Perry pear
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.
Also written Sack 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
- Herefordshire and Gloucestershire
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Flowering
- Mid 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
Sweet
Low acid, low tannin. Mild perry pears giving soft, light perry.
Low acid with high sugar and little tannin. Placed from descriptive material.
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 | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Full |
Descriptive material on a dense, sweet, low-acid juice.
A heavy, sweet, low-acid juice giving a perry with weight and a pronounced sweet finish.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Sack, 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 Sack. 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
- Mid flowering band
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
October. Sugar continues to build in the fruit and there is a real cost to picking early. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in the middle or later part of September 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 mid 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 | — |
Juice and pressing
- High sugar, low acid
- Slow ferment
- Marked residual sweetness
How it is used
- Blended to raise the strength and body of a perry made from sharper fruit.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Rarely made alone; without acid the perry is slack.
About Sack
Sack was the English name for the strong fortified white wines that came in from Spain and the Atlantic islands, and by the seventeenth century it was a byword for a drink of real strength. Naming a perry pear after it was a claim about what its juice could do. The claim sits alongside Brandy and Gin in a small vocabulary of strength names that tells you a good deal about how these farms categorised their own produce.
The pear delivers on the sugar if not on the comparison. The juice is dense and low in acid, ferments slowly, and gives a perry with weight. As with the other sweet-class pears, the sweetness in the finished drink is partly unfermented sugar and partly sorbitol, and the sorbitol fraction is there regardless of how far the ferment ran.
It is a blending cultivar. Alone it produces something heavy and undefined, and its useful role is to put body underneath a sharper pear. The trees are ordinary perry pear standards and the surviving population is small.
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. Sack was the English name for the fortified white wines imported from Spain and the Atlantic islands, and the name places this pear alongside Brandy and Gin in the strength-naming group.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Longstalk | Disputed identity | The National Perry Pear Collection records this name for Sack, and also for Turner’s Barn — a variety the collection holds as distinct and has separated by DNA. |
| Longstuck | Disputed identity | The National Perry Pear Collection records this name for Sack, and also for Turner’s Barn — 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.
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.
Late Treacle
The later-ripening of the two Treacle pears, giving the same dense sweet juice several weeks after the first has gone.
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.
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.
Three Counties Cider and Perry Association
TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.