Barland

How it is classified

What it contributes to a blend

A direction, not a measurement. These bands are the level of resolution the evidence supports, and they say which way adding this fruit pushes a blend rather than what the finished cider will be.

A firm, russeted fruit giving a dark, heavily astringent juice with acid behind it, and a perry that was historically valued for exactly that severity.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Barland, and for a great deal of cider fruit that is a finding rather than a gap. Bittersweet apples in particular contribute tannin, sugar and body while being close to aromatically mute, and most of what a cider made from them smells of was produced by the fermentation rather than carried in by the fruit. CiderHQ publishes the absence rather than filling the space with descriptors nothing supports.

Put Barland into a blend

Measured analysis

Each figure is shown with where and when it was taken. They are not averaged: the same cultivar grown in another climate genuinely gives different numbers, and collapsing them into one would be the most misleading thing this page could do.

Compare within a study to see where these figures sat among the other cultivars the same work analysed — which is a more robust statement than the figures themselves, because absolute values move between laboratories and the ordering inside one study mostly survives.

Watched in the orchard

What named research programmes recorded about this fruit at their own sites. Bloom, harvest and cropping belong to a place and a run of seasons rather than to a cultivar, so they are reported site by site rather than merged.

In the orchard

Harvest window

Late

Flowering

Late flowering band

Vigour

Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping

Cropping

Severely biennial — a substantial crop only every other year

Keeping

Moderate

October. The fruit is firm and does not collapse as fast as the early pears, though the working window is still measured in days rather than weeks. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in the middle or later part of September at Hartpury, one band earlier than the late window recorded here.

Strongly biennial once mature. Barland is among the perry pears most likely to give nothing at all in an off year.

A little better than most, on account of the firm flesh.

Mid-season. Self-incompatible. The National Perry Pear Collection places it in the late flowering band, from flowering records kept over many seasons.

Ripening moves with the site and the season. Where the National Perry Pear Collection’s observation at Hartpury falls in a different band from the window recorded here, both are kept rather than one overwriting the other.

Disease and pest susceptibility

Juice and pressing

• Very high tannin
• Moderate to firm acid
• Dark juice that browns rapidly on exposure to air
• Slow to mature

How it is used

• Made as a named perry in its own right from at least the seventeenth century, when Barland perry was known by name outside its own district.
• Blended in small proportion to give structure to lighter perries.

On its own

About Barland

Names, origin and identity

Cultivar naming is the hardest problem in cider fruit data. The same tree carries different names across ten miles, and two different trees have shared a name for two centuries.

The National Perry Pear Collection’s identifications are supported by DNA analysis of the trees it holds, which is why they are treated here as the stronger account where they conflict with a documentary one. Where the collection records a name for two varieties it holds as distinct, the name identifies a group of trees rather than one variety, and fruit offered under it needs checking against something other than its label.

Why it matters

• One of only a handful of perry pears whose name is documented in seventeenth-century English writing.
• The historic reference point for what a serious perry could be, at a period when perry was taken as seriously as cider by writers connected to the early Royal Society.

Related cultivars

Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.

• Often confused with

  Butt

  The two most tannic Herefordshire perry pears, and the pair whose names are most often exchanged in orchard records.

• Similar role

  Taynton Squash

  Both were named in early literature as pears of the first rank, on opposite principles: Barland for severity, Taynton Squash for delicacy.

Fruit that plays a similar part

Cultivars sharing a classification under the same system and a comparable role in a blend. Not a similarity score — a stated relationship.

• Butt

  A late, very tannic Herefordshire perry pear whose juice ferments slowly and whose perry needs time, and one of the few that can carry a blend on its own.

• Flakey Bark

  A very late Herefordshire perry pear named for the peeling bark of the tree, and among the cultivars that came closest to being lost.

• Winnal’s Longdon

  The most highly regarded of the four Longdon pears, giving a perry with more tannin and more staying power than most of the Three Counties crop.

• Antricotin

  A tannic Domfrontais poiré pear used to give structure to blends led by the region’s softer aromatic fruit.

• De Fer

  A hard, tannic Domfrontais poiré pear whose name — iron — describes the fruit exactly.

• Gin

  A small Herefordshire perry pear named, like Brandy and Sack, for the strength of the drink it makes rather than for anything about the fruit.

Styles it is characteristic of

• 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.

Where it grows

• Herefordshire
• Worcestershire
• Gloucestershire
• Monmouthshire

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.

• 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.
• Does cider get better with age — Some does. Tannic, dry, bottle-conditioned ciders and ice ciders can gain for several years. Light, fruit-driven and commercially filtered ciders lose their aroma and do not gain anything in exchange.
• When are cider apples harvested — In the northern hemisphere the cider harvest runs from about September to November, with late bittersweets such as Dabinett and Vilberie coming in last. Cider fruit is generally picked riper than dessert fruit, and often gathered from the ground.
• Should i ferment cider in an oak barrel — A sound, full barrel is a fine maturation vessel; a leaky, half-empty or previously spoiled one is the fastest route to vinegar. Wood cannot be sterilised, so a barrel carries whatever lived in it before.
• What is maceration in cider making — Maceration is letting milled pomace stand before pressing, so that enzymes soften the tissue and phenolics and aroma move from the skins into the juice. It raises both colour and tannin, and raises the risk of oxidation with them.
• Why does apple juice go brown when pressed — Polyphenol oxidase in the fruit reacts phenolics with oxygen the moment cells are broken, turning the juice brown. In cider making this is sometimes prevented with sulphite and sometimes encouraged, because it also drops harsh tannin out of solution.

Where to go next

• How cider apples are classified — Why there are four schemes and none of them is universal.
• The blend explorer — See which way changing the proportions moves a blend.
• Blending — What a cider maker is actually deciding when they build a blend.

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

  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

• Pomona, or an Appendix concerning Fruit-Trees in relation to Cider

  John Evelyn, Royal Society · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1664

  Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1670 edition held by the Internet Archive. The attribution needs correcting and CiderHQ has corrected it: *Pomona* is not a book by John Evelyn. It is an appendix annexed to Evelyn’s *Sylva*, published by express order of the Royal Society, and the contributors recorded for the volume are John Evelyn, John Beale, Daniel Colwall, Paul Neile, John Newburgh and Sylas Taylor. Beale has his own entry in this register, and the overlap is not a coincidence — the two texts come out of the same Royal Society enquiry into cider in the 1660s. Citing *Pomona* as Evelyn’s flattens a collaborative compilation into a single-author work.

• 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.