Are "Beer Apples" Malus dolgo?

After many years of searching, in an old book I finally found a drawing that matched what we called a "beer apple" when I was a kid: a crab apple with fluoresent-red, oblong fruit (which makes superior jelly), that typically bears on alternate years: according to the drawing, this might be Malus dolgo, which apparently is often used as very hardy rootstock but seldom grown for itself.

There are a few of these "Beer Apples" in Great Falls MT, but I've never seen one anywhere else.

Anyone know anything more about them?

~REZ~

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Rez
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I've never heard them called "beer apples" but that is probably a regional thing. We have two Dolgo crabapple trees in our orchard. Planted them originally as pollenizers for our other apple trees but, the Dolgo seems to bloom about a week early. We use a Mehu-Maija steam juicer to extract the juice from the fruit and it does make the most beautiful jelly you could imagine. We also infuse the juice with various herbs and make herbed jelly, rosemary and basil being two of our favourites. As to alternate year bearing, I can say that one year ours will produce far more fruit than we can ever hope to use and then the following year they produce about twice that much ;-). There's a lot of them grown as ornamentals in this area, which is Southern Ontario, Canada.

Ross. Southern Ontario, Canada. New AgCanada Zone 5b

43º17'15" North 80º13'32" West To email, remove the obvious from my address.
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RR

Probably, which naturally made them hard to track down. In retrospect, I suspect the few specimens seen (very few indeed) were rootstock that grew into a tree after the grafted part died back. They certainly were healthy trees, even under conditions of malicious abuse.

Oooh, that sounds heavenly...

Could I prevail upon you to save me some seeds from this year's crop?

Even tho I'm in SoCal, we get enough sub-freezing winter here to have good blooms from most fruit trees (they grow cherries hereabouts, anyway).

Yeah, as I recall the few trees I knew of were good bearers.

Supposedly they were first brought in as seeds from Russia, which doubtless explains their hardiness :)

~REZ~

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Rez

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