Perry pear
Rock
A hard-fleshed Gloucestershire perry pear, unusual among perry pears in keeping for weeks rather than days after gathering.
Also written Rock Pear, The Rock.
- Classification
- Medium sharp — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Late season, Acid lift
- Origin
- Gloucestershire
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Flowering
- Very late flowering band
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
Perry pear classification
Medium sharp
Moderate acid with low to moderate tannin.
Moderate acid with light tannin. The hardness of the flesh does not translate into unusual tannin, which surprises people who expect it to.
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 | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Medium |
Medium-sharp placement in the Long Ashton perry pear account.
Small, extremely hard fruit giving a moderately sharp juice with a light grip; the perry is plain, and the cultivar’s value is logistical.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Rock, 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 Rock. 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
- Very late flowering band
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
October, and gathered rather than caught: unlike most perry pears the fruit can be picked and stored before milling. This is the single most useful thing about it. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in November at Hartpury, one band later than the late window recorded here.
Exceptional for a perry pear. The fruit will hold for several weeks in cool conditions without breaking down, which allows a mill to schedule it rather than react to it.
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 | low | The tough skin resists scab better than most perry pears. |
| Self-incompatibility | high | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid, light tannin
- Low juice yield from very hard flesh
- Requires thorough milling
How it is used
- Held back and milled at the end of the season, after the perishable fruit had been dealt with.
- Blended with softer pears to extend a pressing season.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Occasionally made alone. The perry is unremarkable; the cultivar earns its place by being available when nothing else is.
About Rock
Perry pears are notorious for having almost no margin: the fruit is ready when it falls and is ruined a week later, and a perry maker spends the autumn reacting to trees rather than planning around them. Rock is the exception. The flesh is genuinely hard — hard enough that milling it takes more work than milling any other perry pear — and the fruit will hold for several weeks in cool conditions without collapsing.
That property is the whole point of the cultivar. It allowed a farm to deal with the perishable fruit first and come back to the Rock afterwards, and it allows a modern mill to schedule a pressing rather than to drop everything when a tree lets go. The juice itself is unremarkable: moderate acid, light tannin, a plain perry. People sometimes assume that hard fruit means high tannin, and in this case it does not.
The yield is lower than from soft-fleshed pears and the fruit needs thorough milling to give up what it has. Trees are large standards of the usual perry pear kind, biennial once mature, and long-lived. The tough skin also makes it rather more scab-resistant than most of the Three Counties crop.
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 describes the hardness of the fruit, which is the cultivar’s defining property.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Black Huffcap | Disputed identity | The National Perry Pear Collection records this name for Rock, and also for Yellow Huffcap — a variety the collection holds as distinct and has separated by DNA. |
| Brown Huffcap | Disputed identity | The National Perry Pear Collection records this name for Rock, and also for Yellow Huffcap — a variety the collection holds as distinct and has separated by DNA. |
| Huffcap | Disputed identity | The National Perry Pear Collection records this name for Rock, and also for Yellow Huffcap — a variety the collection holds as distinct and has separated by DNA. |
| Mad Cap | Regional name | Recorded as a synonym of Rock by the National Perry Pear Collection. |
| Mad Pear | Regional name | Recorded as a synonym of Rock by the National Perry Pear Collection. |
| Red Huffcap | Regional name | Recorded as a synonym of Rock by the National Perry Pear Collection. |
| Uffcap | Disputed identity | The National Perry Pear Collection records this name for Rock, and also for Yellow Huffcap — a variety the collection holds as distinct and has separated by DNA. |
| Uffcup | Disputed identity | The National Perry Pear Collection records this name for Rock, and also for Yellow Huffcap — a variety the collection holds as distinct and has separated by DNA. |
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 exception to the rule that perry pears cannot be stored, and therefore a useful counterexample when the short perry pear harvest window is being explained.
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.
Hartpury Green
A Gloucestershire perry pear from the parish that now holds the national perry pear collection, giving a late, moderately sharp juice.
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.
Gregg’s Pit
A Herefordshire perry pear named after the Much Marcle holding where the original tree still stands, and one of the few perry pears whose parent tree can be visited.
Hendre Huffcap
The most highly regarded of the Huffcap group of perry pears, taking its first name from a Monmouthshire farm and its second from a word for a drink strong enough to lift a hat.
Moorcroft
An early Malvern-country perry pear, known as Malvern Hills as often as by its own name, and at the centre of one of the sharpest identity disputes in perry.
Stinking Bishop
A Dymock perry pear named after a nineteenth-century grower called Bishop, and now better known through the washed-rind cheese that is bathed in its perry.
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.
- How are apples milled for cider
- What is pressing yield — Pressing yield is the proportion of fruit weight recovered as juice. It varies from under half on a poorly loaded basket press to around seventy per cent on a well-run rack-and-cloth or belt press.
- How long can apples be kept before pressing
- 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.
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.
Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.