It's Raining Pears...

Harvesting Red Longdon Perry Pears in Worcestershire.

Perry Making

It's nice when a plan comes together. When the niggles and obstacles are few, your system works, and everything is smoothness and efficiency itself. It's particularly nice as it so rarely seems to happen!

Yesterday was one such day, and it came on the back of several preceding days of smooth efficiency in the orchard. Up at the crack of dawn, and up to our elbows in Perry Pears and water. The Blakeney Reds were in very good condition, very few rots, and since they were mostly shaken down onto a tarpaulin, not too dirty either. I was helped with the washing for an hour or so by Colin Bates, a chap from nearby Great Oakley with a surplus of apples and a desire to learn how to make cider from them. He brought along a friend who gamely set-to with the washing up.

The pears pressed very dry indeed, and released around 250 litres of juice with a thoroughly respectable specific gravity of 1.050. Not exactly a 'vintage' sugar level, but still better than last years Blakeneys which were 1.048. We were all finished, everything cleaned down, and ready for a relaxing bath when Serena & Adam of Keythorpe Rare Breeds arrived to whisk the dry pomace off for the delight of their pigs. Not only did they arrive with impeccable timing, but brought with them a wedge of unbelievably creamy Lemon Cheesecake. We sent them home with our thanks and a bottle of Rockingham Forest Cider, and still feel we got the better end of the deal!

Tomorrow it's back to the orchard with my brother Paul as a willing (?) volunteer. We've our sites set on apples this time. This perry making is all good fun when it goes well, but it's high time we made a bit of cider!

Nice Orchard Blog

We like to litter our blog with as many pretty pictures of orchards as possible. Why wouldn't we? Orchards are at the very heart of what we do. They're beautiful places to spend time in whatever the season, and of course we couldn't make cider and perry without them.

Orchards are also incredibly fragile places, often neglected, and of little commercial value to their owners. You only have to take note of the many 'Orchard Closes', and 'The Old Orchard' housing developments to see what we've already lost of this precious heritage.

By writing about orchards, and also by providing a market for the fruit through our cidermaking, I hope we're doing a little bit to help preserve some of this orchard heritage. A more hands-on approach is being taken by Henry Johnson, who is busy restoring a couple of old Bramley and Plum orchards in Gloucestershire. He writes far more eloquently on the subject than we do on his excellent Charingworth Orchard Trust blog, and the pictures are much more impressive than ours too!

Orchard Rambling

We've had a great day at the orchard in Worcestershire today. Orchard owner John very kindly helped out for an hour or so in the morning, and we managed to bag-up maybe a quarter of a ton of Blakeney Red perry pears. It was pretty hard going, but very satisfying working in such a tranquil environment.

I say tranquil, but the RAF fly very low round these parts! Other than that it was the resident Woodpeckers a-rattling, Pheasants crah-crah-ing, and the distinctive cry of a Buzzard circling overhead. I tried to video the Buzzard, but by the time I'd wound the camera up, it had gone. Instead I did a really bad video blog, which you can view below. Rest assured, I'll be quicker and catch the Buzzard next time...

Perry Pears - Raising a Stink

Perry Pears are unusual things. Small, hard, sometimes very quick to rot, and absolutely horrible to taste when eaten raw.

The unpleasant taste is the result of very high tannin levels in perry pears, sometimes so high that the fruit needs to be milled a few days before pressing to help the tannins 'soften' through oxidisation (known as Maceration). Of course it's the tannins which make perry such a fine drink, and the reason why 'ordinary' dessert pears are not nearly so good for perry making.

The perry pears we pressed a couple of weeks ago were pretty tannic, though not so high that they needed to be 'macerated' to reduce the tannin. These Moorcroft pears are renowned for producing an excellent perry, though it's a difficult pear to make perry from owing to the very short time between ripening and the fruit rotting. In common with many varieties of perry pear and cider apple, Moorcroft pears go by several names depending on where they're grown. When grown in Worcestershire they tend to go by the name Malvern Hills or Malvern Pear for obvious reasons. Choke Pear is another name which perhaps reflects the tannic nature of this variety of perry pear.

Another less common name which has come to greater prominence in recent years, is Stinking Bishop, also the name of a highly regarded artisan cheese made by Charles Martell in Gloucestershire. If you've ever come across this rare soft cheese, you'll know the reason for it's unusual name. During the ripening period, the individual cheeses are regularly washed in perry made from the Stinking Bishop pear. This gives the cheese a unique 'sweaty socks' aroma which certainly lives up to it's unusual name. On the face of it, perhaps not a great advert for Moorcroft Perry, but strangely enough the perry itself is light, floral, and perhaps one of the finest you're likely to come across. So whither the pong?

The quantity of Moorcroft pears we pressed was not that great, and the resulting dry pomace was only sufficient to fill two small sacks. We normally send our pomace off to Keythorpe Rare Breeds as feed for their lucky free-range pigs, but this batch was a little too small for the journey and therefore sat for a few days outside waiting to be disposed of with the green waste. After a couple of days in the sun, the Stinking Bishop moniker started to become all too clear. The smell was overpowering, even the vinegar flys were avoiding the sacks. I dread to think what the bin-men were thinking when they emptied our green bin this week!

We're off to Worcestershire again this weekend in search of Blakeney Red perry pears. Another great pear variety, with the potential to make really excellent perry, though formerly used to dye soldiers uniforms Khaki.... Hmm!.... At least it won't smell so bad.