The only thing I know is this is a cold weather apple but this must be a great growing season. The batch I bought were sweet and tart at the same time. The juices are abundant and provide a long lingering finish. This is a lovely apple and will buy a couple of pounds more today as I understand they have a long storage life.
Honeycrisp are very good but an even more recent introduction, the Sweetango, is now my bestie. My local Wegmans has a great apple assortment through fall and winter.
HC were great for a bit but have been light and wooly the past few years while still commanding $$$. Hope this is a good year for then as they are my favorite.
U of MN introduced both Honeycrisp and Sweetango, I think.
I’ve read that if there’s been a decline in quality of the Honeycrips apples over the past few seasons (I agree with Michael on this), it’s due in part to the fact that they’ve been planted everywhere, even sites not well suited to the apple. Sweetango, on the other hand, is licensed and will only be allocated to orchardists with ideal locations. Terroir counts, in other words.
Both Honeycrisp and Sweetango are too sweet for my tastes.
I prefer several old varieties – all of them hard, crisp, and tart – and, unfortunately, harder and harder to find as newer, sweeter varieties crowd the marketplace:
Honeycrisp is good but nearly double the price of anything else, even from small orchards at farmer’s markets in this neck of the woods. Can be hard to find but goldrush is hands down my favorite apple variety. Usually one of the last to pick in the season. A bit sweet yet plenty of sour with firm texture and stores forever. I haven’t found an apple dish yet it doesn’t hold up in.
I don’t see any of those, though I used to see winesaps. Jonathans do well locally though we are too warm in MO for many varieties to do well in most years. I find at their best HC are amongst the crispest, the trait they were bred for IIRC.
We get HC cider here as well. Been getting a great local cider at my local farmer’s market but I’ll have to ask what apple varieties he’s using.
We used to drive to the Aspetuck Valley Apple Barn in Easton to get them when I was in CT … in NH they were all over. Few apples I get here have the tang of macouns.
Are Honeycrisps a new variety - I’m suddenly seeing so many mentions of them everywhere?
FWIW, I planted a Honeycrisp tree 4 years ago. Good harvest this year in Michigan from what is still a very small tree. So many apples, that I needed to cut off about a third of the crop so the tree wouldn’t fall over, or lose branches.
My Cortland tree had a great year, my Golden Russet has plenty of apples but not ready yet, and I have a 4 in one antique variety tree, nothing ready on that yet either.
Pruning and disease/pest control is a job. I have learned to really respect how much work goes into farming, especially if organic (which I am not).