Fruit

Perry pears

Perry pears are not eating pears any more than cider apples are eating apples. They are hard, astringent, often barely edible, and they grow on trees that outlive the people who plant them.

CiderHQ holds 94 perry pear cultivars. Almost all of them are English or Welsh, from a belt of country running through Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Monmouthshire, with a French group from the Domfrontais alongside.

Two things separate them chemically from cider apples, and both matter more than the classification does. Pears carry sorbitol, a sugar alcohol that yeast does not ferment, so a perry fermented completely dry still tastes sweet in a way a cider never can. And they carry citric acid alongside malic, which lactic bacteria can metabolise — one of the reasons perry has a reputation for being harder to keep stable.

The four chemical differences between apple juice and pear juice that decide how each behaves in the vessel and in the glass.

Described in full

Layout: Four rows — sugars, acid, tannin and finish — with a cider column and a perry column side by side.
Sugars: Apple juice carries glucose, fructose and sucrose, all fermentable. Pear juice carries the same three plus sorbitol, a sugar alcohol that tastes sweet and that Saccharomyces cannot ferment.
Acid: Apple acidity is essentially malic acid alone. Pears carry citric acid as well, which a single total-acid figure does not distinguish — so two juices with the same titratable acidity can taste different.
Tannin: Both carry condensed tannin, but perry pear tannin is typically more astringent and less bitter than apple tannin at the same measured level. A perry pear classified as bittersweet does not taste like a bittersweet apple.
Finish: A fully fermented cider is dry unless sugar is added back or fermentation is arrested. A fully fermented perry can still taste distinctly sweet, because the sorbitol survives untouched.
Why that matters for stability: Sweetness from sorbitol carries no refermentation risk: there is nothing there for yeast to eat. Sweetness from back-sweetened sugar carries a real one, and needs stabilisation, filtration or pasteurisation.
What is the same: The process. Milling, pressing, fermentation, maturation and packaging are the same operations, which is why perry is made in cider cellars and rarely in dedicated ones.

By classification

Perry pears are sorted on the same acid-and-tannin logic as cider apples, but the categories behave differently because pears carry citric as well as malic acid, and because sorbitol leaves sweetness behind that fermentation cannot remove.

A borrowed scheme

Perry pears are sorted on the same acid-and-tannin logic as cider apples, but the labels predict the palate less well: pear tannin is often more astringent and less bitter than apple tannin at the same measured level, and a total-acid figure does not separate citric acid from malic. Many of these cultivars are also known from very few trees, so the analytical basis is thinner than it is for apples.

Sweet (29)

Low acid, low tannin. Mild perry pears giving soft, light perry.

Medium sharp (37)

Moderate acid with low to moderate tannin.

Bittersweet (11)

Low acid with substantial tannin — the class that gives perry grip.

Bittersharp (4)

Acid and tannin together; the most structured perry pears.

Picking and pressing

Perry pears are notorious for a very short window. The old rule is that a perry pear is ready when it falls, and ruined a week later — the fruit goes from unripe to rotten at the core with almost no interval, and the rot starts from the inside where it cannot be seen.

Harvest windows, northern hemisphere.
Window	Roughly	Cultivars
Very early	Late August to early September	Tumper, Judge Amphlett
Early	September	Moorcroft, Thorn, Hendre Huffcap, Taynton Squash, Yellow Huffcap, Early Treacle, Swan Egg, Hellen’s Early
Mid	Late September to mid October	Blakeney Red, Plant de Blanc, Oldfield, Winnal’s Longdon, Stinking Bishop, Gregg’s Pit, Grüne Pichelbirne, Speckbirne
Late	Late October	Barland, Green Longdon, Brandy, Gin, Rock, Red Pear, Coppy, Hartpury Green
Very late	November onwards	Butt, Flakey Bark

Every perry pear

All perry pears on CiderHQ, alphabetically.