Sometimes good things come in large packages.

For the owner of a small orchard in New England, that “good thing” came in the form of a big and beautiful chance-seedling tree that so happens to produce just the kind of apples that are in high demand by the rapidly expanding hard cider market.

The fruit is called the Franklin Cider Apple after the orchard’s location in Franklin, Vermont.

The discovery of the one-of-a-kind bittersharp apple tree actually heralds back to 2008, but at that time orchard owner Bill Mayo only saw its potential for the sweet cider that he and his wife Sue sell in their country store.

“I used to walk by this tree, which is right on the edge of my small gentleman’s orchard, as I like to call it, and I’d pick apples off of it. They were always very high in sugar and had an astringency that would leave this wonderful dryness in my mouth, so I thought it would be a really nice ingredient to put into the sweet cider in our store,” he said.

He devised a sweet-cider blend that included about 5 percent juice from the Franklin Cider Apple, and his customers took to it right away. “I make all I can, and I cannot keep it in the store. People say it’s the best they’ve ever had anywhere,” he said.

As Mayo continued to make and sell the sweet-cider blend, his appreciation for the tree’s other attributes also grew. For one thing, it was a survivor. Estimated to be at least 60 years old, the only care it had ever received was a bit of pruning, but it still stood strong in the Zone 3 temperatures on his farm.

“This tree doesn’t show any dead wood or other signs that it’s unhealthy,” he said. “It’s just an incredibly vibrant tree, and that says a lot about its winter hardiness.”

It also shows some disease resistance, Mayo said. “I’ve always marveled at the fact that there was no foliar scab and no scab on the fruit, which is very russeted and thick-skinned. That’s pretty amazing for a tree that didn’t have any chemicals used on it. That scab resistance caught my interest as a grower.”

In addition, the tree is a heavy producer of apples and juice. Last fall, Mayo harvested 30 bushels off the parent tree and squeezed 2.74 gallons per bushel, “which is incredible throughput for a cider apple,” he said.

To top it off, harvesting was a simple affair, with those 30 bushels harvested in just a couple of hours.

“We laid these big tarps under the tree and literally just shook the tree. It was just unbelievable how the apples rained down on the tarps,” he said, noting that this feature makes the tree perfect for mechanical harvesting.

Hard cider

In 2013, a friend of Mayo’s decided to dabble in hard ciders, and since Mayo owns a store, he thought maybe he could put in a growler system and do some of his own hard cider branding.

He ended up fermenting about 150 gallons blended with the chance-seedling apple. “What it did to hard cider was wonderful. I realized we had something I considered very special,” he said.

Mayo then sent out samples for analysis to Terence Bradshaw, tree fruit and viticulture specialist with the University of Vermont, and to cideries.

The analyses showed that the Franklin Cider Apple exceled in the three major cider-apple qualities: sugars, tannins and acidity.