Those first ones came from a local nursery…and the ones at the grocery sold out in a few days. And tree ripened they were wonderful (as is Red Delicious, too)…but after being picked before ripe and stored for months, you get another sugary apple that looks attractive all year long…and not much else.
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I’ve eaten two of the Redlove varieties…and I’m not impressed so far.
(Partly why I’m playing with hand pollinating red fleshed apples…surely I can beat the Redloves in taste if I get a few years to do so before I croak.
They are disease resistant it appears, but the flavor just wasn’t there in the limited samples I’ve had.)
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Im a honeycrisp fan, but not the store bought ones, although they are crisp, they dont compare at all to my home grown ones in ND. This year my blossoms froze so Im hoping for a significant crop next year. One downside is, on my trees with 6-8 varieties of apples, honeycrisp are the first that insects go after each year and often I lose a lot…
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Ours aren’t even sugary. 10 or 11 brix typically. Bland and/or sour.
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I’m a honeycrisp fan but if I don’t grow them anymore I’m not eating them. We get to be spoiled over the years or perhaps we just like good tasting apples. The honeycrisp that originally came from the store were better than I can grow but I’ve not seen those hc in 5 years.
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Can anyone please explain what happens to apples???
@clarkinks wrote:
The honeycrisp that originally came from the store were better than I can grow but I’ve not seen those hc in 5 years.
Why is that? The same thing seems to happen with all of the ‘great’ new apples. They are only great for a couple of years - and then they become DULL . . . like all the other apples in the grocery stores.
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A huge part of the loss in quality is from commercialization practices. Apples are grown in the wrong climate/soil, picked when not quite at the peak of flavor, shipped to a storage warehouse, eventually moved to the store for retail sale, along the way absorbing flavors and odors from anything they come in contact with. Too long in storage is an especially pervasive negative for apple flavor.
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What I’ve noticed with HC, is in general, the larger the apple, the less flavor. I love them and it’s about the only apple I will buy. For reasons, I started to occasionally frequent another grocery store and they carried the super-sized HC. I thought this was great! Until I tried one and found it to be bland and watery. I’ve gone back to only getting the ‘regular’ sized HC apples.
I’m not sure why the apples were bland, perhaps they received a ton of rain which contributed to the larger apple size, but reduced flavor.
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I believe the same marginal places growing red delicious graft over to honeycrisp. The apples they grow in those areas taste terrible by not tasting like anything at all. There are lots of them though! Perhaps they get to much rain I’m not sure.
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The Yakima Valley can’t use too much rain as their excuse 
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I think some orchards use irrigation to the extreme to get apple sizes way too big. Since most places charge by the pound for fruit, the larger the size the more $$ it costs the consumer. More water makes the flavor diluted but makes the fruit so much bigger. Normally we do not like small size apples. A lot of great tasting newer but mostly older apples have gone by the wayside for commercial growers.
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“Grocery store” HC I’m very much not impressed with. HC from a couple of local “fruit stand” type places are pretty good though. The much lauded Cosmic Crisp I’m even less impressed by. They’re “OK” but I’d probably take an HC over them.
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I don’t know, but for whatever reason, it just must be more expensive for the growers to be choosy about picking each apple at an appropriate stage of ripeness. When a variety first comes out, maybe they absorb the extra cost so they can generate a buzz about that variety’s flavor. As time goes by they might revert to cheaper harvest methods that result in, say, only 60% of the fruit being peak ripeness. This success rate combined with consumers memory of that variety must be enough to keep enough people buying. Maybe the grower doesn’t care how much we liked the apple, as long as we keep giving it a shot in the future. I don’t think I’ve bought a good grocery store plum in 5 years, but every few months, I give them another try, take a bite then throw them away.
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I have to agree with you on Cosmic Crisp. I sampled them a few times and came away unimpressed. There was so much hype with this one and it’s generally failed to impress.
Honeycrisp really was a game changer (but the quality has certainly gone south as they attempt to have them available for purchase all year long).
CosmicCrisp on the other hand is just another Club apple that is good, but all the hype reminds me of politics. Often the one that has the most money to spend on advertising gets the ‘prize’.
I prefer a grassroots approval of an apple…if it has to have millions of $$$$ in ads to sell it, it must be like laundry detergent…the cheaper generic gets the same job done.
I think we get a lot of our out-of-season apples from New Zealand. I seem to remember seeing that on the stickers on each apple. There always seems to be a couple week gap between US apples and New Zealand apples as suppliers are switched.
I bought Cosmic Crisp - just a couple - the first time I saw them in my grocery store. I ate one on the drive home . . . and almost crashed my car (just kidding). It was THAT good. I loved it.
Next batch I bought from same store, soon after. Great! Then, each bag I bought, through the spring/summer got worse and worse. I quit buying them. So - what’s the story? They are lousy ‘storers’? Or the same ruination that seems to happen to all varieties, eventually, just took effect?
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At any rate, the only way to judge how an apple will do in your own orchard is to grow it in your own orchard. Honeycrisp may have declined in quality because commercial growers without great sites for it found out they could make money by growing and selling it anyway. Most modern apples hold their quality pretty well in atmosphere controlled storage but most lose their flavor by spring in my experience. Yeah, what you call “lousy storers” may just mean typical storers. But then, I’m no expert on store bought apples anymore, or even apples not grown in my immediate region.
Yes, the Cosmic Crisp debut was a letdown relative to all the hype. I haven’t had a Cosmic Crisp that is anywhere near as good as the best Honeycrisp I had early on. But I have had several Cosmic Crisp that were quite good. They are hit and miss. Haven’t had a good Honeycrisp in many years.
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Stuffed my face with Honeycrisp out in the orchard today…they are still going strong fresh picked off the tree. Super sweet and juicy. Definitely not a complex flavor…but it’s not like I’m looking for a good bottle of Merlot.
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