cider Apples (LARS 1903) is as follows: Sharp Acid More than 0.45% Tannin less than 0.2% Bittersharp Acid more than 0.45% Tannin more than 0.2% Bittersweet Acid less than 0.45% Tannin more than 0.2% Sweet Acid less than 0.45% Tannin less than Yet you take an apple like "Amere de Berthecourt" which is clearly a bittersweet, you have BRIX 15.0 Acid 0.23% PH 4.08 Tannin 0.169% Average weight per apple: 82g So it's low on acidity, yet the tannin levels are still below 0.2%. According to the classification, it would be a sweet, but it's actually a bittersweet, I've tasted it, it's definitely very bitter. Then take Taylor's sweet, it has a malic acid content of 0.18% but the tannins are close to Amere de B at 0.14%. What I am trying to say with this is that the bitterness is not necessarily correlated to the tannin contents, and that bitterness is likely to not be affected by heat, it's only the amount of sugar and malic acid that changes as a function of heat, thus making it seem that an apple might have more or less tannins. I've attached a link for Cider apple compositional data. But I don't think the data is all that helpful in determining which one has the highest bitterness tannins, because the measurement is for tannins as a whole, not just those tannins that contribute to bitterness. Here is a link that might be useful: Cider Apple Compositional Data

I hope it was good.

Looks like a lot of good plants for this year.

More about our birds. . . How we came to have the parakeet is a story in itself. Mother was out in the garden hanging up the laundry one sunny day and out of nowhere a blue & white parakeet flew right down and landed on Mother's shoulder. She nibbled lovingly on Mother's ear and mother said, "Well hello there" and the bird said, "Ooooh. Hello!" And Mother said, "So, who are you?" The bird replied, "Pretty Bird!" So, she kept her name. She never flew away after finding a nice home, having no desire to try living out in the big free world ever again. We never did find out from whence she came. I would like to add about the Mexican Love Bird. . . . . .that after cursing out the preacher and telling him to "Go to Hell!", and saying things like "Well, -uck a duck!", our love bird never said any of the really foul swear words ever again. Mother said it must have just been a cleansing thing for her, but I have always wondered just what Mother did to make her "repent" and come clean.??? And as for our parakeet, Pretty Bird? After her jello bath, she began saying, "Oooooh, Pretty Bird. Pretty Bird is a dirty bird!" We kids got so much fun out of her. She loved Orange Jell-O, not just for bathing but for eating it as well. She especially loved it when mother made it into a salad by adding grated carrots and chopped walnuts. Yum yum! She would walk across the table and sample everything. If she found something she particularly didn't like, she would make a mess of it and have a fit! So afterward she had to kept up during meals. She would fuss and squawk at us from her cage, demanding to be loosed at once! As you said, covering her cage was helpful in quieting her down. She would then say, "Good night Pretty Bird!" which would then of course, set us all into a round of giggles. ~Annie