Brian Frange has been pontificating on apples since 2016. He has a few things to say before you hit the orchards.
Melissa’s favorite apple variety is a Fuji. She has been apple picking only once.
In 2016, Brian Frange’s favorite fruit was “probably a grape or a mango.” Then one day, at a Whole Foods in New York, he stumbled on a SweeTango apple for the first time. Curious, he tried it.
He was infuriated by how good it was.
“I felt betrayed that apples like the SweeTango could exist and I was being forced to eat trash,” he said. “And that’s when I vowed to spread the word about different varieties of apples.”
What sounds like the beginning of a vengeful saga turned into an act of public service from Mr. Frange in the form of Apple Rankings, which started as a blog on Tumblr before becoming a full-fledged website around 2021.
Mr. Frange, 36, is from New York and lives in Culver City, Calif., where he works as a TV writer and a comedian while also creating animations for social media. He developed his own system to rate apples, with those ratings running alongside his wildly opinionated blurbs.
The quality on his F100 rating scale can range from “Criminal Malfeasance” to “The Fabled ‘Immaculate Apple,’” with “Horse Food” and “Barely Worth the Calories” sprinkled in between. Certain factors, like taste, cost, availability and density, might influence a score. More than a hundred apples that he has tried are still waiting for rankings.
“I am on a quest to rank as many apples as I humanly can before the day I die, and I hope that when I die, this list of apple rankings can live on and be my legacy,” Mr. Frange said. He added, “Yeah, I don’t have children.”
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