Dataset

The Long Ashton perry pear analyses

Nineteen perry pears analysed at Long Ashton between 1903 and 1963, and for most of the twentieth century the only compositional data on perry fruit that existed.

What did the historic perry pear analyses actually measure?

Gravity, acid and tannin, on nineteen varieties, across sixty years at one Somerset station. Until a modern survey reached CiderHQ in this sprint, this was the entire published compositional record for perry pears in English, and it is why perry writing has leaned so heavily on so few numbers.

The tannin column is a permanganate figure and responds to everything phenolic in the juice at once, which for pears is a sharper limitation than it is for apples: pear juice carries a large phenolic-acid fraction that browns readily and tastes of almost nothing, and a single tannin number cannot separate it from the polymerised material that makes a perry astringent.

The programme

Transcribed from the source as published. Nothing in this panel is CiderHQ’s wording.

Site: Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England
Period: 1903–1963
Cultivars transcribed: 19
Measurements: 57
Values withheld: None
Classifies under: long-ashton

Climate. 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.

Method. 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.

What the source says about itself

A 2010 National Association of Cider Makers compilation of Long Ashton material, itself resting on Luckwill and Pollard’s Perry Pears (1963). CiderHQ has opened the compilation and not the 1963 volume, and records the figures at traditional-record tier accordingly. The compiler’s warning about tree age is attached to every figure in the set.

What it adds

It is the historic baseline. Every twentieth-century account of perry pear composition rests on this work, and a reader meeting a tannin figure for Blakeney Red in a modern book is usually meeting this figure at one or more removes.
It anchors the classification. The perry pear scheme divides fruit on acid and tannin much as the apple scheme does, and these are the analyses it was drawn against.

What it cannot be asked

Stated as limits rather than as apology. A dataset with known bounds is more useful than one presented as complete.

Nineteen varieties out of a Three Counties repertoire numbering in the hundreds. The pears analysed were the ones a research station could reach, not a representative sample.
Sixty years of seasons compressed into single figures, with no dispersion published and no way to recover which year contributed what.
One tannin number where the modern survey shows two independent quantities moving separately.
CiderHQ reaches these figures through the National Association of Cider Makers’ archive of cider pomology research rather than through the station’s own reports, and the archive is served over plain HTTP with no https equivalent.

Why these figures are not universal

A perry pear’s composition is a statement about a tree as much as about a variety, and the modern Three Counties survey has since measured how large that effect is: Oldfield’s true tannin came out at 690 mg/L in one year and 3,000 mg/L in another, and Hendre Huffcap from standard trees carried nearly three times the acid of Hendre Huffcap from bush trees in the same month. A single historic figure per variety cannot represent that spread, and the Long Ashton compiler said as much — noting that perry pear juice quality improves markedly with the age of the tree.

What was measured

Every property in the transcription, with how many cultivars carry it. A property measured on some cultivars and not others is a gap in the source, not in the transcription.

Properties recorded across 19 cultivars in The Long Ashton perry pear analyses
Property	Cultivars	Reported in
Specific gravity	19	Specific gravity
Titratable acidity	19	Grams per litre
Total tannin	19	Milligrams per litre

Total tannin across every cultivar in this dataset that carries it — 19 of them, from 320 down to 70 mg/L. Every figure here comes from this one programme, measured by one method in one place, which is the only arrangement under which a comparison like this is sound. Nothing on this chart may be read against another dataset’s column.
Cultivar	Total tannin (mg/L)	Where it sits in this study’s range
Butt	320
Barland	260
Hellen’s Early	180
Moorcroft	170
Gin	150
Oldfield	150
Blakeney Red	130
Taynton Squash	130
Brandy	120
Green Horse	110
Winnal’s Longdon	110
Thorn	100
Yellow Huffcap	100
Barnet	90
Judge Amphlett	90
Parsonage	90
Red Pear	90
Hendre Huffcap	80
Newbridge	70

Ordering only. Where a figure was published as a range the midpoint is used to place the row, and the range itself — not the midpoint — is what appears on the cultivar’s own page.

What it can be read beside

The commonest way to misuse this corpus is not to misread one figure but to put two side by side that were never measuring the same thing. This is the judgement, stated.

Whether The Long Ashton perry pear analyses may be read in one column with the site’s other datasets
Dataset	Verdict	Why
The Three Counties perry pear survey	Partly comparable	The same varieties, the same region, sixty years apart, and worth reading together — but the modern survey separates polymerised tannin from phenolic acids where this one reports a single permanganate figure, so the tannin columns are not the same measurement and should not be differenced.
The Klosterneuburg Mostbirnen trial	Not comparable	Austrian perry pears, and Austrian wine law reports titratable acidity as tartaric acid where every figure here is malic. The same juice reads roughly a quarter lower expressed as tartaric.

Where a dataset is not listed, no judgement has been recorded and the safe reading is that the two have not been checked against each other. CiderHQ never averages across studies: how evidence is handled sets out why.

Cultivars in this dataset

Each carries this programme’s figures on its own page, alongside whatever else has measured it.

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.

Long Ashton Research Station cider fruit analyses
National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol · research institute · registered as competent for this subject · covers 1903–2003
The foundational body of cider-fruit science in English. Long Ashton produced the acid-and-tannin classification that divides cider apples into sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp, and analysed hundreds of cultivars grown at its Somerset site. Its figures are historic measurements of specific fruit at a specific place, not universal constants — a distinction CiderHQ preserves in every measurement record that cites it.
The Archive of Cider Pomology
Hereford Cider Museum Trust / National Association of Cider Makers · historical source · retrieved 2026-08-25 · covers 1989–2012
The single most useful discovery of Mega Sprint 4. When the Ministry closed Long Ashton’s cider work, the National Association of Cider Makers took over cider pomology research; the resulting archive is held at the Hereford Cider Museum and publishes some seventy-five research reports openly, including compilations of Long Ashton material that had otherwise reached the present only through books. It is the route by which CiderHQ finally obtained per-cultivar perry pear figures, having failed to reach the 1963 volume they originate in.
Perry Pear Varieties from Long Ashton (NACM Short Report 8.2)
National Association of Cider Makers, Archive of Cider Pomology · research institute · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 1903–1963
A four-page compilation, dated March 2010, of the Long Ashton perry pear varieties: for each of twenty pears, its vigour, cropping habit, maturity window, specific gravity, acidity, tannin and an assessment of vintage quality. It rests on Luckwill and Pollard’s Perry Pears (1963), which CiderHQ has verified bibliographically and has not opened, so the figures are held at traditional-record tier rather than at research tier despite originating in institutional analysis. This is the report that ended a two-sprint gap: before it, no perry pear page on the site carried a cultivar-specific number.