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What perry is

What is perry?

In short

Perry is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting the juice of pears, in the same way cider is made from apples. It is traditionally made from perry pears — varieties grown for pressing rather than for eating, most of them too hard, too astringent or too gritty to be worth putting on a plate.

Perry is not just cider with pears in it. Pears carry sorbitol, a sugar alcohol that yeast cannot ferment, so a perry taken to complete dryness still tastes softly sweet. They also carry citric acid, which apples effectively do not.

The drink is called poiré in France and Birnenmost in Austria and southern Germany, and it survives in quantity in only a few places: the English three counties, the Welsh borders, Normandy’s Domfront country, and parts of the Alpine and central European Most belt.

From perry pears to bottlePerry production in sequence, with the sorbitol branch that bypasses fermentation marked to the right.Perry pearsSweatingMillingPressingJuiceFermentationMaturationBottlingsorbitolnot fermentedstays sweet
Perry production in sequence, with the sorbitol branch that bypasses fermentation marked to the right.
Described in full
Shape
A chain of eight stages top to bottom — perry pears, sweating, milling, pressing, juice, fermentation, maturation, bottling — with a separate branch leaving the juice stage to the right and rejoining at bottling.
Sweating
A stage cider does not always need. Perry pears are commonly held after picking until the flesh softens, because most are unpressable when picked hard and lose acid and gain sugar as they sit.
The sorbitol branch
Pear juice carries sorbitol, a sugar alcohol. It is sweet on the tongue and Saccharomyces cannot ferment it, so it passes through the whole ferment untouched and arrives in the bottle intact.
What that means for the finish
A perry can therefore taste distinctly sweet while being fully fermented and carrying no fermentable sugar at all. The same drink is dry by measurement and sweet by taste.
Pressing
Pear pomace is more slippery than apple pomace and can slump in a press, which is one reason rack-and-cloth and bladder presses are favoured for perry.
Bottling
Because the residual sweetness is unfermentable, a bottled perry is more stable against refermentation than a back-sweetened cider carrying the same perceived sweetness.

Perry pears are a different fruit problem

A perry pear is not a dessert pear that happened to be pressed. The traditional varieties — Blakeney Red, Butt, Thorn, Hendre Huffcap, Oldfield and several hundred others — were selected over centuries for juice, and most of them are unpleasant to eat: hard, gritty with stone cells, and in many cases so astringent that the sensation lasts for minutes. Some are described in the older literature as choke pears, which is not a compliment.

The trees themselves are the other difference. Perry pears are famously slow and famously long-lived: a standard perry pear can take a decade or two to give a useful crop and can then stand for two or three centuries, growing to a size no apple reaches. This is why perry orchards were planted as an inheritance and why their loss is close to irreversible — a replacement planting does not restore what was removed within a working lifetime.

Perry pear varieties are also concentrated in a very small area. A large share of the named traditional varieties are associated with Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Monmouthshire, and many are known from a handful of surviving trees. The analytical evidence behind perry is correspondingly thinner than for cider apples.

The sorbitol difference

Pears contain sorbitol, a sugar alcohol, in quantities that apples do not approach. Wine and cider yeasts do not ferment it, so it survives the fermentation intact and remains in the finished drink. Because sorbitol tastes sweet, a perry fermented until no fermentable sugar remains still reads as gently sweet on the palate — a dryness that is chemically complete and sensorially not.

This single fact explains a great deal about how perry behaves. It is why a bone-dry perry can taste rounder than a bone-dry cider; why perry is often described as delicate rather than austere; and why a perry that has been back-sweetened can tip into cloying more easily than a cider given the same treatment.

Sorbitol also has a physiological effect at higher intakes, which the older perry literature records with more candour than modern marketing does. It is poorly absorbed in the small intestine and is an osmotic laxative in quantity. This is a straightforward property of the compound rather than a fault in the drink.

Why this page keeps returning to sorbitolThe sorbitol content of pears is the most securely evidenced chemical difference between perry and cider, and it is the one that most reliably predicts how a perry will taste. Most other differences between the two drinks are differences of degree.

Acid, tannin and why perry is harder to make

Apple juice acidity is dominated by malic acid. Pear juice carries malic acid too, but it also carries citric acid, which apples contain only in traces. A total-acid figure therefore hides more in a pear than in an apple, because it is summing two acids that taste and behave differently.

Perry pear tannin also behaves unlike apple tannin at the same measured level. It tends to read as more astringent and less bitter, which means the four-way class labels borrowed from the apple scheme predict the palate less reliably for pears than for apples. The perry pear classification page sets out why the categories are kept anyway.

Perry is generally reckoned the more difficult drink to make, and for reasons that are specific rather than mystical: the fruit has a short usable window between unripe and rotten, the juice is prone to pectin haze, the pears must often be left to sweat after picking, and the low acidity of many varieties leaves the juice at a pH where spoilage organisms are comfortable. None of this is insurmountable, but none of it is forgiving.

Perry and "pear cider" are not reliably the same thing

From the late 2000s the term pear cider came into wide commercial use in Britain for drinks made largely or wholly from dessert pear juice or from pear concentrate, sold in a style closer to mainstream cider than to traditional perry. The term has no protected meaning and is used both for those products and, occasionally, for genuine perry.

The distinction that matters to a reader is the fruit and the method, not the word. A drink made from traditional perry pears, fermented and left to find its own balance, will taste substantially different from one made from concentrate and back-sweetened, and the label will not always tell you which you have. Traditional Welsh Perry and the Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire perry names are protected; pear cider is not.

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