Butt

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 hard, late, heavily astringent fruit giving a juice that dries the mouth from the first sip and needs both time and dilution by other pears to become drinkable.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Butt, 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 Butt 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

Very 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

Late October into November, and the last of the Three Counties perry pears in most seasons. The fruit is hard when it falls and does not soften usefully, so the usual instruction to mill on the day of gathering matters less here than for any other perry pear. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in November at Hartpury, which agrees with the window recorded here.

The biennial habit is pronounced. A heavy year can be followed by almost nothing, which makes a single-variety Butt perry an intermittent product.

Unusually good for a perry pear. The hard flesh holds for a week or two, which is one of the reasons Butt could be worked at the end of a long season.

Mid to late flowering. 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
• Substantial acid
• Slow, sometimes reluctant fermentation
• Needs extended maturation before the astringency settles

How it is used

• Used in small proportion to give structure to blends built on softer pears.
• Made single-variety by makers prepared to keep it long enough for the astringency to resolve.

On its own

About Butt

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 reference point for what perry pear tannin can do, and the usual counterexample to the assumption that perry is a light drink.

Related cultivars

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

• Often confused with

  Barland

  Both are old, very tannic Herefordshire pears and their names have been swapped in orchard records more than once.

• Similar role

  Winnal’s Longdon

  The other established structural perry pear, though with less tannin and more aroma.

• Similar role

  Flakey Bark

  Another very late, tannic pear worked at the end of the season.

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.

• Barland

  One of the oldest named English perry pears, associated with Bosbury in Herefordshire and recorded in seventeenth-century writing, giving a markedly tannic perry that was once famous by name.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Where it grows

• Herefordshire
• Gloucestershire
• 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.
• 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.
• What is 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 before the conservation work of the last forty years.
• How long can apples be kept before pressing
• 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.

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

• 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.