Perry pear
Dymock Red
A red-fruited perry pear from the Gloucestershire parish of Dymock, one of the most concentrated perry pear districts in England.
Also written Dymock Red Pear.
- Classification
- Medium sharp — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Tannin and structure
- Origin
- Dymock, Gloucestershire
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Perry pear classification
Medium sharp
Moderate acid with low to moderate tannin.
Moderate acid with light to moderate tannin. Some accounts describe more tannin than others, which would move it towards the bittersharp class; the difference is not resolved.
Every classification on CiderHQ names its system. Why there is more than one.
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.
| Axis | Typical | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Acid | Moderate | |
| Tannin | Moderate | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Descriptive material, with wide bands because accounts of the tannin level differ.
A red-flushed fruit giving a moderately sharp juice with a light drying finish and good colour.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Dymock 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.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Dymock Red. Figures for this cultivar circulate, but they reach the present through compilation rather than through the original tables, and publishing a number we cannot attribute would give it an authority it has not earned. What is known about how the fruit behaves is described above and below.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Late September into October.
Mid-season. Self-incompatible.
Pears are not self-fertile. A variety needs another in blossom at the same time to set fruit, which is why the flowering band matters more in a perry orchard than the harvest window does.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pear scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid
- Coloured juice
- Light drying finish
How it is used
- Pressed as part of the Dymock crop and blended with the parish’s other pears.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made alone in small quantities by Gloucestershire makers.
About Dymock Red
Dymock is a Gloucestershire parish on the Herefordshire border that carried, before the twentieth century, one of the densest concentrations of perry pear orchards anywhere in England. Several cultivars take their names from it, and the parish is a fair illustration of how localised this fruit was: a district a few miles across with its own pears, its own perry and its own names for both.
Dymock Red is the red-fruited pear of the group. The juice is moderately sharp with a light drying finish and good colour, and accounts differ over how much tannin it carries, with some descriptions placing it closer to the bittersharp pears than the medium-sharp ones. That disagreement is recorded here rather than settled, and the blend profile carries wide bands as a result.
The orchards that gave the parish its density have largely gone. What survives does so in scattered trees, in restoration plantings and in the national collection a few miles away at Hartpury, and a cultivar like this one is now a conservation object as much as an agricultural one.
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.
Origin · traditional account
Parish tradition. Dymock and the parishes around it carried an unusual density of perry pear orchards, and several cultivars take their names from it.
Why it matters
- One of several cultivars carrying the Dymock name, in a parish whose orchards were among the densest concentrations of perry pears in England before the twentieth-century clearances.
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
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.
Betty Prosser
A Monmouthshire perry pear named after a woman about whom nothing else is recorded, and one of the Welsh cultivars recovered by survey work.
Bunch
An early-ripening, very late-flowering Three Counties perry pear whose juice carries moderate acid and unusually generous assimilable nitrogen.
Norton
A Three Counties perry pear named after one of the several Nortons in the region, giving a moderately sharp juice with some tannin.
Blakeney Red
The most widely planted perry pear of the Three Counties, taking its name from the Gloucestershire village of Blakeney and grown for perry, for canning and, during the First World War, for dye.
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.
Where it grows
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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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 still 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.
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 · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Three Counties Cider and Perry Association
TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.