Perry pear
Red Horse
A red-fruited counterpart to Green Horse, known from fewer trees and described as giving a slightly softer juice.
Also written Red Horse Pear.
- Classification
- Medium sharp — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bulk juice, Acid lift
- Origin
- Herefordshire and the Welsh border
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- 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.
Placed from descriptive material. Some accounts describe it as softer and sweeter than Green Horse, which would move it towards the sweet class; the difference is not resolved.
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 | Moderate | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Descriptive material only, with wide bands reflecting the unresolved question of how it differs from Green Horse.
Large red-flushed fruit giving a juice reported as milder than Green Horse, with light acid and little tannin.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Red Horse, 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 Red Horse. 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
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Late September into October.
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 | — |
How it is used
- Pressed with other Herefordshire and border fruit; no separate tradition of use is recorded.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
No established single-variety tradition, and too few trees to support one.
About Red Horse
Red Horse is the red-fruited pear of the Horse pair, and it is much the less common of the two. Where Green Horse survives in reasonable numbers in Herefordshire and Monmouthshire orchards, Red Horse is known from few trees, and most of what is said about it is said by comparison with its green counterpart rather than on its own evidence.
The juice is described as milder — lighter in acid, still low in tannin — which would place it at the boundary between the medium-sharp and sweet classes. CiderHQ places it as medium sharp and records that the distinction is unresolved rather than choosing between two descriptions neither of which rests on an analysis.
The pattern here is worth naming, because it recurs across this file. A well-known perry pear and a scarce relative share a name element; the scarce one is described in terms of the well-known one; and the description hardens into fact by repetition. Where the underlying evidence is a handful of trees and a few lines of text, the record should say so.
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 Horse element again indicates a large fruit.
Why it matters
- Known from a small number of trees on the Herefordshire and Monmouthshire border.
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.
Berllanderi Green
A Monmouthshire perry pear named after the farm near Raglan where it was found, and known from a very small number of trees.
Green Horse
A Herefordshire perry pear of large fruit and vigorous growth, giving a moderately sharp juice used both alone and in blends.
Brown Bess
A russeted Three Counties perry pear whose name is shared with an infantry musket, without either being named for the other on any recorded evidence.
High Pear
A mid-season Three Counties perry pear of balanced juice and reasonable nitrogen, named — as far as anyone knows — for the height of the tree.
Holmer
A perry pear named for a parish now absorbed into the northern edge of Hereford, and a marker of how far perry orchards once reached into what is now a city.
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
- 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
- Is cider made in monmouthshire
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.
Marcher Apple Network · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Has rediscovered and DNA-fingerprinted a number of lost Welsh border cultivars. Cited for identity work on cultivars the national collections do not hold.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.