Anyone see these? Aldis here had them in stock yesterday so i bought a Honeycrisp…they had Granny Smith and Fuji… I’m a fan of Honeycrisp, so obviously i loved it. Now i want to grow more Honeycrisp. 99 cents for a bottle…Looks like they are from Michigan. I’d buy a whole case, but they’d be gone in a couple of days in my house.
Seems you sacrifice Honeycrisp’s entire claim to fame- extreme crunch. It is otherwise an ordinary apple, IMO, but what a crunch!
I like Granny based apple cider- at least compared to something mostly of Red Delicious as is quite common in the cheap sweet cider realm. Here in the northeast we get to sample some real nice blends if we make an effort. I do the pruning and some consultation for a commercial cider mill here that makes blends with a lot of Golden Russet and Northern Spy in the mix. Nice balance of sweet and tart with aromatics from the Spy.
I think he charges like $4 a quart for it. Very high end.
Honeycrisp brings back my childhood with that green Jolly Rancher flavor… I love them. Yes…they do have a nice crunch too. I like a “wet” apple… Probably make an excellent alcohol…although the hangover might be not so good.
I should have bought all three…maybe i’ll swing back in there. We only have 1 Aldi store in our area so its very busy and hard to get in and out quickly unless you time it right.
warm…I think Honeycrisp is the single greatest apple introduction ever…I love 'em. I agree with you 100% on the Jolly Rancher thing…always reminds me of that also. I tried the juice though and to be honest it was too strongly flavored for me. Maybe it’s just that I’m used to the more bland flavored juice…I dunno.
I’ve bought Honeycrisp about 5 times. Most were uneatable at about 10 brix with some green. I’m sure most of that is on the growers. Picked too early and/or over cropped. I’ve read the good ones are grown in MN and similar cold climates. Washington state growers are killing the golden goose. Would like to try a MN HC.
Fruitnut you should try a Maryland Honeycrisp right from my backyard. I don’t have a spectrometer yet so I can not say for sure what the brix level is, but it’s damn sure more than 10. I would suspect though that colder regions grow better HC.
Who cares what the brix are anyway if it tastes awesome?
I meant to order a spectrometer last year and got sidetracked and forgot. I’ll order one later tonight and this year I’ll check a few and report the findings.
You have to be the only person on the planet who has bought Honeycrisp 5 times and in all 5 cases they were “uneatable”.
Is it possible you really just don’t like apples?
No, they were awful!!! Opinions on HC seem to vary a lot. Alan doesn’t much care for them and I didn’t find the crispness all that appealing. But that may be totally biased by the awful flavor of the specimens I tried.
Look for a refractometer.
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I can vouch for Maryland-grown Honeycrisps as MY favorite apple, hands down. They cannot be beat in September, when they’re fresh. Only Red Gravenstein can approach them as a close second.
However, I find HC sweet cider as lacking the kind of full-bodied flavor achieved in a blend.
Up here we get Wisconsin, MN, Michigan, NY and Washington State grown honeycrisp (that is just what i’ve been able to notice in the various places that sell apples here in the fall)… Its weird that the big grocery chains here seem to sell mostly MI, NY and Washington apples while you have to go the little farmer’s stands/orchards to get the local stuff (must just be a quantity/pricing thing). I would say my favorites have come from New York, but have had good locally grown and even last year ive had some from out west that were good. You can buy huge bags of 2nds from the orchards around here (they call them “deer food” or something) and if you time it right, its mostly Honeycrisp.
Obviously flavor is going to change year to year and from what I’ve read, Honeycrisp can be tough to grow.
I appreciate Honeycrisp when they reach reasonable brix levels before dropping off the tree, which is not all that common here lately. Believe me, Appleseed, not all Honeycrisps are as good as the ones you seem to be finding there.
I don’t find their taste terribly interesting even at their best, but the texture and nice acid sugar balance more than makes up for that. I just generally don’t find September apples all that appealing and don’t start storing my winter stash until the first week of Nov.
I don’t know very many folks who grow all their own fruit that are that crazy about Honeycrisp, but we’ve been through all this before. It doesn’t matter which apples you love, it is just great to love some of the types you can grow. I have not mastered Honeycrisp, so my opinion is biased anyway. I like cooperative apples that actually support my sense of competence at what I’m paid to do. .
Stores here sell Honeycrisp cider and Gala cider.
I like that there is interest in varietal juices. Not just nameless apple juice.
I have been making multigrafts because I get tired of the same thing over and over, and because I like tasting different types, and they have different seasons. Most likely I will add Honeycrisp to my semidwarf multi because the one on M27 is too puny. It is a tasty apple.
No doubt honeycrisp apples picked from Sorgels orchards in Wexford PA is the single greatest apple I’ve ever eaten. It is not the sweetest apple by any means. In fact it is rather tart. But the incredible texture and juiciness totally blew me away. It was nearly as juicy as some of the best peaches I’ve eaten.
If there is one trait of an apple that I can not tolerate is mealy or mushy texture. If an apple is not crunchy I don’t want it. I like to eat mostly fresh out of hand so texture is huge for me. A Peach or plum on the other hand, I can handle them soft and sweet.
yeah…refractometer is what I meant. I even recently done an experiment with my kids using a dilution of sugar water and seeing the difference in refraction based on differing dilutions of sugar. I cannot afford a mass spectrometer, nor would I know how to use it even if I did have one. 
Oh…and outside of this forum, opinions on Honeycrisp actually really don’t vary that much. That’s a myth that really needs to get corrected here. The fact is, an overwhelming majority not only like them, they prefer them over all else. Simple undeniable fact.
I’m with you speedster…texture is King. And the current apple market is more than proof that it is a winning trait. I’d not even be interested in sampling a soft, mealy, mushy apple no matter the taste.
I’m with you on the “crunchy” and warmwx on the “wet”.
This is the future of apples. Finally!
My friends and colleagues seem to all love Honeycrisp in spite of the fact that all the ones I’ve tried from the grocery stores are under 12 brix.
Yeah…good stuff. If all we wanted was brix we could all go out and buy a 4lb. bag of Domino sugar and dig in until our hearts were content. We could far more easily and cheaply accomplish this if sugar was all we were after.
Sorry my friend, I don’t believe you. I’m not trying to be disagreeable, it’s just that I don’t believe you. You have had a very inordinate experience and it does not follow suit with that of most others.
Believe me H’man…they are way, way better than what you and fruitnuit have experienced. That’s how it really is.
Why is it that in the face of the market, not to mention the replies here, that you seem to think your experience is the one that counts most?
They’re freakin’ awesome man…why do you think they’re so damn popular?
You don’t believe that all the Honeycrisps aren’t as good as the one’s you are finding there ?- that is a silly comment.
I am speaking of the apples that I pick up from the ground under my own trees- the Honeycrisps that fail to ripen properly and drop prematurely and the ones that get rot even before that, apparently because I can’t be bothered with a regimen of calcium sprays tripling my spray regimen. This I have already explained to you in a previous thread where you seemed to be campaigning to make Honeycrisp president of the apple nation.
Also. when we had a duplicate debate a few weeks ago there were several others who posted about buying poor quality Honeycrisps- have you forgotten already?
Please, if you are going to wax poetic about your love affair with Honeycrisps, let it be about the ones you are harvesting from your own trees. This is a fruit growing forum not a food forum. I am discussing Honeycrisp as a home orchard apple.
I am still eating my own apples- only Goldrush is still good out of my fridge (that’s my idea of a great apple). This morning I’,m eating waffles with them and blueberries in a Valor plum sauce out of my freezer and from my orchard (the waffles and my coffee are getting cold). I am only buying citrus for fruit right now- the rest is out of the freezer and fridge.
I’m not going to use this forum to discuss how wonderful the citrus is. How would that be helpful to other fruit growers? Let’s start a fruit shopping section for folks that want to promote their favorite store bought fruit.
I’m trying to steer people to the best fruit to grow in a home orchard that relies on conventional storage.
The great Honeycrisp Goldrush debate is on! This will be my first year I will be harvesting Honeycrisp hopefully so I can at least compare both from my home orchard.
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The debate will be a lot more interesting to me if it is between growers of the fruit. Maybe I can actually learn to efficiently grow Honeycrisp from the tips of others here. Commercial growers around here find HC twice as expensive to grow as any other apple in their orchards- but they get twice as much money per bin.
It is not just a difficult apple to grow, it is also tricky to store- trade magazines feature articles about the specific needs of their commercial storage which are much more demanding than other apples. I have long since forgotten the apples I was eating last Sept. Some of them were probably some decent Honeycrisps. At the time I was much more excited about plums, pluots and nectarines.
I should mention that the first HC I planted on my property was productive of excellent fruit the first couple of bearing years, but once it was plugged in fully to the soil the problems began. Someday I expect the tree to calm down enough to produce good fruit again- meanwhile it has been mostly grafted over to other varieties.