Perry pear
Early Treacle
An early, very sweet Three Counties perry pear, named for the density of its juice rather than for any resemblance to treacle in the perry.
Also written Treacle, Early Treacle Pear.
- Classification
- Sweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Early (September)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Early season
- Origin
- Gloucestershire and Herefordshire
- 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
Sweet
Low acid, low tannin. Mild perry pears giving soft, light perry.
Low acid, low tannin, high sugar. The class placement follows the name and the descriptions, which agree.
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 | Low | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Very high | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Full |
Descriptive material consistently reporting an unusually sweet, low-acid juice.
A dense, sweet, low-acid juice giving a perry with weight and a pronounced sweet finish.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Early Treacle, 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 Early Treacle. 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
- Early
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
September. The early ripening is the point of the distinction from Late Treacle and the reason both were kept.
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 | — |
| Wasp and bird damage | high | Very sweet fruit ripening in September attracts wasps in numbers, and damaged fruit breaks down immediately. |
Juice and pressing
- High sugar with low acid
- Slow to ferment out
- Marked sweetness in the finished perry
How it is used
- Blended to raise the gravity of a perry made largely from sharper fruit.
- Pressed early in the season alongside the other September pears.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made alone occasionally. Without acid the perry is heavy, and the sweetness that survives fermentation is emphatic rather than balanced.
About Early Treacle
Treacle, in a perry pear name, describes the juice: dense, dark-sweet and heavy on the palate. Two Three Counties pears carry the name, distinguished only by when they ripen, and this is the earlier. Whether the two are related or whether two communities independently reached for the same word is not established, and the collections hold them as separate cultivars without settling the question.
The fruit is very sweet and very low in acid. That combination raises the gravity of a blend and gives a perry weight, which is what it was grown for, and it also makes the pear a magnet for wasps in a warm September. Damaged fruit goes over at once, so an Early Treacle crop can be lost between one visit to the orchard and the next.
The sweetness in the finished perry comes from two places, and they are worth distinguishing. Some of it is unfermented sugar in a juice dense enough that a wild ferment may not take it all. The rest is sorbitol, which no ordinary yeast will touch at all, and which is present whether the ferment finished or not. The second is the reason a perry pressed from any pear, sweet-class or not, finishes sweeter than a cider fermented to the same point.
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
Unrecorded. The Treacle element describes the sweetness of the juice; the Early and Late qualifiers were added to distinguish two trees carrying the same name.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Late Treacle | Disputed identity | Early and Late Treacle are held as separate cultivars, distinguished chiefly by ripening date. Whether they are related, or simply share a descriptive name, is not established. |
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.
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.
Taynton Squash
A Gloucestershire pear named in seventeenth-century writing as one of the finest for perry, reduced to very few trees by the twentieth century and propagated back from them.
Tumper
A very early Three Counties perry pear whose juice contains almost no nitrogen a yeast can use, and more proline than any other variety measured.
Swan Egg
An old perry pear named for the shape of its fruit, recorded in English pomology well before the perry pear surveys of the twentieth century.
Plant de Blanc
The dominant poiré pear of the Domfrontais and the cultivar the Poiré Domfront appellation is built around.
Green Longdon
The senior member of the Longdon group, widely grown in north-west Gloucestershire and carrying six synonyms, three of which other Longdons also claim.
Oldfield
A Worcestershire perry pear with a nineteenth-century show reputation, giving a light, low-acid perry that has been made single-variety for well over a century.
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.
- How do i know when my cider has finished fermenting — Take two hydrometer readings several days apart: if the gravity has not moved, the ferment is over. Airlock activity is not a reliable test, because a slow ferment can produce gas too slowly to see.
- How long does cider take to ferment — A warm ferment with cultured yeast can finish in one to two weeks; a cool wild ferment in a cellar may take three months or more. Slow is not the same as stuck — the test is whether gravity is still falling.
- 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.
- 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 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.
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.
Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.