Perry pear
Late Treacle
The later-ripening of the two Treacle pears, giving the same dense sweet juice several weeks after the first has gone.
Also written Late Treacle Pear.
- Classification
- Sweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Late 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, as with the earlier pear of the name.
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 reporting a dense, sweet juice comparable to Early Treacle.
A heavy, sweet juice arriving late in the season, when most of the sweet perry pears have already been pressed.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Late 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 Late 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
- Late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
October, some weeks after Early Treacle. That gap is the entire reason both cultivars 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 | — |
Juice and pressing
- High sugar, low acid
- Useful for raising gravity late in the season
How it is used
- Blended late in the season with the tannic October pears, supplying the sugar they lack.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Little tradition of separate use; the cultivar earns its place in a blend rather than in a bottle of its own.
About Late Treacle
Late Treacle exists because Early Treacle ripens in September. A farm that wanted the dense, sweet juice both trees give had a reason to keep a version of it that arrived in October, when the tannic pears were coming in and there was something for the sugar to balance. The two cultivars are separated in the record by ripening date and by very little else.
That is a real function rather than a curiosity. Perry pear harvest is a sequence of narrow windows, each a few days wide, and a mill working through a season is constantly matching what is available now against what it needs. A late sweet pear ripening alongside a late tannic one is the difference between a blend and a queue.
The juice is high in sugar and low in acid, as the name promises. It has no structure of its own and is not usually made alone. Where it appears in a modern perry it is doing exactly what it did on a nineteenth-century farm: putting weight and sweetness underneath something sharper.
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, and inseparable from the naming of Early Treacle. The qualifier was applied to distinguish two trees, not to record a lineage.
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.
Brandy
A high-sugar Herefordshire perry pear whose name records the strength of the perry it makes rather than any flavour of brandy.
Sack
A perry pear named after the fortified wine of the same name, and one of the group of Three Counties cultivars named for strength.
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.
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.
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.
- 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 herefordshire cider
- Where are perry pears grown
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
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.