Choke pear

Related terms

Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.

• Perry

  Perry pear

  A pear cultivar grown for fermentation rather than for eating, characterised by high tannin, high acid or both, small size, and flesh too hard and astringent for the table.

• Sensory

  Astringency

  A tactile sensation of drying, roughening and puckering in the mouth, caused by tannins binding and precipitating the proteins that lubricate the oral surfaces. It is a feeling, not a taste.

• Perry

  Huffcap

  A traditional name element attached to a group of perry pears — Hendre Huffcap, Red Huffcap, Black Huffcap among them — and, older still, a word for a drink strong enough to lift the cap off the drinker’s head.

Where to go next

• Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
• Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
• Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.

Sources

What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.

• Perry Pears

  L. C. Luckwill and A. Pollard (eds), published for the National Fruit and Cider Institute by the University of Bristol, 1963 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25 · covers 1963

  Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, which records the work as Luckwill, 1963, published for the National Fruit and Cider Institute by the University of Bristol. The catalogue entry names Luckwill alone where the standard citation names Luckwill and Pollard as joint editors; CiderHQ keeps both names and records the discrepancy rather than silently following one catalogue. This is the foundational descriptive work on English perry pears and the ancestor of most later variety lists. No copy was opened: it is sixty years old, out of print, and held in research libraries rather than in open digital collections.

• Pomona, or an Appendix concerning Fruit-Trees in relation to Cider

  John Evelyn, Royal Society · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1664

  Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1670 edition held by the Internet Archive. The attribution needs correcting and CiderHQ has corrected it: *Pomona* is not a book by John Evelyn. It is an appendix annexed to Evelyn’s *Sylva*, published by express order of the Royal Society, and the contributors recorded for the volume are John Evelyn, John Beale, Daniel Colwall, Paul Neile, John Newburgh and Sylas Taylor. Beale has his own entry in this register, and the overlap is not a coincidence — the two texts come out of the same Royal Society enquiry into cider in the 1660s. Citing *Pomona* as Evelyn’s flattens a collaborative compilation into a single-author work.