Perry pear
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.
Also written Flaky Bark, Flakey Bark Pear.
- Classification
- Bittersharp — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Very late (November onwards)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Late season, Vintage quality
- Origin
- Herefordshire
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Biennial bearing
- Severely biennial — a substantial crop only every other year
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
Perry pear classification
Bittersharp
Acid and tannin together; the most structured perry pears.
Tannin with acid behind it. It is one of the late, structured perry pears rather than one of the light early ones.
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 | Firm | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Drying | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Full |
Bittersharp placement in the Long Ashton perry pear account, with astringency raised in line with the general behaviour of perry pear tannin.
Late, firm fruit giving a tannic juice with real acid behind it, and a perry that repays keeping rather than early drinking.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Flakey Bark, 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
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.
Sorbitol10.0–30.0 g/L
Various growing sites; the literature pools pear juice analyses rather than reporting by orchard · Various journals and institute reports
A general pear juice figure rather than a Flakey Bark analysis. It is relevant on a bittersharp pear because the sorbitol sweetness is what keeps a tannic, acidic perry from reading as merely severe. The range is not tied to a single study or season.
A sugar alcohol abundant in pears and largely unfermentable, which is why perry keeps a sweetness cider does not. Measured in grams per litre.
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.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Very late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- 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
November in most seasons, and the last perry pear off the tree in many orchards. Late ripening in a wet autumn is a real risk: fruit that does not colour before the weather closes in is not worth pressing. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in late October or early November at Hartpury, one band earlier than the very late window recorded here.
Markedly biennial. Combined with the very late ripening, this makes a reliable annual supply unlikely.
Firmer than most and correspondingly more forgiving, though still a matter of a week or two rather than a season.
Mid to late flowering. 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.
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
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pear scab | moderate | — |
| Failure to ripen in a wet autumn | high | A November-ripening pear in an English orchard is at the mercy of the season in a way a September one is not. |
Juice and pressing
- High tannin with firm acid
- Slow to ferment in cold late-season conditions
- Benefits from extended maturation
How it is used
- Pressed at the very end of the season to give a blend structure.
- Made single-variety by makers interested in perry that will keep.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made alone where a crop allows. The result is firm and astringent young and settles with time; the sorbitol sweetness underneath keeps it from being merely hard.
About Flakey Bark
Flakey Bark is named for the tree, not the fruit — the bark peels in plates, which makes a mature specimen recognisable across an orchard in winter. That turned out to matter. When perry pear identification work began in earnest, most cultivars had to be identified from fruit that was available for a fortnight a year, if the tree cropped at all; a cultivar identifiable from its trunk was findable in a way the others were not.
It ripens very late, often in November, which is both its interest and its problem. Late ripening extends a pressing season and produces a firmer, more tannic juice than the September fruit, but a pear that needs November in an English autumn is exposed: in a wet, sunless season the crop may not come good at all. Combined with a strongly biennial habit, that makes Flakey Bark an occasional rather than a dependable cultivar.
The juice carries both tannin and acid, placing it in the bittersharp class, and the perry it makes is firm and astringent when young and settles with keeping. Underneath the tannin sits the sorbitol sweetness that every perry retains, and it is that sweetness which keeps a structured perry of this kind from reading as merely severe. There is no cider equivalent of the effect.
The cultivar came very close to being lost. It survives now through propagation from a small number of veteran trees, and the surviving population remains small enough that a Flakey Bark perry is an uncommon thing rather than a regular 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
Unrecorded. The name describes the tree rather than the fruit, which is unusual and makes the cultivar easier to spot in an old orchard than most.
Why it matters
- Reduced to a very small number of trees in the twentieth century and brought back through propagation from them. Among the clearest examples in this file of a cultivar that survives because somebody went looking for it.
- Named for a feature of the tree rather than the fruit, which made it identifiable in a neglected orchard when the fruit characters had long gone unrecorded.
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.
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.
Butt
A late, very tannic Herefordshire perry pear whose juice ferments slowly and whose perry needs time, and one of the few that can carry a blend on its own.
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.
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 temperature should cider ferment at — Most cider is fermented cool, commonly between about 12 and 18 °C. Cooler ferments keep more fruit aroma and run slower; above the low twenties the cider tends towards hot, solvent-like higher alcohols.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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, 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
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.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.