Blakeney Red

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.

Soft red-flushed fruit giving a juice of moderate acidity and light grip, with a fresh pear character that fades quickly if the fruit is milled late.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Blakeney Red, 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 Blakeney Red 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

Mid

Flowering

Mid flowering band

Vigour

Vigorous

Cropping

Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate

Keeping

Poor — mill soon after picking

Late September into early October in the Three Counties. The window is short: the fruit is ready when it begins to drop and is past use within about a week of that, a pattern that holds across most perry pears and is sharper here than in later cultivars. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in the first half of October at Hartpury, which agrees with the window recorded here.

Heavy years alternate with light ones on mature standards. The pattern is less pronounced than in Barland or Butt but is enough that a single-orchard perry maker cannot plan on an even supply.

Days rather than weeks. Fruit gathered from the ground must go to the mill more or less at once; held in a heap it browns from the core outwards and the juice loses its freshness before it is pressed.

Flowers in the middle of the pear season. Like most perry pears it sets poorly on its own pollen, so a solitary tree in a garden crops erratically where the same tree in a mixed orchard does not. The National Perry Pear Collection places it in the mid 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

• Moderate acid with light tannin
• Pink to red juice from the skin flush when milled whole
• Ferments readily and clears without much difficulty

How it is used

• The mainstay of Three Counties perry blending, both as a base and as the whole of a single-variety perry.
• Canned and bottled as fruit through the twentieth century, one of very few perry pears with a fresh-fruit trade behind it.
• Used during the First World War as a source of dye for khaki cloth, a use recorded for this cultivar specifically.

On its own

About Blakeney Red

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

• The commonest surviving perry pear in the Three Counties, and consequently the cultivar most orchard restoration schemes plant first.
• One of the very few perry pears whose economic history runs beyond drink, through canning and wartime dye.

Related cultivars

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

• Often confused with

  Painted Lady

  The two names have been used for one another in parts of Gloucestershire. CiderHQ keeps them apart and records the confusion rather than deciding it.

• Often confused with

  Red Pear

  Red-fruited perry pears are routinely lumped together in orchard records, and Blakeney Red absorbs other red pears in casual naming.

• Similar role

  Dymock Red

  Another red-fruited Gloucestershire pear used in the same part of a blend, though from a much smaller surviving population.

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.

• Gregg’s Pit

  A Herefordshire perry pear named after the Much Marcle holding where the original tree still stands, and one of the few perry pears whose parent tree can be visited.

• Hendre Huffcap

  The most highly regarded of the Huffcap group of perry pears, taking its first name from a Monmouthshire farm and its second from a word for a drink strong enough to lift a hat.

• Moorcroft

  An early Malvern-country perry pear, known as Malvern Hills as often as by its own name, and at the centre of one of the sharpest identity disputes in perry.

• Stinking Bishop

  A Dymock perry pear named after a nineteenth-century grower called Bishop, and now better known through the washed-rind cheese that is bathed in its perry.

• Thorn

  One of the oldest named English perry pears, recorded in the seventeenth century and still valued for a quick, light perry that is ready before most others.

• Berllanderi Green

  A Monmouthshire perry pear named after the farm near Raglan where it was found, and known from a very small number of trees.

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.

• Bottle-conditioned perry

  Perry that completes its fermentation in the sealed bottle, generating carbonation and lees character while the fruit’s sorbitol keeps a sweetness the yeast cannot remove.

• Sparkling perry

  Perry carrying a persistent bubble, a presentation that suits pear’s aromatics and residual sorbitol and has a documented history going back to the seventeenth century.

• Still perry

  Perry without carbonation, in which the fruit’s sorbitol sweetness and its texture carry a drink that has no bubble to lean on.

• Three Counties cider

  The shared cider and perry tradition of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, defined by a common fruit inventory and by the perry pear orchards that survive nowhere else in comparable numbers.

• Welsh cider

  Cider from Wales, rebuilt over recent decades from a nearly lost tradition, with protected names for traditional Welsh cider and perry and a fruit inventory shared with the English border counties.

Where it grows

• Gloucestershire
• Herefordshire
• Worcestershire
• 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.
• How are apples milled for cider
• 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.
• What is juice blending
• How are perry pears classified — Perry pears are conventionally divided by acid and tannin into sweet, medium sharp, bittersharp and bittersweet, following the scheme used in the English perry literature. Sorbitol content matters too, and it does not appear in the classes.
• What is bottle conditioned perry

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.

• Gloucestershire Orchard Trust

  Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24

• Three Counties Cider and Perry Association

  TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24

• 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.