Perry pear
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.
Also written Gin Pear.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Sugar and body, Late season
- Origin
- Herefordshire
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Flowering
- Very late flowering band
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Perry pear classification
Bittersweet
Low acid with substantial tannin — the class that gives perry grip.
Low acid with appreciable tannin. Descriptive accounts differ over whether it belongs with the bittersweets or the sweets, which reflects genuine variation between sites as much as disagreement about the fruit.
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 | Firm | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Drying | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Full |
Descriptive accounts in the national collection material rather than published analysis; the confidence is set to reflect that. These bands were authored from description; published analyses of this fruit have since been transcribed onto the record from named trial programmes and are shown above. The bands are not derived from those figures, which is why this profile is marked as classified rather than measured.
Small fruit giving a dense, low-acid juice with a drying grip and enough sugar to carry weight.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Gin, 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.
Specific gravity1.052 SG
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England, 1903–1963 · Juice density. Published by the source in the four-figure form (1058) and written here in full. · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
Long Ashton perry pear analyses, reaching CiderHQ through a National Association of Cider Makers report compiled in 2010 from the station’s material. The underlying volume is Luckwill and Pollard, Perry Pears (University of Bristol, 1963), which CiderHQ has verified bibliographically and not opened. The compiler warns that juice quality in perry pears improves markedly with tree age, and that young trees give weaker acid and tannin and a lower gravity. A single figure for a perry pear is therefore a figure for a tree of some unstated age.
Juice density, the practical proxy for sugar before fermentation. Measured in specific gravity.
Titratable acidity4.2 g/L
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England, 1903–1963 · Titration, reported as malic acid. Published as a percentage and stored here in grams per litre by exact conversion — one per cent weight per volume is ten grams per litre — so that the historic figures sit in one column with the modern survey the site also holds. · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
Long Ashton perry pear analyses, reaching CiderHQ through a National Association of Cider Makers report compiled in 2010 from the station’s material. The underlying volume is Luckwill and Pollard, Perry Pears (University of Bristol, 1963), which CiderHQ has verified bibliographically and not opened. The compiler warns that juice quality in perry pears improves markedly with tree age, and that young trees give weaker acid and tannin and a lower gravity. A single figure for a perry pear is therefore a figure for a tree of some unstated age.
Acid measured by neutralisation — the quantity of acid, not its strength. Measured in grams per litre.
Total tannin150.0 mg/L
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England, 1903–1963 · Löwenthal permanganate titration. Published as a percentage and stored here in milligrams per litre by exact conversion — one per cent weight per volume is ten thousand milligrams per litre — so that the historic figures sit in one column with the modern survey the site also holds. · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
Long Ashton perry pear analyses, reaching CiderHQ through a National Association of Cider Makers report compiled in 2010 from the station’s material. The underlying volume is Luckwill and Pollard, Perry Pears (University of Bristol, 1963), which CiderHQ has verified bibliographically and not opened. A permanganate figure, not comparable with a Folin–Ciocalteu total-phenolics figure.
The phenolic fraction responsible for bitterness and astringency. Measured in milligrams 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.
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.
Long Ashton perry pear varieties
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England · 1903–1963 · National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology
Maritime and mild. The station sat outside the perry counties it studied — the pears are Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire fruit — which is worth holding in mind when a figure here is compared with one measured on fruit picked in the Three Counties.
- Harvest
- Second to third week of October
- Growth habit
- Medium
- Bearing
- Very good, biennial
- Held as
- Listed as “Gin”
Medium acid and tannin, average to good quality.
Recorded by the programme from professional cidermakers in the region. One panel, one place, one set of seasons — a description of these ciders rather than of the cultivar everywhere.
Juice analysis: specific gravity, acidity by titration as malic acid, tannin by Löwenthal permanganate titration. Acid and tannin are published as percentages and stored here in grams per litre by exact conversion. Vigour, cropping habit, maturity window and a vintage quality assessment are the compiler’s summary of the station’s descriptions.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Late
- Flowering
- Very late flowering band
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
October. The fruit is small and drops over an extended period, which suits a farm gathering by hand and frustrates anyone hoping to clear a tree in one pass. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in November at Hartpury, one band later than the late window recorded here.
Mid to late. Self-incompatible. The National Perry Pear Collection places it in the very late flowering band, from flowering records kept over many seasons.
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 | — |
Juice and pressing
- Low acid with real tannin
- Good sugar
- Astringent finish
How it is used
- Blended for tannin and weight with sharper pears.
- Grown in Herefordshire orchards alongside Brandy, with which it is habitually paired in nursery lists.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Rarely made alone. The low acid leaves a single-variety perry slack behind the astringency, and the cultivar is more useful contributing grip to something sharper.
About Gin
Gin belongs to a small group of perry pears — Gin, Brandy, Sack — named after stronger drinks. The naming is worth reading as evidence rather than as colour: it tells you that the people growing these trees classified them by what the perry did, that they had a vocabulary for strength borrowed from spirits and fortified wine, and that this was a practical distinction on a farm where perry was a staple rather than an occasion. It tells you nothing about how the fruit tastes.
The fruit is small and low in acid with appreciable tannin, which places it among the bittersweets, though accounts differ and some put it with the sweets. That kind of disagreement is normal for a cultivar that has never been analysed systematically and is grown on a small number of sites with different soils. What is consistent is the description of a dense juice with a drying finish and enough sugar to give a blend weight.
It is a blending pear. On its own the low acid leaves nothing for the astringency to sit against, and the perry reads as slack and grippy at the same time. Alongside a Huffcap or a Longdon it does useful work. The trees are ordinary perry pear standards: large, long-lived, slow to bear and alternating heavily once they do.
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 belongs to the same group as Brandy and Sack and describes a reputation rather than a place or a person.
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.
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.
Red Pear
A tannic Herefordshire perry pear whose generic name has been applied to red-fruited pears generally, making orchard records that use it almost impossible to interpret.
Knapper
A hard, tannic border perry pear whose name probably records either stone-knapping or the hardness of the fruit.
Coppy
A tannic perry pear of the Welsh border country, known from few trees and giving a juice with unusual grip for its class.
Red Longdon
One of four perry pears carrying the name of the Worcestershire parish of Longdon, distinguished by its red-flushed fruit and a juice with more tannin than acid.
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.
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.
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.
Three Counties Cider and Perry Association
TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.