Culinary dessert apples, generally thought of as less desirable for cider production than heirloom cider varieties are still used due to their high yield, low cost, etc. However, little is known about the aromatic profile of ciders produced from these cultivars, and if their flavor can be adjusted with alternate processing such as allowing extended skin contact (i.e., processing as one would a red wine). To better understand the aroma profile, five (the year 2018) and eleven (the year 2019) cultivars of common dessert apples were ground and divided into treatments i) a “non-skin” trial with pressing prior to fermentation like normal cider production, or ii) an “on-skin” trial with fermentation prior to pressing. Volatiles were characterized by HS-SPME-GC-MS/MS based on the integrated metabolomic approach. Principal component analysis visualized only significant features in 2019 and 2018 (1159 and 1340), respectively. Feature detection was followed by compound identification and semi-quantification using authentic standards. Compounds identified in the various samples are known to illicit responses described as sweet, fruity, and floral with classes of compounds contributed by both apple- and yeast-derived volatiles. The partial least squares-discriminant analysis further demonstrated clear separations in cultivars and treatments. The ‘Gala’ and ‘Jona Gold’ samples all generally had the highest overall intensities with ‘Gala’ positively correlated with eugenol and 1-butanol. The skin treatment increases the content of the detected compounds, especially in the cultivars that tended to have low intensity in traditionally produced ciders, although the impact in some cases was highly cultivar dependent (e.g., the content of ethyl 2-methylbutyrate in 'Fuji' sample increased 14-fold after skin treatment, but much less in other cultivars). This work demonstrates that there is a huge aroma difference in ciders produced by dessert apples that can be utilized by producers and that revisiting common processing practices may allow further expansion of potential flavors from common cultivars.

Investigation of the volatile composition of apple ciders from dessert apple cultivars with and without skin contact during fermentation using a metabolomics-based approach

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