Perry pear
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.
Also written Stinking Bishops.
- Classification
- Medium sharp — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Aroma
- Origin
- Dymock, Gloucestershire
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- 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.
Moderate acid with low tannin, from descriptive material. If the equation with Moorcroft were accepted, the classification would be the same, which is one reason the dispute has never been forced to a conclusion.
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 on a moderately sharp, low-tannin pear, with confidence lowered because the cultivar’s identity is not settled.
A moderately sharp, low-tannin juice giving a light perry; the pear’s reputation rests on its name and its association with cheese rather than on any unusual character in the glass.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Stinking Bishop, 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 Stinking Bishop. 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
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Late September into October, on the descriptions available. Where the cultivar is identified with Moorcroft the harvest is reported earlier, which is one of the practical points on which the two descriptions diverge.
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 | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid, low tannin
- Clean, quick ferment
How it is used
- Pressed as part of the Dymock perry crop.
- Its perry is used to wash the rind of a Gloucestershire cheese that takes the pear’s name, which is why the cultivar is far better known than its perry.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made alone in small quantities. Anyone doing so is relying on an identification that the record does not fully settle.
About Stinking Bishop
Stinking Bishop is the perry pear with the highest public profile and the least secure identity. Its name is attached to a washed-rind cheese made in Gloucestershire, whose rind is bathed in perry made from this pear, and the cheese has carried the name far beyond the parishes where the tree grows. Most people who can name a perry pear name this one, and most of them have never encountered the perry.
The name comes from a nineteenth-century Dymock grower called Bishop. The epithet, on the consistent local account, described the man rather than the fruit or the drink. Like almost every perry pear origin story, it is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere, and CiderHQ records it as tradition rather than as fact.
The identity question is more serious. Several accounts treat Stinking Bishop as a synonym of Moorcroft, itself also called Malvern Hills; others hold it as a distinct Dymock cultivar. The national collection keeps them separate. This file does the same and marks the dispute on both records, because the alternative is to assert an identity on preference. The two descriptions differ mainly in harvest timing, which is the practical place a grower would notice the difference.
As a pear it is moderately sharp with low tannin and makes a light, clean perry. That is a fair description and not a diminishing one: most perry pears make light, clean perry, and the disproportion between this cultivar’s fame and its character is entirely a product of the cheese.
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
Tradition names a Dymock grower called Bishop, with the epithet reflecting local opinion of the man rather than of the fruit. The story is consistently reported and nowhere documented.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Moorcroft | Disputed identity | Several accounts treat Stinking Bishop as a synonym of Moorcroft, also called Malvern Hills. Others hold it as a distinct Dymock cultivar. CiderHQ keeps both records and does not resolve the question. |
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 only perry pear most people outside the Three Counties can name, and they know it from a cheese rather than from a drink.
- A live identity dispute: whether this is a distinct cultivar or a further name for Moorcroft has not been resolved.
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.
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.
Thorn
One of the oldest named English perry pears, recorded in the seventeenth century and still valued for a quick, light perry that is ready before most others.
Burgundy
A deeply coloured Monmouthshire perry pear, one of the Welsh cultivars located and propagated by survey work after being reduced to a handful of trees.
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 still perry
- What is herefordshire cider
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.
Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Three Counties Cider and Perry Association
TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.