History · Nineteenth century to present
Why perry declined
Why is perry so much rarer than cider?
In short
Every stage of making perry is harder than the equivalent stage for cider. The trees take a generation to bear and grow too large to manage or harvest conveniently, the fruit ripens and rots within days, and the juice is prone to problems that cider juice rarely presents.
Those difficulties were tolerable while rural labour was cheap and plentiful. When it was not, perry orchards were the first thing to go. The commercial redefinition of the word in the twentieth century, and the later marketing of ‘pear cider’, then detached the name from the fruit.
The tree is the first problem
A traditional perry pear is a forest-sized tree. It may reach fifteen metres, live for two hundred years or more, and take a decade and a half to give a worthwhile crop. Nothing about that suits twentieth-century agriculture, which wanted early returns, small trees and access for machinery.
Harvesting compounds it. Fruit forty feet up cannot be picked by hand from a ladder in any economic way, so perry pears were traditionally shaken down or allowed to fall and then gathered from the ground — work that needs many hands over a short period.
Cider apples faced the same pressures but had an escape route. Apple growing had dwarfing and semi-dwarfing rootstocks, developed and tested through the twentieth century, allowing bush orchards that crop within a few years and can be machine harvested. Equivalent options for perry pears were far more limited, and the crop could not make the same transition.
The narrow window and the difficult juice
Perry pears ripen from the inside. The traditional guidance is to pick when the first fruit falls, and the interval between a pear that will not press and a pear that has broken down internally can be a matter of days. Where cider fruit can wait in heaps for weeks, perry fruit cannot.
The juice then behaves awkwardly. Perry pears carry citric acid as well as malic, are high in tannin and stone cells, and contain substantial sorbitol, which yeast does not ferment and which leaves a sweetness that has to be accounted for. Perry is more prone than cider to certain spoilage problems, and a batch can be lost late.
None of this is insurmountable — perry is made successfully every year — but it means that perry rewards attention and punishes neglect, in an industry that was moving towards scale and standardisation.
- Fifteen years or more from planting to a useful crop.
- Trees too large for ladder picking or for orchard machinery.
- A picking window measured in days rather than weeks.
- Fruit that must be milled promptly and cannot be stored.
- Juice high in tannin and stone cells, with unfermentable sorbitol.
- Greater vulnerability to spoilage during and after fermentation.
When the labour went
The perry orchard was viable as part of a farming system with a resident workforce that could be directed to gathering fruit for a fortnight in September. The movement of that workforce off the land through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries removed the condition on which the crop depended.
Nothing replaced it. A perry orchard could not be mechanised in the way an apple orchard could, and its returns did not justify hiring seasonal labour at market rates. Farms let the trees stand and stopped gathering from them, then removed them when the ground was wanted.
The post-war grubbing-up grants finished a process already well advanced. Old perry orchards were among the clearest cases for removal: large trees, low yields, no prospect of renewal, and land that could carry something else.
The word comes loose from the fruit
Through the twentieth century a substantial commercial perry trade existed, but its relationship to perry pears was loose. The best-known example is the sparkling perry launched by a Somerset firm in the early 1950s and marketed heavily, including on early British commercial television; it was a manufactured drink sold on presentation rather than on orchard provenance.
From the mid-2000s the term ‘pear cider’ was adopted by large producers for pear-based drinks, frequently made from concentrate and often from culinary or dessert pears rather than perry pears. British duty law treats perry and pear cider as the same category, so the label carried no obligation to use perry fruit.
The result is a real difficulty for a reader. A traditional perry made from named perry pears in Gloucestershire and a mass-market pear drink can occupy the same shelf under closely related names, and specialist organisations have campaigned for the distinction to be visible. CiderHQ treats the two as different products and describes what is in each rather than arguing about the word.
How this developed
Certainty is marked on each entry. Where the popular account runs ahead of the evidence, that is said rather than smoothed over.
Nineteenth century· probable
Orchards age without replanting
Perry orchards are not renewed as farming systems change and the returns fall behind alternatives.
Early to mid twentieth century· probable
The labour disappears
The seasonal workforce that gathered perry fruit leaves the land, and the crop loses its economic basis.
Early 1950s
A manufactured perry reaches a mass market
A heavily marketed sparkling perry establishes the word in British consumers’ minds as a branded product rather than an orchard drink.
1950s–1980s
Grubbing up
Grant-aided orchard clearance removes large numbers of old perry trees, which were among the least defensible to retain on economic grounds.
From the mid-2000s
‘Pear cider’
Large producers adopt the term for pear drinks often made from concentrate, and the name is separated from perry fruit in the market.
Also answered on this page
Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.
- What is the difference between perry and pear cider?
- Why did perry orchards disappear?
- Why is perry hard to make?
Related
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What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- How old is perry and where does it come from — Perry — fermented pear juice, made from tannic and often inedible perry pears rather than from dessert fruit — is recorded in England from the medieval period and was made across northern France and the Low Countries as well. Its English heartland is a small area of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and the Welsh border where the soils and climate suit the trees.
- Is mass-market cider made from apple juice — Partly. Most high-volume cider is made from apple juice concentrate reconstituted with water, fermented, and adjusted with sugar, water and sweeteners to a target strength and sweetness. The finished drink can contain a minority of apple juice by volume and still be sold as cider in the United Kingdom.
- What is perry — Perry is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting the juice of pears, traditionally of specific perry pear cultivars rather than eating pears. It is to pears what cider is to apples, and has its own history in the three counties of England and in Normandy.
- Why were so many orchards grubbed up after the war — Because it paid. Post-war and later European schemes offered grants for clearing orchards, and an ageing standard orchard was in any case worth less per acre than almost anything that could replace it — arable, improved grass, or a modern bush orchard with a fraction of the labour requirement.
- Is perry the same as pear cider — Not necessarily. Perry traditionally means a drink made from perry pear cultivars; pear cider is a modern commercial term that also covers drinks made from dessert pears or pear concentrate. Neither phrase is protected in most markets.
- What are stone cells in pears — Stone cells are hard, lignified cells that give perry pear flesh its gritty texture. They make the fruit unpleasant to eat and make the pomace behave differently in the press from apple pomace.
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.
Three Counties Cider and Perry Association
TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
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- The history of cider — The rest of the history, by period and by tradition.
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