Perry pear
Nailer
A tannic perry pear of the Forest of Dean and north Worcestershire country, whose name is generally taken to record the nail-making trade.
Also written Nailer Pear, Nailor.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Bittersweet base
- Origin
- Gloucestershire and Worcestershire
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Flowering
- 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 substantial tannin, from descriptive material rather than analysis.
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 | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Drying | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Full |
Collection descriptive material on a tannic, low-acid pear.
A firm, drying juice with little acidity, used for grip rather than for balance.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Nailer, 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 Nailer. 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
- Late flowering band
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
October, on the descriptions available. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in November at Hartpury, one band later than the mid window recorded here.
Mid-season. Self-incompatible. The National Perry Pear Collection places it in the 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 | — |
How it is used
- Blended for tannin in the Forest of Dean and along the Worcestershire border.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Not made alone in any established tradition.
About Nailer
Nailer belongs with a small group of perry pear names that record an occupation rather than a place or a person. Nail-making was a substantial domestic industry in parts of Gloucestershire and along the Worcestershire border, carried on in outbuildings by families who also kept orchards, and a tree standing on a nailer’s ground would take the name naturally. The connection is not documented, and it is offered here as the usual reading rather than as fact.
The occupational names are worth noticing because they locate perry in a working economy. These were not gentlemen’s orchards. Perry pears grew on smallholdings and on the edges of industrial districts, the fruit was pressed by the people who lived there, and the perry was part of what a labouring household drank. That is the context in which the whole naming vocabulary — trades, families, fields, effects — makes sense.
The pear gives a low-acid, tannic juice used for grip in a blend. It survives in small numbers and has not been analysed in any source CiderHQ has verified, so the blend profile here carries wide bands and a stated confidence of "described".
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. Nailing was a substantial domestic industry in parts of the Forest of Dean and the Black Country fringe, and the name is generally read as occupational, though nothing documents the connection.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Billy Williams | Regional name | Recorded as a synonym of Nailer by the National Perry Pear Collection. |
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.
Why it matters
- One of several perry pears whose names record the trades of the people who grew them rather than the fruit itself.
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.
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.
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.
Carisi
A tannic Domfrontais poiré pear, one of the cultivars that gives the region’s blends structure.
Harley Gum
A Herefordshire perry pear whose name records a gum exuded by the tree, and one of the more distinctive names in a fruit full of 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.
- 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
- 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.
- Where are perry pears grown
- What is worcestershire 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.
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
Three Counties Cider and Perry Association
TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.