I don’t know about you, but when I first got into perry, I didn’t have a clue what I was looking at. Here was this wonderful drink I had just discovered, made from fermented pears – and often not just any pears, but special pears grown for the sole purpose of perry. I wanted to know more, to taste more, but where on earth to start?
Not living in the Three Counties, perry could be hard enough to come by as it was until 2018 or so, when the first nationwide home delivery cider and perry merchants started up. If you were lucky enough to live near a good independent pub with a focus on cider and perry, that was one thing. Otherwise you could be very much on your own.
There was little information to guide you either. Perry was always a chapter in a book about cider. Knowledge was hard won; if you didn’t have the privilege of being able to speak directly to a producer, there was little available on the flavours of pear varieties, the styles of perries or the ways in which different perries from different producers, regions and countries might offer their own inflection of flavour.
The last five years or so has seen a sea-change in this information availability. Led by CAMRA’s Learn & Discover team, by the #rethinkcider movement spearheaded initially by Susanna Forbes, James Peyton and the Manchester Cider Club, and by a growing chorus of dedicated and highly-informed advocates like James Finch, Gabe Cook and Burum Collective, there is now far more to read about perry online than was the case a few short years ago. Ironically, the pandemic – a catastrophe in almost everything else – proved a boon to online information, since lockdowns pushed conversations online into a written and recorded format, and cider and perry lovers around the UK and the world exchanged knowledge at a previously unprecedented level.
But perry is still a largely unfamiliar drink; one that comparatively little has been written about, one that is rare and hard to find and which is, therefore, harder to get into. The relative paucity of information means that it is also easy for misinformation and generality to be accepted as gospel truth – one key aim of CAMRA’s upcoming book, Perry: A Drinker’s Guide, is to dispel some of the myths that have grown around the drink, and offer consumers a pathway to understanding and navigating perry for themselves.
What, then, does ‘transparency’ mean when it comes to perry? First and foremost, it means furnishing drinkers with all the relevant, necessary and honest information about a product on which they are spending their own money. Importantly, this does not equate to dictating or policing what people should or shouldn’t drink. That’s entirely their business, and it’s critical that perry avoids any sense that people are being criticised for their choices and preferences. But it does mean that we should be critical if producers – whether industrial or smaller – are withholding pertinent facts about the contents of their perry. Just as with cider, it is perfectly legal for perry – or ‘pear cider’ which, remember, has an identical legal definition to perry by UK law – to be made from only 35% juice, all of which may be from concentrate. I remember being shocked when, as a newcomer to ‘aspirational’ or ‘real’ cider, I discovered that drinks I had believed to be made from apples were in fact predominantly water. I’m sure many people, like me, are unaware of this, and would be similarly taken aback. Transparency of ingredient, to my mind, should be a fundamental legal requirement. Is your perry made from fresh-pressed pears, or has it come mostly out of a tap?
If this most basic guideline of transparency is followed, smaller producers gain more of a chance to demonstrate their unique points of difference and the benefits they offer. This not only gives the consumer a route to a product made with consummate craft, care and higher quality ingredients, but it adds inherent value to real perry to boot. When two bottles are similarly labelled, why should a consumer pay more for one than the other? But if one bottle is demonstrably made at greater cost, with rarer, better ingredients and a higher level of skill, of course it should be valued accordingly.
Distinguishing aspirational perry from industrial should be the minimum requirement. But it should be seen as just that – a base line. In order to really open the category up to new consumers, transparency must go much further. The basic and humbling admission must be made that perry is little-known, niche, poorly-understood. Producers must go the extra mile to explain what they have made, with what ingredients and how. This is very easy if you are personally selling your product to someone directly at a market stall or your own perry barn, but real transparency means being able to show your working via labels or a route to website, even if you aren’t there to sell it in person.
Pear varieties, first of all. This is the engine room that drives the flavour of a perry. If you have made a single variety, naturally the name of that pear should go on the label. And that’s a great start, but the onus should be to go further. ‘Thorn’, in isolation, doesn’t mean much to anyone. But a brief sentence describing Thorn’s racy acidity, its natural flavours of green citrus and elderflower – now we’re getting somewhere.
‘Traditional method’, ‘pét nat’ – these are great words, but what do they mean? Sure, they might be more familiar to wine drinkers than the name of pears, and borrowing stylistic language from other drinks made the same way is a hack which should be taken full advantage of. But there is a huge potential audience who might be fascinated to learn the lengths that producers have to go to to make perry in these styles, who would realise why these perries were special and might pay a higher price to enjoy them if only those unfamiliar words were unpacked, but who at present do not, because those terms have not been translated.
Transparency is simple, but it is not easy. It takes busy makers going the extra mile to describe their perry pear varieties, as the likes of Little Pomona, Ross-on-Wye and others do so brilliantly. It takes innovations such as the QR codes that Cwm Maddoc have added to their labels, which take potential customers to a webpage packed with information. It takes a level of joined-up advocacy in which we collectively consider the best way – and ways – to talk to new audiences about perry in a way that guides them into the category without gatekeeping; which brings perry into new places and allows the drink to offer a new level of visibility and inclusivity.
Ultimately, transparency and coherent advocacy from a broad and unified chorus are perry’s routes to gaining that wider audience. There is a whole world of fascination and flavour within perry; a world that is growing year on year and producing perhaps the best perries that have ever been tasted. It’s a world that more and more people are becoming aware of and interested in. A world potentially on the cusp of an international renaissance. Wouldn’t you like to share that?
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