Glossary · Perry
Perry pear
Definition
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.
- Subject
- Perry
In more detail
Perry pears were selected over centuries for juice, not flavour in the hand. Most are inedible raw. The trees are long-lived and very large — a mature perry pear on its own roots can exceed fifteen metres and stand for two or three centuries — which is why perry orchards were planted as standards and why the loss of an old tree is not quickly replaced.
Many cultivars are intensely local, known in a handful of parishes, and identification is difficult because the same name attaches to different fruit in different valleys. The national collections and the DNA work behind them exist because of exactly that confusion.
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
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.
Region
Monmouthshire
The Welsh end of the border perry pear belt, where a farmhouse cider and perry tradition came close to extinction in the twentieth century and was deliberately reconstructed from surviving trees and surviving practitioners.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Perry
Perry
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.
Perry
Perry pear classification
The four-class scheme — sweet, medium sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp — used to group perry pears by acid and tannin, in the same logic as the Long Ashton classification of cider apples.
Perry
Choke pear
An old English name for a pear so astringent that it is inedible raw — a description of most perry pears, and the origin of the phrase used figuratively for anything hard to swallow.
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.
Orchard
Standard
A tree grown on a vigorous rootstock with a clear trunk of about 1.8 to 2.1 metres before the first branch, forming a large canopy that can be grazed or mown beneath.
Perry
Stone cells
Clusters of thick-walled lignified cells in pear flesh that give it its gritty texture. They blunt mills, complicate pressing and contribute to the sediment a perry throws.
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.
Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24