We currently press each of our apple varieties on their own as we do love the delicious and distinctive tastes that they each give. In our second season, the ten different juices we have made are all fantastically individual. We’re lucky that we have trees planted by earlier generations of our family, some of which you will never find in a supermarket or even a greengrocers, but provide us with a taste of their wonderful heritage.
Discovery
Our youngest apple variety is creeping up on its 70th birthday. The trees are often laden with beautiful ruby red apples. They’re delicious! When we press these, the juice has a fantastic pink colour, but whilst this fades, the flavour remains. Discoveries have a full-bodied apple flavour that is sweet, yet still has a lovely tang.
Cox’s Orange Pippin
Everyone has heard of a Cox! Dating from 1825, its popularity comes from its delicious honeyed aroma. Little, but full of flavour, they makes a wonderful cloudy apple juice that retains the apple’s superb taste.
Bramley
Everyone’s favourite cooking apple also makes a delicious tangy apple juice that’s not as tart as you may at first expect. Bramley apples can be traced back to a single apple pip planted by a young girl in 1809. The original tree still exists, proudly filling a Nottinghamshire back garden. Our tasters tell us it goes down a treat with gin!
Newton Wonder
Discovered by an innkeeper growing in the thatch of the Hardinge Arms in Derbyshire, 1870! It is favourite for baked apple. Our trees are enormous and the oldest in the orchards. Ripening late in the season, it is a milder cooking apple than a Bramley, but can be kept through to the following spring for a good brisk and fruity eating apple. We press our Newtons in the Autumn and it has a tangtastic zip!
William Crump
The apple rather formally takes its name from Mr William Crump, head gardener at Madresfield Court near Malvern. It won a RHS Award of Merit in 1908, a First Class Certificate in 1910 and in our eyes it is still a winner. It ripens late and the fruit still hangs on the tree right into December, when the leaves have all been dashed away. There is more than a hint of aniseed in the apple and our tasters tell us their tastebuds are tickled with the taste of honey, tangerines and tigers (well perhaps not the last one).
James Grieve
This Scottish variety tracks an ancestry back to 1893, from the height of Victorian experimentation with Apple varieties. These lovey rosy apples create an appealingly aromatic, light and refreshing juice similar to a Greensleeve.
Greensleeve
Greensleeves are an apple that start to glow gold the longer they are left on the tree. Their estimable parent the James Grieve imparts a lot of fine flavour, and the Greensleeves juice is a refreshing, crisp, sweet, clear delight that really treats the taste buds!
Charles Ross
A Scottish apple and another childhood favourite!
Heralding from 1899, these apples grow as big 
as your head! Well, it appeared that way when we were young. Crossed with a Cox and the wonderfully named Peasgood Nonsuch, the juice is delicious, sweet, and spiced with a hint of pear.
Spartan
Spartan were a childhood favourite, picked from the tree and placed straight into the school lunchbox. These little dark purple gems have a delicious crisp taste and loads of juice. The taste is sweet with little acidity and lots of flavour. Every other year the trees are laden, but in between times they take a well earned rest. This coming Autumn we hope to press some more for those of you who enjoyed it so much in our first year.
Worcester Pearmain
One of the proud parents of the Discovery apple, Worcester Pearmain apples – or simply Worcesters – date back to 1874. The apples are delicious and the juice is sweet, with a lovely mellow flavour. Unfortunately high winds this last summer stripped the fruit from the branches, leaving us enough to munch on, but not enough to press.
Merrylegs Apple Juice
The Market Garden, Barton, B50 4NP
enquiries@merrylegsapplejuice.co.uk
01789 867262