Sensory descriptor
Bletted pear
Deep, faintly winey overripe pear character from fruit softened past ripeness, met in traditional perry and in medlar-like notes.
Also called Medlar, Sleepy pear.
- Aroma family
- Pear
- Does it indicate a fault?
- No — a normal part of cider and perry aroma
What causes it
Bletting is the post-ripening softening in which cell walls break down under the fruit’s own enzymes, starch and remaining acid fall, and anaerobic metabolism inside the fruit produces ethanol and acetaldehyde. In perry pears this happens quickly and internally: the characteristic problem of a "sleepy" perry pear is a brown, mealy core inside an apparently sound fruit. The aroma is heavy, sweet and faintly winey, with acetaldehyde giving it a bruised edge, and it sits at the point where ripe fruit becomes something else. Traditional perry practice tolerates a degree of it and uses the term sleepy specifically for the state.
Mild bletting adds depth and is part of the character of traditional perry from late-dropping fruit. Beyond it the fruit is simply rotten, acetic bacteria have arrived, and the descriptor to record is vinegar.
The compounds responsible
Where the molecule is established. Some descriptors in this lexicon name a compound the compound register does not yet hold a record for; those are named in the cause above instead.
Acetaldehyde
The compound sitting one step short of ethanol, which smells of bruised apple and sherry, binds most of the sulphite added to a cider, and is the chemical signature of oxidation.
Ethanol
The alcohol yeast makes from fruit sugar, which converts a perishable juice into a keepable drink and carries most of its aroma to the nose.
Sorbitol
The unfermentable sugar alcohol that pears carry in quantity and apples carry only in trace, and the single reason a fully fermented perry keeps a sweetness a fully fermented cider cannot.
Pectin
The structural polysaccharide of fruit cell walls, which decides how much juice a press releases, whether a cider ever clears, and whether keeving is possible at all.
What raises it
Processes that increase this character, or preserve it where it would otherwise be lost.
Fruit storage before milling
Holding a gathered crop between harvest and the mill, and managing what respiration, water loss and spoilage do to it while it waits.
Sweating the fruit
Deliberately heaping or storing gathered fruit so that it softens, loses water and finishes converting starch before it goes to the mill.
Fruit sorting
Taking rotten, mouldy and damaged fruit and foreign material out of the crop before it reaches the mill, which is the primary control on patulin in cider.
Where it is usually met
Fruit and styles this character is recorded in. A record here is where the descriptor is commonly found, not a claim that every example shows it.
About Bletted pear
The term medlar is used interchangeably with this note by perry writers, borrowing from a fruit that is only edible bletted, and it names the perception accurately even though no medlar is involved.
Its diagnostic value is in the direction of the error. A perry showing bletted character has fruit held too long; one showing unripe pear had fruit pressed too soon. The window between them in perry pears is famously short.
Others in the pear family
Fresh pear, pear drop and pear skin.
Fresh pear
Clean, watery, faintly green pear aroma, the base fruit note of perry and of pear-fruited cider.
Pear drop
The sweet-shop confectionery note of isoamyl acetate with ethyl acetate behind it — a fermentation product, not a pear one.
Ripe pear
Full, soft, honeyed pear character from fruit at or just past maturity, heavier than fresh pear and lower in green notes.
Pear skin
A dry, gritty, faintly tannic pear note from the fruit’s skin and stone cells, prominent in traditional perry pears.
Tinned pear
The syrupy, slightly flat pear character of canned fruit, from heat-degraded pear esters over residual sweetness.
Unripe pear
Hard, green, markedly astringent pear character from fruit pressed before it softened.
Williams pear
The intense, perfumed pear character of Williams and Bartlett fruit, driven by decadienoate esters at high concentration.
Cooked pear
Soft, sweet, heat-treated pear character, with the decadienoate top note stripped and a lactone-like weight left behind.
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 many calories are in cider — Roughly 40 to 60 kcal per 100 ml for most ciders, so a UK pint falls somewhere around 200 to 250 kcal. Alcohol contributes about 7 kcal per gram and residual sugar about 4, so both strength and sweetness matter.
- 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 does pectin do in cider — Pectin is the structural polysaccharide that holds fruit cells together. In juice it holds haze in suspension, and it is the molecule keeving depends on: strip its methyl groups and it will gel with calcium and float the nutrients out of the juice.
- Why is sorbitol important in perry — Sorbitol is a sugar alcohol that pears carry in quantity and that Saccharomyces cannot ferment. It passes through the whole fermentation untouched, so a perry can taste sweet while being dry by measurement.
- 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.
Where to go next
- The sensory model — The thirteen structural dimensions and the twenty aroma families, in full.
- Compounds — The chemistry behind the words.
- Troubleshooting — When a perception turns out to be a problem, this is where it is diagnosed.
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.
Three Counties Cider and Perry Association
TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24