Interesting. Alternative topic, but I have been trying to improve a juicing recipe by adding and apple to get a tart taste to the spinach, celery, cauliflower, and cucumber. I use green apple but it's still sweet. I think I need your African apples in my kitchen (While I love the taste of beer, wine is more convienent
There are lots of tart apples out there, they used 5o be the only type of apple that existed, but industrious fruit breeders kept at it creating bigger, sweeter, and brighter colored types of apples and the market moved that direction because that sold the most apples. In 1900 hard cider out sold beer in this country so tart apples still had a big market but by 1945 cider was dead in this country or a very niche product so there was almost no demand for tart apples. With the post 2000 cider revival one of the big things cider companies have been trying to do is revive rare or extremely old tyes of apples bred just for cider production. That means going to places like Colorado, Minnisotta, and Michigan to find rare trees still growing in old lots, out of production orchards, or even in people's backyards. Then once you find these virtually extinct varieties you have to build them up to commercial scale again. It will be a long process.
There's a farm down the road that grows their own cider apples. I inherited an apple press that, according to my 93 year old granny-in-law, was an antique when she was a child. I tried it out on some local store bought apples to see how it functioned. It needs a little fixing up to keep apple guts from flying all over the place, but next time I'm getting some of those cider apples. Eventually I want to start making some apple wine and ultimately apple jack.