Glossary · Perry
Perry
Definition
A fermented alcoholic drink made from the juice of pears, and specifically from perry pears rather than dessert pears. It is not cider made with pears added: it is a separate drink with its own fruit, chemistry and problems.
- Subject
- Perry
In more detail
Perry differs from cider in three ways that matter. Pear juice contains sorbitol, a sugar alcohol that yeast cannot ferment, so a fully fermented perry still tastes faintly sweet and feels rounder than a fully fermented cider. Its dominant acid is malic with a significant citric fraction, which behaves differently in malolactic conversion. And its pectin and stone-cell content make it harder to clarify and slower to settle.
Perry is also less forgiving in the orchard and in the cellar. Perry pears must be caught in a narrow window between hard and rotten, they can go from ripe to useless in days, and the finished drink is prone to ropiness and to the historic disorder known as sickness. That difficulty, more than fashion, is why perry has always been made in far smaller volumes than cider.
The main historic centres are the three counties of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, Monmouthshire and the Welsh border, the Domfrontais in Normandy, and the Mostviertel in Lower Austria.
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
Style
Perry
The fermented drink of pears, a tradition parallel to cider rather than derived from it, in which unfermentable sorbitol leaves a sweetness the maker never chose.
Region
Gloucestershire
The centre of English perry: a county whose orchard identity rests less on apples than on a population of enormous, long-lived perry pear trees concentrated in the Severn Vale and the country around May Hill.
Chemistry
Sorbitol
The unfermentable sugar alcohol that pears carry in quantity and apples carry only in trace, and the single reason a fully fermented perry keeps a sweetness a fully fermented cider cannot.
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.
Perry
Poiré
French perry: pear juice fermented, in the Domfrontais made largely from local perry pears, keeved and bottled to finish sparkling and off-dry.
Perry
Pear cider
A trade name used from the 2000s for pear-flavoured drinks and for pear ferments made from dessert pear juice or concentrate, distinct from perry made with perry pears.
Chemistry
Sorbitol
A sugar alcohol present in substantial quantity in pears and in smaller amounts in apples. Yeast does not ferment it, so it survives fermentation and leaves a fully dry perry tasting faintly sweet.
Faults
Ropiness
A texture fault in which the cider becomes viscous and pours in an oily rope, caused by lactic acid bacteria producing extracellular glucan polysaccharide.
Faults
Cider sickness
The historic name for a spoilage disorder of low-acid cider in which the drink turns turbid, loses colour, throws a deposit, produces gas and develops a milky, sometimes raspberry-like character.
Perry
Birnenmost
Pear must, and by extension the fermented pear drink of Austria, Switzerland and southern Germany — the central European equivalent of perry.
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.
National Perry Pear Centre, Hartpury · specialist organisation · passage verified 2026-08-24
Read on 2026-08-24 — and the address CiderHQ had registered, perrypears.co.uk, is no longer the Centre at all. It fails the TLS handshake over https, and over plain http it resolves to a Sedo domain-parking page: an earlier pass in this sprint recorded it as retrieved on the strength of an HTTP 200, which was wrong, and the correction is the point. The Centre publishes at nationalperrypearcentre.org.uk. It is the closest thing British perry has to an identity authority: it holds at least two examples of most known varieties, states that the DNA of most of them has been determined and is used as an aid to identification, and publishes a variety register with synonym lists. Its 121-variety register is transcribed into the perry pear records, including the nineteen names it shows being claimed by more than one variety.
Research on pear juice composition and sorbitol in perry
Various journals and institute reports · peer-reviewed literature · registered as competent for this subject
The evidence base for the single most important chemical difference between cider and perry: pears carry substantial sorbitol, which yeast does not ferment, so a fully fermented perry retains sweetness a fully fermented cider cannot.