Madness and Bitter Fruit — Making Perry in the Shadow of May Hill

I got high by mistake while researching this article. Monstrously high. At the Ross on Wye Cider Festival, already drunk on cider and perry, its pear-based cousin, I took an edible without clocking what it was. I’m not a weed user, so had no tolerance to fall back on.

Sometime after the THC hit, I found myself along with two others in a nighttime pear orchard. Wrapped in its deep-columned darkness, we formed three darker pillars, a stone circle mimicking the trees that threw their gunmetal forms high into the air. A gray-lilac blanket draped across the treetops in which bright white stars burned and screwed.

One of the standing stones called me over. I must have drifted away. Walking back my feet stirred up the scent of the cool silver grass. Up close, I saw pale shadows whirl where his eyes, nose and mouth should have been. “Eat this,” his blank non-face told me. His arm bridged the long gap between us. I took a small steel-blue fruit from his hand. It felt rough, rounded and firm.

A handful of Gin Pear trees stood nearby. I knew them from earlier, had seen them so heavy with fruit their branches hung like vines. They obscured the ridges and valleys beyond, but I knew that if I were to grow at that moment until I could step over them, I would see the great sandstone dome of May Hill on the horizon with its cap of Corsican pines standing sentinel beneath the ice-fire stars.

Legend says perry pears grow best within sight of this landmark, or sometimes that this is where the best perry is made, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. Were I to fly from this orchard to May Hill’s peak, my vision would stretch for 40 miles in all directions. The Three Counties—Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire—would be swallowed in its span, and more besides.

The pines were planted to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, one year after the Gin Pear variety was first recorded by Messrs Hogg and Bull in The Apple and Pear as Vintage Fruits. Evidence for a clump of trees on the summit of May Hill goes back a further hundred years at least. To locate perry’s heyday takes you back yet another century—back beyond the name May Hill, first recorded in 1703, to a time when locals called it Yartleton Hill. Or Yattleton. Or even Iarkeldon, which may derive from the Celtic name “Iarkledune,” meaning a round-topped hill.

I held the unripe perry pear and bit into its swelling belly. Thin juice puckered my tongue and turned it to wood. I felt a gritty powder coat the backs of my front teeth. I chewed the arid flesh which became concrete dust, leeching every last trace of moisture along my gums and inside my cheeks. The pear’s stubborn skin remained in the center of my tongue, shattered by my teeth and crumpled into itself, but unyielding.

There is another legend about May Hill, which goes like this: After making the world, the gods sat atop May Hill lording over the splendor of their creation. A small godling approached, claiming to have discovered the elixir of life, and handed the chief god a pear. Upon taking a bite, however, the chief god screwed up his face in horror and disgust. This harsh, bitter fruit couldn’t be the elixir of life—it was too horrible! Undeterred, the godling explained that the pear itself wasn’t the elixir. That came from its juice, which you needed to squeeze from the fruit, then ferment. But it was too late. The chief god spat out the pear and scattered its seeds across the land. From the ground where they fell, majestic perry pear trees grew, spreading their fruit to the mortals living below.

These inedible pears are the fount of perry, a jewel of a drink. It zings with lemon and lime, elderflower and soft fruit, struck through with mineral notes and structural tannins. You can blend it, but single-variety examples are more common. Not quite lost but largely forgotten, perry swirls with madness and bitter fruit. A small band of impassioned makers has cleaved fast to its memory, upholding its long tradition until more drinkers reawaken to its flavor and romance. I was awake but slipping back into a trance. I spat out the pear skin.

A FICKLE MISTRESS

I visit the pear orchard again the following day with Albert Johnson, of the Ross on Wye Cider & Perry Company. Broome Farm was a dairy farm until the 1930s when Johnson’s grandfather, Kenelm, began planting apple orchards to supply local cider giants Bulmers with fruit. Johnson’s father, Mike, made cider and perry here for 40 years, winning prestigious awards along the way, including CAMRA’s Pomona Award in 2009 and the Queen’s Diamond Award for Excellence in Food and Drink in 2013.

Johnson, bearded but somehow babyfaced, has been gradually taking on the business since late 2017. He has creative control, deciding on what to press and what to blend, but still consults with Mike. He makes his perries from full juice fermented by wild yeasts. Most are single-variety, such as Thorn, which gives a triple-kick of big acid, big tannins, and big sugars. The 2019 was electric; I’ve heard it described as “sauvignon blanc on steroids.” His Gin perry is more delicate, elderflower dancing with herbal, mineral notes and a hint of citrus. And his 2019/20 Green Horse amps the citrus up with distinct lime aromas over a juicy pear and hedgerow freshness.

I’ve brought Johnson into the pear orchard to explain why, at each stage of the process, from graft to glass, perry is so much trickier to make than cider. There’s a litany of challenges for us to work through.

To begin, the trees take a long time to mature. You plant pears for your heirs, or so the saying goes. Mike planted this perry orchard in the mid-1980s when the Bulmers nursery sold off a collection of mother trees, during a low ebb in perry’s popularity. The site, a steep, north-facing slope, wasn’t much use for anything else, and Mike thought planting a perry orchard would be “a nice thing to do.” It took about a decade for the trees to start producing fruit. Two-and-a-half decades on, none are yet in their prime.

The trees are also susceptible to diseases. Fire blight ripped through this orchard last year and left its telltale scars of curled and blackened leaves. Fire blight is caused by Erwinia amylovora, a bacterium native to the U.S. for which there is no chemical control in the U.K. “The only thing you can do is cut it out,” says Johnson. He points to one tree that was so infected he had to cut it in half to slow the spread.

Then there’s the fact that pear blossom comes early in the year, which puts the fruit at risk. “If you get a big frost in late March or the middle of April, which we did this year, then you’ll lose a lot of fruit because it will kill the blossom,” Johnson says.

He describes the trees as “temperamental,” cropping well one year and poorly another. This goes beyond the simple on-year, off-year cycle apple trees display. Pear trees give the impression they will only fruit when they feel like it. When the fruit is ripe it will fall, and Johnson must drop what he’s doing and race to pick it off the ground. A pear tree won’t drop its crop in one go, so Johnson must keep returning as more fruit falls. The tree dictates his working rhythms rather than vice versa.

Apples, in contrast, are quite forgiving, and can frequently be stored for weeks before pressing. With some pear varieties, that window shrinks to a matter of hours. “Even if you have a huge crop, depending on the variety, you can lose it very quickly if you’re not ready the day the fruit is ready,” Johnson says.

Yellow Huffcaps, one of the 30 or so varieties Johnson grows in this orchard, will “blet”—undergo a softening beyond ripeness—from the inside while they’re on the branch. Once they fall to the ground this can quickly progress to them rotting from the core outwards. “If you don’t pick them up on the day they fall then they’ve already gone too far,” he says. Our conversation lulls for a moment in the warm sunshine and, as if to illustrate this last point, tiny flies whirl in circles above fermenting windfall fruit.

Next comes washing, milling, and pressing. Again, pears make heavy weather of all this. They sink where apples float, and don’t take well to milling. “They come out very sloppy compared to apples,” Johnson says. This is just about manageable when you’re using hydropresses, as Johnson currently does. Next year he plans to switch to a belt press. This will be more efficient for pressing apples, but for pears… Johnson has been warned by other producers that he’s going to have a hard time. Pears often turn to a sludge that sticks to the belt.

Pear juice contains sorbitol, an unfermentable sugar. This makes fermentation unpredictable. “When you measure the [sugar content] in an apple, you’ll say, ‘OK, I more or less know exactly how this is going to go.’ With a pear, you can never be quite sure,” Johnson says. “Sometimes they stop and they just won’t ferment. You can try and kick them on but they won’t do it. Then you’ll come back six months later and it will have fermented out, and you’ll be like, ‘Well, when did that happen?’”

Apples can withstand some oxidation before they start to show off-flavors, but pears are more delicate. “If you handle them badly they can very quickly deteriorate and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Johnson says. Fermenting perry is prone to faults. Acetic acid can sour it; ethyl acetate can make it smell of nail polish; mouse taint can make it taste of wet rodent fur.

The complex, long-chain tannins that give perry its structure and balance can cause trouble too. “You might start with two beautifully bright, clear liquids, and when you blend them they will go milky and you’ll never be able to get rid of that haze,” Johnson says. These same tannins sometimes clump together to form a pallid waxy “jellyfish” or “brain” suspended in the liquid. They look like snot-monsters to me. These aren’t harmful, but they’re not especially appetizing floating in your bottle.

It’s at this point that I finally ask Johnson if you have to be a little bit mad to make perry. He laughs ruefully. “Yeah. Absolutely,” he says after the slightest pause.

PYRIFORM

Perry accounted for one-fourth of Ross on Wye’s production in 2013. That was the year Swedish “fruit cider” brand Rekorderlig hit the U.K.’s supermarket shelves, joining Kopparberg, which had established itself a decade before. These drinks are mostly water and perhaps 15%–20% juice, finished off with artificial colors, flavorings, and preservatives. Rekorderlig’s “Pear cider,” one of the brand’s many confected flavors, eclipsed perry overnight following its launch. Albert Johnson wasn’t working for Ross on Wye at the time, but saw its perry sales dive off a cliff. “They felt very disheartened and gave up on perry for a long time,” Johnson tells me. “I can remember that my first two seasons, ’17 and ’18, when I was having an input and helping to direct what we were going to press, perry was a very low priority. Those years we absolutely let pears rot in the soil because it was like, no one’s gonna buy it.”

Thankfully sales have improved, with perry riding on the coattails of cider’s recent blooming. Johnson says there’s so much demand now that Ross on Wye can’t make enough perry to meet it. “There is a surge of interest in [perry], and a surge of people enjoying drinking it, that hasn’t existed before. It’s just a question of how long is that surge going to last. Are we actually going to see more pear trees planted?”

“We have an obligation now, and especially me because my dad planted these trees. I feel a duty of care for them and a desire to carry on that tradition, and make sure they’re still there in 50 years’ time. I love that aspect of it.”

Johnson raises the specter of a structural weakness affecting all perry makers. “Most of us are using a lot of fruit from trees that are very old,” he says. “There aren’t that many medium-age orchards.” To make matters worse, for some pear varieties the number of fruiting trees is down to single digits. This means that one bad storm could end production of certain perries for decades until newly grafted trees can mature. Flakey Bark is listed in pomonas (books listing and describing known varieties of a particular fruit, commonly apples) as “critically rare,” with just six mature trees in the world. It gives us big, deep, tannic perries. Tom Oliver makes perry from a Coppy tree thought to be around 150 years old. It is the only mature tree of its kind that we know of. It last bore a crop in 2019. Its singular perry is typically strong with residual sweetness that Oliver describes as “both different and enchanting.”

New trees are going into the ground—in the National Perry Pear Centre at Hartpury, Gloucestershire, and elsewhere—but until they mature, this fragility remains. That was brought home to Johnson last year when the fire blight attacked Broome Farm. “We went from having eight Gin Pear trees to four in one year,” Johnson says. “My dad planted them 35 years ago and they took 30 minutes to cut down.”

To a perry pear tree, 35 years is nothing. The ones we’re sitting among now are but striplings. They could easily grow to be centuries old and still give fruit. Many perries are made from trees 200 or even 300 years old that have been looked after by successive generations, something Johnson says he finds incredible. “We have an obligation now, and especially me because my dad planted these trees,” he says looking up at the orchard around us. “I feel a duty of care for them and a desire to carry on that tradition, and make sure they’re still there in 50 years’ time. I love that aspect of it.”

EPICENTERS

It was the Romans, hungry for a taste of home in the far-flung edges of their empire, who first introduced pears to Great Britain. In his book, Pears of Gloucestershire and Perry Pears of the Three Counties, Charles Martell explains these were mostly culinary varieties that needed to be cooked before consumption. But there was one, the Falerian, that yielded so much juice it was used for making perry. Pliny the Elder mentions this in his Natural History.

After the Romans departed and their orchards fell into abandon, the pear trees they had so carefully planted began to self-seed. The fruit gradually reverted to the original wild Pyrus communis, occasionally crossing with the only truly indigenous pears, Pyrus pyraster and Pyrus cordata, to form wild hybrids, known as wildings. By the 12th century, the Severn Vale, which encompasses the Three Counties and parts of Monmouthshire in Wales (where perry is also made), was strewn with wildings in a “shadow orchard” of woods, forest, fields, and hedges.

New culinary and (later) dessert pears were introduced to restock England’s orchards over the ensuing centuries. As other pears were tamed, feral wildings persisted, despite their tannins and acids making them all but inedible. Their inimitable juice proved too good to give up. In 1629, herbalist John Parkinson wrote, “The perry made of Choke Peares, notwithstanding the harshnesse and evill taste, both of the fruit when it is greene, as also the juyce when it is a new made, doth yet after a few moneths become as milde and pleasant as wine…”

It is likely perry pears grew elsewhere in England, too, but were replaced by cookers and eaters—in the eastern counties to feed the ever-growing city of London, and in the Southwest to provision ships setting sail from the region’s many ports. The Three Counties weren’t beset by the same demands, so kept their tannic cider apples and perry pears. “That’s a potential theory, but it’s a bit back-of-the-napkin,” says cider writer Adam Wells, whose Cider Review website recently devoted an entire month to covering perry.

According to Wells, the area around May Hill is one of three perry-making epicenters in the world. The other two are in France and Austria. The Domfront region of Normandy, in northeastern France, has an “incredible perry tradition,” Wells tells me, and “sensational makers” including Simon Pacory at Ferme des Grimaux, and Jérôme Forget at Ferme de L’Yonnière. France also has Eric Bordelet who, Wells says, comfortably sits among “the top one or two perry makers in the world.” Meanwhile in Austria, producers in Mostviertel—named for “Most,” meaning juice, mainly pear juice in this case—make a perry very much like white wine. Their pears tend to be less tannic than British perry pears, but have “this wonderful bright sinewy freshness. I’d love to see more Austrian perry in the U.K.,” says Wells.

“Some of the trees in the Three Counties that are still harvested to make perry are over 300 years old. The Gregg’s Pit [pear variety’s] “mother tree” predates the battle of Waterloo, and was harvested to make this drink as long ago as that. It’s jaw-dropping. That unbroken lineage going back centuries that some varieties and even individual trees have in the Three Counties is something I find absolutely fascinating about perry. It endlessly captures my imagination.”

Elsewhere, you can find good perry from producers in Germany like Kertelreiter, Jörg Geiger, 1785, or Hohenloher; Ramborn makes perry in Luxembourg; there’s perry in the U.S. (Blackduck Cidery, Finnriver Farm & Cidery, and a handful more) and in Canada (Domaine des Salamandres). Broadly speaking, though, these are the outliers rather than the rule.

You can also find British perry made outside the Three Counties. Wells is particularly fond of perry from Paul Ross in Downside, Somerset. That county is also home to producers like Hecks and Sheppy’s, and arguably the most famous perry ever—Babycham. Launched in the 1950s, it was once described as “the first drink a woman could order in a bar without feeling a tart or a crone.” It was glitzy and aspirational; then, by the 1980s, faded and naff.

But it is around May Hill, on the border between Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, that you will find the greatest concentration of perry pears. “It’s not just that there are a lot of them, it’s the diversity of varieties within that,” says Wells. “You can have something as delicate and crisp and clear as Gin and then you can have something that’s really full-on in its acidity and its tannin like Thorn. You can have things like Butt and Flakey Bark that are deep and rich and tannic and have that incredible structure. And then you can have things like Blakeney Red that is the carthorse, in that it’s the most ubiquitous perry pear. It doesn’t have the tannin and the acidity of [other varieties] but it’s reliable, it’s got a lovely fruity middle. It bolsters out most blends and it does OK as a single variety too.”

Alongside historical precedent, climate plays its role in the area’s perry pre-eminence. Like most fruit trees, pears need a period of winter chill—around 800 hours below 7°C (45°F)—if they are to bud and flower later in the spring. They need March and April to be mild, so bees and other insects can pollinate their blossom. They also need these months to be dry. Rain ruins blossom, and frost kills it. In summer they need a balance of rain and sunshine for the fruit to grow and the sugars to develop, respectively. All these conditions exist within the Severn Vale, whereas trees further north receive less sun and more rain. Drier weather further south also upsets this balance.

Atlantic storms blow in from the southwest on the U.K.’s prevailing winds. The Severn Vale is sheltered from the worst of these by the Brecon Beacons and Black Mountains. But there is also a theory that the area benefits from more lightning strikes than elsewhere, as thunderstorms travel up the Bristol Channel and discharge their energy when they hit land over the Wye Valley. This may be spurious—I haven’t been able to confirm it with actual data—but it is true that lightning strikes can enrich soil with nitrogen in a form available to plant life.

The wealth of perry pears and the bond among perry makers are, for Wells, the Three Counties’ two “aces in the hole.” Johnson, for example, has run a monthly Cider Club since April 2018 at which producers swap stories and knowhow. “When you come to events like the Ross [on Wye Cider] Festival and you see the shared knowledge, that’s certainly a strength,” says Wells.

Wells also sees the age of the trees here as a strength rather than a weakness. “Some of the trees in the Three Counties that are still harvested to make perry are over 300 years old. The Gregg’s Pit [pear variety’s] “mother tree” predates the battle of Waterloo, and was harvested to make this drink as long ago as that. It’s jaw-dropping. That unbroken lineage going back centuries that some varieties and even individual trees have in the Three Counties is something I find absolutely fascinating about perry. It endlessly captures my imagination.”

RUNNERS AND CHASERS

Twilight, and the festival works itself into full swing once more. The barns swell with music, dance, and drink. Cheerful men in various stages of drunkenness amble past where Rob Castle and I are talking. Spotting him, they slow to a swaying halt and hoist a glass in salute. “Oi, Rob!” they call. “Your perry’s the best!” Or to me they might say, “He’s the king of perry!” Rob smiles, exchanges a word or two, and then stares at the grass looking pleased but a little bewildered.

That’s how I read his expression, at least, but it’s not always easy to tell. Johnson describes him with some fondness as “shrouded in unknowable mystery.” Castle has about him something of a younger Hide The Pain Harold. I place him around his mid-40s, with long, graying strawberry blonde hair swept back from his face and a physique that suggests he would have been good at rugby in his youth.

His reputation as a cider and perry maker is all the more intriguing because Castle is not a commercial producer. He makes just 900 liters (238 gallons) or so each year, two-thirds of which is perry and the rest cider. “That’s really down to the accessibility of the fruit,” Castle explains. “I live in a very pear-rich area.”

Castle lives on May Hill.

To drink Castle’s perry, you must seek him out in person. He sells here and there—in his village hall, at CAMRA events, and at Ross on Wye each year during the festival. Picture bottles sporting hand-drawn labels and plastic demijohns with the variety and year of their contents scrawled on the front in marker. This is small-scale stuff. It is also some of the best perry I have ever tasted.

Castle’s 2020 Gin perry begins where Ross on Wye’s leaves off. What were hints of citrus become bold seams of zesty lemon fire in Castle’s perry, overlaid by firm, gripping tannins. His 2020 Oldfield starts with a sharp edge of acid that softens into gentle fruit before blossom and elderflower take over, and finally soft tannins deftly controlled. Here is every element you want in a perry displaying itself in turn, each perfectly balanced with the last.

“The area stopped producing apples and the apple trees have died, but as pears live longer, you’ve got the remains of the past. What I like is being able to make a perry from individual trees, making a note and comparing it the following year.”

When I ask Castle questions his answers come in a roundabout way, wrapped in stories from his village on May Hill that are steeped in cider and perry. Each leads into another before it is finished, and I lose myself in a whirl of tales within tales. They all add up to smallholders being replaced by specialist producers, and a way of life fading away.

He tells me of a local character who used to scrape out barrels, who never drank but was always drunk from the fumes. People from the village would take their fruit to him to be pressed, but eventually they stopped and his millstone ended up in his neighbor’s garden as an ornament. The stone used to make the “runners” and “chasers” in the old mills was quarried in the eastern edges of the Forest of Dean, just 12 miles away—another reason, perhaps, that perry-making flourished here. These millstones were once a common sight in gardens around May Hill but are growing rarer as people sell them on. Thus the old mills are doubly lost.

The village has even begun to lose its pears. “The big trouble on May Hill now is people moving to the village with horses,” Castle says. “Horses and pears don’t agree with each other. I think it causes the horses colic. The horses eat the fruit and it makes the horse ill, and people would rather get rid of the tree than the horse.”

For Castle, perry’s appeal lies in how deeply rooted it is to the land around him. He likes to explore his village and look at the trees. “The area stopped producing apples and the apple trees have died, but as pears live longer, you’ve got the remains of the past,” he says. “What I like is being able to make a perry from individual trees, making a note and comparing it the following year.” Each pear variety, Castle says, is unique to the place it first grew. “It’s like people’s accents, it changes from one village to the next.”

BULLSEYE

Most cidermakers in the Three Counties also make perry. It isn’t their bread and butter. It won’t make the difference between a good year and a bad one, between making a profit or a loss. Still some, like Ross on Wye, choose to put the words “and Perry” in their title. Ragged Stone, Cwm Maddoc, Gregg’s Pit, Cleeve Orchard, Tom Oliver—all hold this drink of equal importance to cider and demonstrate this commitment by putting it on their letterhead.

There are twin strands at work in the survival of perry. One is romance, and the other is duty. There are custodian-makers like Kevin Minchew who feel the strong need to uphold the cultural tradition of perry-making. And there are others who are simply smitten with perry and persist in making it despite the heartache involved. Tom Oliver once described perry thus: “When it goes right it’s unassailable; when it goes wrong it’s unsellable.” I picture the makers like birds perched on a power line slung between these two poles of romance and duty. Some may sit closer to one pole and some to the other, but all rely on both to bear their weight.

For me as a drinker it’s all romance—perhaps tipping into madness. I’ve drunk three 750ml bottles by myself in the past week. As I write, my fridge holds three more, one of which, from French producer Eric Bordelet, cost me more than I want to say. Another three take up cupboard space I can’t really spare. And still I want to buy more.

I want to dig into perry by drinking different ones side by side—blends next to single-variety perries; examples of the same perry from different years; perries from the same single variety but different producers, or the same producer but different orchards.

That is the joy of being at the Ross on Wye Cider Festival: There is so much perry concentrated in one place, and so many perry lovers gathered together to share it. I recall fondly an afternoon drinking my way through an impromptu perry-only bottle share in the long grass beneath a gnarled and ancient apple tree. Meanwhile at the Three Counties Showground in Malvern, Worcestershire, visitors to the recent Malvern Autumn Show got to choose from more than 100 perries all on the same bar.

The area around May Hill is not the only place to get good perry, but it might be the best. It is home to the makers, the stories, and most of all, the trees. These are so long-lived that perry can, to a certain degree, survive despite us, waiting when we drift away until a new generation rediscovers the joys of the drink. It’s our loss if we don’t wake up to its bewitching power—to spurn it would be madness.

Words by Anthony Gladman
Illustrations by Colette Holston