Perry pear
Fausset
A Domfrontais poiré pear giving a juice with more acidity than the region’s sweeter cultivars, used to keep a blend from turning flat.
Also written Poire Fausset.
- Classification
- Medium sharp — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift
- Origin
- The Domfrontais, southern Normandy
- 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.
Mapped from French descriptions of a moderately acid, lightly tannic pear. The English categories are not used in French practice and the placement is CiderHQ’s reading.
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 | High | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
French descriptive material on a moderately acid poiré pear.
A moderately sharp juice used to give a poiré blend freshness where the dominant cultivars supply none.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Fausset, 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 Fausset. 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
October in the Domfrontais.
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
- Light tannin
- Useful for lowering the pH of a low-acid blend
How it is used
- Blended into Domfrontais poiré for acidity.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
A blending cultivar rather than one made alone.
About Fausset
Fausset supplies what most Domfrontais pears do not: acid. A poiré built on low-acid aromatic fruit and arrested with sugar still in it has an obvious weakness, which is that it can taste flat and cloying, and the cultivars that carry acidity are what prevent that. Fausset is one of them.
The acid question in perry is more complicated than in cider, because pears carry citric acid alongside malic while apples essentially do not. Citric acid is metabolisable by lactic acid bacteria, and where it is broken down the products can include diacetyl and acetic acid — which is one of the ordinary ways a perry becomes unstable in cask or bottle. A pear that contributes acidity is contributing both a taste and a microbiological margin, and the two do not behave identically.
The name may derive from the word for a cask tap, though nothing documents that. As with the English cultivars, the naming of Domfrontais pears is local, undocumented and mostly descriptive, and the honest treatment is to report the suggestion and mark it as 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
Local tradition. Fausset is a word for a tap or spigot in a cask, though whether that is the origin of the name is not documented.
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.
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.
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.
Styles it is characteristic of
Poiré
French perry, made chiefly in southern Normandy and Maine from local perry pears, characteristically sweet, low in alcohol and firmly sparkling.
Poiré Domfront
The controlled appellation perry of the Domfrontais in southern Normandy, made predominantly from the Plant de Blanc pear on high-standard trees and finished sweet, low in alcohol and bottle-conditioned.
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 malolactic fermentation — Malolactic fermentation is a bacterial conversion of sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid, releasing carbon dioxide. It lowers total acidity and raises pH, and in cider it is often the source of a farmyard or buttery note as well.
- What pears is poire domfront made from — Chiefly Plant de Blanc, which the appellation requires to make up at least forty per cent of the orchard. Poiré Domfront is the only full appellation of origin for perry anywhere.
- How do you adjust the acidity of cider
- 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 normandy cider
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.
Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC)
IFPC · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The French technical institute for cider production. The authority for the French cultivar classification families, for keeving as an industrial process, and for the pectin and nitrogen chemistry that keeving depends on.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.