Speckbirne

How it is classified

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.

Very juicy and sweet, low in acid, and — depending entirely on when it is pressed — either notably sweet or notably strong.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Speckbirne, 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.

Put Speckbirne into a blend

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.

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.

In the orchard

Harvest window

Mid

Flowering

Not recorded

Vigour

Vigorous

Cropping

Slightly biennial

Keeping

Poor — mill soon after picking

Picked in mid September at Klosterneuburg. The trial pressed one sample after eighteen days and another after forty-seven, and the difference between them is the single clearest demonstration in the dataset that storage time is a production decision.

Reported among the more fruitful varieties in the trial.

Not recorded. Austrian sources do not publish flowering groups or bands for Mostbirnen in any form CiderHQ has reached.

Juice and pressing

• 7.8 to 8.2 per cent alcohol depending on pressing date
• 2.8 to 9.1 g/L residual sugar, from the same harvest
• 4.0 to 7.0 g/L acid as tartaric
• 2 150 mg/L total phenols in the fruit
• Almost no citric acid — 0.2 g/L, the lowest in the trial

How it is used

• The principal Most pear of the Hausruck and a mainstay of the Mostviertel.
• Also used for drying and for distilling.

On its own

About Speckbirne

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.

Why it matters

• One of only two pear cultivars named in Austrian wine law, which lowers the minimum acidity requirement for it because the fruit is naturally low in acid.

Related cultivars

Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.

• Similar role

  Schweizer Wasserbirne

  The other cultivar named in the Austrian acidity derogation, and the mildest in the trial.

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.

• 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.

• Barnet

  A very late-flowering Three Counties perry pear of mild juice, carrying six recorded synonyms and one that collides with a cider apple.

• Bartestree Squash

  A late-ripening Herefordshire squash pear of notably low acid, and one of the mildest juices in the modern Three Counties survey.

• De Cloche

  A bell-shaped Domfrontais poiré pear, planted alongside Plant de Blanc and giving a mild, sweet juice.

• Green Roller

  An early-flowering Three Counties perry pear with the highest assimilable nitrogen recorded in the modern survey.

• Potato Pear

  A heavily russeted Monmouthshire perry pear whose name describes a fruit that looks like a potato, giving a mild, sweet juice.

Where it grows

• Mostviertel
• Upper Austria

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 long can apples be kept before pressing
• What does sweating apples mean — Sweating is holding picked fruit in a heap or store for days or weeks before milling, so it softens, loses water and gains sugar concentration. Perry pears in particular are usually held until they yield to the thumb.
• What is juice blending
• Is most made outside the mostviertel — Yes. Upper Austria carries the same pear and apple Most tradition as the Mostviertel next door, on a large orchard base, and the boundary between them is administrative rather than cultural.
• Where is cider made in austria — Mainly in the Mostviertel of Lower Austria, a landscape of scattered standard pear trees where *Birnenmost* — perry — is at least as important as apple must.

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.

• Prüfung ausgewählter Mostbirnensorten als Spindel unter Bio-Produktionsbedingungen

  Wurm, Gössinger, Wendelin and Korntheuer, HBLA und Bundesamt für Wein- und Obstbau Klosterneuburg, in Mitteilungen Klosterneuburg 61 (2011): 236–246 · research institute · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 2002–2010

  Fourteen Austrian perry pears trialled at the research station that also runs Austria’s statutory fruit-wine analysis panel. The only measured Austrian Mostbirnen data CiderHQ has found, and the first Austrian figures on the site. Its tables are scanned images with no text layer, so every figure published here was read from the rendered pages directly rather than from an extraction, and the source’s own typesetting error — Knollbirne’s residual sugar printed “3,o” — is recorded rather than normalised. The acid convention is tartaric rather than malic, which is Austrian wine law and is stated on every measurement taken from it.

• Österreichische Mostbirnensorten

  Bundesministerium für Land- und Forstwirtschaft, Klima- und Umweltschutz, Regionen und Wasserwirtschaft (BMLUK), register of traditional Austrian foods, entry 191 · government · retrieved 2026-08-25

  The Austrian agriculture ministry’s own account of its perry pears, in its register of traditional foods. It carries no analytical figures at all — no acid, no sugar, no tannin — and is cited here for synonymy, geography, dates and the ministry’s own descriptions of what the fruit tastes like. Its estimate of over 400 Mostbirne types in Austria is labelled by the ministry itself as an estimate, and CiderHQ repeats that hedge rather than the number alone.

• Obstweinverordnung, BGBl. II Nr. 18/2014, consolidated

  Republic of Austria, made under §§ 35, 36 and 37(1) of the Weingesetz 2009; consolidated text published by the Bundeskellereiinspektion · legislation · passage verified 2026-08-25

  The instrument that decides what Most legally is in Austria, and the answer is: a fermented drink. That single fact is the one most often got wrong in English writing, because Most means the unfermented juice in Switzerland and is ambiguous in Germany. The ordinance also names two pear cultivars individually — Speckbirne and Schweizer Wasserbirne — in a derogation lowering their minimum acidity, which is a legislature encoding pomology. Retrieved from the federal cellar inspectorate’s mirror because the Austrian legal information system refused every automated request.