Empire

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Availability

Late September

Sweet Eating Apple

 Empire apples are red, juicy, firm, crunchy and sweet.

Best Uses

Empire apples are excellent for eating and salads, and good for sauce, baking, pies and freezing.  It is an ideal lunch-box apple, not least because it does not bruise easily

History of the Cultivar

Empire is the name of a  cultivar of apple derived from a seed grown in 1945 by Lester C. Anderson, a Cornell University fruit nutritionist who conducted open pollination research on his various orchards. In 1945, under the direction of A. J. Heinicke, scientists from the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station of Cornell University in Geneva, New York, harvested the Empire seed, together with thousands of its siblings.The Geneva teams grew and tested ever dwindling sub-populations of the sibling group until 1966, when the final selection, the Empire, was released to the public at the New York Fruit Testing Association meetings in Geneva.