Perry pear
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.
Also written The Red Pear.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Bittersweet base, Late season
- Origin
- Herefordshire
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Flowering
- Late flowering band
- 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
Bittersweet
Low acid with substantial tannin — the class that gives perry grip.
Low acid with substantial tannin. Because the name has been used generically, a classification attached to it inherits whatever identity confusion the source carried.
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 |
The bittersweet placement in the Long Ashton perry pear account, with the caveat that the name may not have referred to a single tree even there.
A deeply coloured, tannic juice with low acid, giving a perry with a firm drying finish and dark colour.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Red Pear, 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.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Specific gravity2 readings, spanning 1.045–1.055 SG | 1.055 SG | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England | 1903–1963Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology |
| 1.045 SG | Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and neighbouring counties, England | 2022Modern analysis | Cider and Perry Academy (Peter Mitchell) | |
| Titratable acidity2 readings, spanning 1.4–2.9 g/L | 2.9 g/L | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England | 1903–1963Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology |
| 1.4 g/L | Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and neighbouring counties, England | 2022Modern analysis | Cider and Perry Academy (Peter Mitchell) | |
| Total tannin2 readings, spanning 90.0–640.0 mg/L | 90.0 mg/L | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England | 1903–1963Historic analysis | National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology |
| 640.0 mg/L | Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and neighbouring counties, England | 2022Modern analysis | Cider and Perry Academy (Peter Mitchell) | |
| Free amino nitrogen | 3.7 mg/L | Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and neighbouring counties, England | 2022Modern analysis | Cider and Perry Academy (Peter Mitchell) |
| Phenolic acids | 160.0 mg/L | Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and neighbouring counties, England | 2022Modern analysis | Cider and Perry Academy (Peter Mitchell) |
| Proline | 42.8 mg/L | Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and neighbouring counties, England | 2022Modern analysis | Cider and Perry Academy (Peter Mitchell) |
| Total amino acids | 23.8 mg/L | Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and neighbouring counties, England | 2022Modern analysis | Cider and Perry Academy (Peter Mitchell) |
| Total phenolics | 800.0 mg/L | Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and neighbouring counties, England | 2022Modern analysis | Cider and Perry Academy (Peter Mitchell) |
3 properties here have been measured more than once. The readings are shown as they were taken and are deliberately not averaged — climate, season, ripeness at picking, the age of the tree and the analytical method all move these numbers, and a single figure would hide every one of them. Where a spread is given below a property, it is the distance between separate studies, not the variation within any one of them.
How these were measured
- Juice density. Published by the source in the four-figure form (1058) and written here in full.
- 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.
- 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.
- Juice pressed from fruit collected in the Three Counties and frozen before analysis. Published to five decimal places and shown at the three the site displays.
- Titration, reported as malic acid.
- “True tannin” — the polymerised phenolic fraction, measured separately from the phenolic acids. Published in grams per litre and stored here in milligrams per litre by exact conversion.
- Phenolic acids measured separately from the tannin fraction. Published in grams per litre and stored here in milligrams per litre by exact conversion.
- The sum of the true tannin and phenolic acid fractions as the surveyor reports it. Published in grams per litre and stored here in milligrams per litre by exact conversion.
- HPLC. The whole amino acid pool by mass, assimilable and non-assimilable together.
- Free amino nitrogen, calculated from the individual amino acids as nitrogen available to yeast. Excludes proline.
- HPLC.
- 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.
- 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.
- One sample from one source in one season. The surveyor reports the same variety differing markedly between years, sites and tree types, and publishes the samples separately rather than pooling them.
- Measured as “true tannin” — the polymerised phenolic fraction — separately from the phenolic acids. It is not a Folin–Ciocalteu total and not a permanganate total, and should be compared only with figures produced the same way.
- Perry pear juice runs far lower in assimilable nitrogen than cider apple juice, a difference the Long Ashton workers reported and this survey confirms across most of the varieties sampled. Several readings here sit below the level at which a ferment is generally expected to need feeding.
- Proline is an amino acid a wine or cider yeast cannot assimilate without oxygen, so it does not count towards usable nitrogen. In these pear juices it routinely exceeds the whole assimilable amino pool, which is why a perry must can be rich in amino acids and starved of nitrogen at the same time.
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
- Variable, first to third week of October
- Growth habit
- Medium
- Bearing
- Good, biennial
- Held as
- Listed as “Red Pear”
Low acidity and tannin, average 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.
Three Counties perry pear juice survey
Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and neighbouring counties — the perry country itself, rather than a research station elsewhere · 2022–2024 · Cider and Perry Academy (Peter Mitchell)
The lower Severn and Wye vales: mild, wet, and the only ground in Britain where perry pears have ever been grown at scale. Fruit was collected across three autumns, and the survey reports each collection separately rather than pooling the seasons.
- Held as
- Sample RP-Oct22
Juice from single varieties, frozen before analysis. Specific gravity; titratable acidity by titration as malic acid; “true tannin” and phenolic acids measured as separate fractions; individual amino acids by HPLC, with free amino nitrogen calculated from them and proline reported apart because yeast cannot assimilate it anaerobically. Where samples differed by location, tree age or year, they are reported separately.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Late
- Flowering
- Late flowering band
- 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
October. The fruit is firm and holds a little longer than the soft early pears. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in the first half of October at Hartpury, one band earlier than the late window recorded here.
Mid to late. Self-incompatible. The National Perry Pear Collection places it in the late flowering band, from flowering records kept over many seasons. The collection lists it in two adjacent bands, late and very late, which is what a variety whose blossom straddles a boundary looks like in a table with four columns.
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
- Substantial tannin, low acid
- Strongly coloured juice
- Browns rapidly in air
How it is used
- Used for tannin and colour in blends built on lighter fruit.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Seldom made alone, and where it is, the identity of the fruit in the press is worth establishing before the identity on the label.
About Red Pear
Red Pear is a cultivar and also a phrase, and the two cannot be separated in the documentary record. Held in the collections it is a specific, tannic, low-acid Herefordshire pear with dark juice. Written in a nineteenth-century orchard survey it may mean that tree, or Blakeney Red, or Dymock Red, or any red-fruited pear the surveyor did not know the name of.
That makes it the standard illustration of why perry pear identity work is necessary. It is not enough to know that a parish grew red perry pears; identifying which cultivar stood in which orchard requires the trees themselves, and increasingly requires genetic comparison rather than description. Where the trees have gone, the record cannot be recovered, and a name like this one is where the loss is most visible.
As fruit, what the collections hold under the name is worth having: substantial tannin, low acid, and a strongly coloured juice that browns fast in air and gives a perry with a firm drying finish. Used in a blend it contributes what most Three Counties perry pears cannot. Used alone it is demanding, and the sensible order of business is to establish what is in the press before deciding what to put on the label.
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 obscured by the name. A cultivar called simply Red Pear cannot easily be traced through documents in which the same phrase is used descriptively.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Aylton Red | Regional name | Recorded as a synonym of Red Pear by the National Perry Pear Collection. |
| Black Horse | Regional name | Recorded as a synonym of Red Pear by the National Perry Pear Collection. |
| Blunt Red | Disputed identity | The National Perry Pear Collection records this name for Red Pear, and also for Early Blunt Red — a variety the collection holds as distinct and has separated by DNA. |
| Red Horse | Disputed identity | The National Perry Pear Collection records Red Horse as a name for Red Pear. CiderHQ holds Red Horse as a variety in its own right, so the two accounts disagree about whether this is one fruit or two. The Collection’s identifications are supported by DNA analysis of the trees it holds, which makes it the stronger source — but nothing available here settles the question, so both records stand and the equation is marked as contested rather than adopted. |
| Sack | Disputed identity | The National Perry Pear Collection records this name for Red Pear, and also for Sack — a variety the collection holds as distinct and has separated by DNA. |
| Blakeney Red | Disputed identity | Red Pear has been used loosely for any red perry pear, Blakeney Red included. As a cultivar name it refers to a specific tannic pear held in the collections; as an orchard record it means very little. |
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
- The clearest case in perry of a name too generic to function as a name, and the standard illustration of why perry pear identity work exists.
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.
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.
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.
Carisi
A tannic Domfrontais poiré pear, one of the cultivars that gives the region’s blends structure.
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.
- Why does apple juice go brown when pressed — Polyphenol oxidase in the fruit reacts phenolics with oxygen the moment cells are broken, turning the juice brown. In cider making this is sometimes prevented with sulphite and sometimes encouraged, because it also drops harsh tannin out of solution.
- 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.
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.
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.