Fruit for making good cider and perry requires different qualities and properties from those found in dessert and culinary fruit.  True cider apples contain more tannin, and have chewy, coarser flesh.  As a result, although their juice is good, their flavours range from reasonable to inedible. Because cider and perry fruit requires crushing to extract the juice, the size of the fruit is not important and is often far smaller than dessert and culinary varieties.

There are a great many varieties of apple which can be used for cider making, although many are now very rare.  As a result there are probably only ten or so varieties now widely grown for cider making.

At Westons we take fruit from our own orchards (we have about 150 acres of bush orchards and about 50 acres of traditional, organic orchards) and from approximately 250 local farmers.

Apple blossom appears mid April to mid May.  It must compete with all the other flowers to attract insects.  Crab apples and cider varieties may be able to self fertilise without insects.

Perry Pears

Although not as well known as cider, the making of perry is traditional throughout the county, particularly around the Herefordshire-Gloucestershire border. Perry is produced in a similar way to cider, with perry pears replacing the apples, giving a distinctive taste.

Perry pears are generally small, hard, dry fruit which are horrible to bite into - but yield surprisingly larger quantities of juice.  And when fermented they make a delicious drink that many enthusiasts hold in very high esteem.

As with cider making, the quality of perry inevitably depends on the type of pear used. The classification of pears into different categories is more ambiguous than for apples but a widely accepted classification comes from Pollard and Beech.  They define the following categories: Sweet, Medium Sharp, Bittersweet and Bittersharp, although they state that the latter category would probably be better named as Astringent-sharp.

As with cider apples, although there are a number of varieties of pears, many of them are now very rare.  As a result, there are now only around 10 recognised varieties that are still grown for perry making.