I was recently lucky enough to be invited to give the keynote speech at CraftCon, the UK’s biggest conference for aspirational cider. It was a huge honour, not least because the event was the biggest and best CraftCon yet.

I won’t labour this preamble since the speech was 40 minutes long or so, so it’s a bit of a beast. Just to say another huge thank you to Albert and Lydia for giving me the chance to talk perry, to everyone who listened and especially to everyone who made CraftCon such a joyous celebration of cider and perry. I had a blast and I can’t wait for next year.

Thanks Albert.

Albert’s actually written a beautiful foreword to my book – just getting the shameless plugs started right away there. So I’m getting dangerously used to being introduced by him now, in person and in print. We’d probably better stop soon, or I’ll get even more big headed and start saying things like ‘thank you Johnson, that will be all’. Actually, that felt great. That felt right.

Anyway, hello!

For those who don’t know me, my name’s Adam, just like Albert said – perfectly – he wouldn’t lie to you about something like that.

I’m kind of a multi-purpose drinks writer I guess – sort of the Swiss Army Knife of making up words about miscellaneous booze, which we’ll come back to.

And it’s an absolute privilege and pleasure to be speaking to you today at this brilliant, brilliant event. To the contrarian in me it’s also a special pleasure to be opening a conference about cider – the most important conference about cider in the UK no less – with a talk about a completely different drink.

And it’s also, if you’ll excuse some colourful language, completely fucking terrifying.

On the one hand that’s partly just anxiety at speaking in front of a room full of  knowledgeable people, but I’ve been advised that imagining you as a homogenous blob is quite helpful in this respect.

And as someone who spends a lot of time looking at the bottom of bottles of perry, homogenous blobs are something I’m quite familiar with.

*           *           *

But also, when Albert and Lydia very kindly offered me the chance to give the keynote speech today I was obviously enormously flattered, and I was also like ‘yeah, perry, 40 minutes on perry, no problem, I can do that. I’ve just written a book on perry for christ’s sake.

And that’s 74000 words on perry – which incidentally is quite a few more words than it was meant to be. My publishers made the catastrophic blunder of writing ‘about 65000 words’ in my contract and I promptly interpreted that ‘about’ as liberally as I possibly could.

But anyway, yeah, I thought an hour on perry? Easy. And then I thought about it a bit more. And then a bit more, and the deadline got a bit closer and a bit closer and I thought ‘Jesus, what am I actually going to say?’

And I brought this up with Caroline and I said ‘seriously, what am I actually going to talk about?’ And she said ‘what are you on about, you love talking about perry’. And I said ‘well, sure, but normally when I talk about perry it’s to some friend or other who thinks perry is the name of some new mate I’ve made. So I can chat away in absolute beginner mode.

‘You know, I’m going to be doing this talk to probably the most perry-literate audience in Britain, one of the most perry-literate in the world, I can’t just go ‘so, there’s this drink, and what you do is you get some pears, and you pick out the wasps and the filth and the squolch and so on and then you give them a bit of a squeeze…’

Like, I’ve pressed, I don’t know, maybe a tonne of pears in my life. Maybe a tiny bit more than that. And a big chunk of that was for photos for the book, and none of it was actually going to be my problem after pressing was finished.

So if you’re looking for tips on your actual making of perry in this talk then golly you are right out of luck, because I have absolutely nothing to offer. Other than maybe keep everything clean and don’t put stuff on sale when it’s got mouse. Which probably you already knew.

And so I said to Caroline, ‘what on earth am I going to say to these people? I’m not a maker, I’m a blogger. If I just go on about basics of perry it’ll be like the club secretary spending half an hour reading back the minutes. And no one wants to listen to that.’

And she said ‘well, at least you’ll make it fun.’ Which was really helpful, thanks Caroline.

But before we get stuck into all the fun, just to say that the first thing you need to know about me as regards this speech is that I am a complete technophobe. I can manage anything invented after the Black Death about as well as spiders can manage vacuum cleaners.

So there’ll be no slides, no multimedia presentations, nothing like that. Just me and this lectern, which I’ll be clinging to for dear life, a wad of speech papers you could swat a tarantula with and my quite monotonous voice.

And there’ll be no breaks, no tastings, no passing notes about between you. Doors are locked from the outside, and if you have any questions as we go along, feel free to put your hand up, and I’ll feel free to ignore you until the end, which is when questions will be taken if you’re good, and if I reckon I know the answers.

*           *           *

Right. Perry. What can I possibly tell you about it?

Well, as I say, my kind of main connection to the world of cider and perry is that I’m a blogger. Mainly for a website called cider-review.com, which I founded with James Finch a few years back.

And if there’s one thing bloggers know it’s talking about ourselves.

So if you’ll excuse a minute of unedited solipsism I’m gonna do just that for a moment and promise that it’s relevant, and you’re just going to have to trust me, because I’ve got the mic.

So my journey was a bit convoluted. A scenic route if you like. But it’s all soaked in other sorts of booze.

I guess one of the most important points was discovering at a tender age that I didn’t like macro beer very much, but could more or less rub along with macro cider. And so cider became the sort of regular pint at the pub, without being something I ever gave much thought to.

And a few years along the line a friend’s dad gave me a glass of wine that tasted a bit different to other glasses of wine I’d been given, and I thought ‘Jesus, what one earth’s this, why does it taste like this?’ And so I asked him, and he was only too happy to explain to me at great length, and one thing led to another and I spent the best part of 10 years working in the wine industry, as you do.

And about 9 years ago, a couple of years into working in wine, I started blogging about whisky. Which I’d always been interested in, since it was my dad’s drink, and we always used to visit the Arran distillery up in Scotland. So I’d always been fascinated by it.

I remember being about 7 or 8, being dragged round this big factory for some kind of odd grain poison, probably very bored, couldn’t care less, and then at the end of the tour they did this blind tasting for the adults and dad said ‘that one’s this and this one’s the other’. And I was like ‘wow. That is incredible. That is magic. They look exactly the same.’ And after that I was hooked. I always made us go back to the distillery, I had to like whisky, and in my younger years when I didn’t really like whisky, I told myself sternly that it wasn’t the whisky’s problem, it was my problem, and I’d damn well pull myself together and persevere. And persevere I did.

And so anyway, at this point years ago I remember a friend of mine had started a blog about baking, which I thought was pretty cool, but assumed that, being internet stuff, I wouldn’t have the first clue how to do it.

And then my then-partner explained that there were these marvellous sites where the blog was basically built for you, and all you had to do was upload some words into these boxes, and maybe a picture or two and away you could go.

And I thought that was wild. Anything you want, anything at all, write it in the box, boop boop boop, press publish, let – I don’t know – the internet robots do their thing, nothing anyone can do to stop you, and some people might even read it. What a time to be alive.

So I started blogging, and I wrote about whisky for about six years, for a bunch of different sites but mainly one called Malt Review. Because I realised it was even easier to just send some other stooge a word document and let them do the actual uploading.

And then somewhere along the way I started falling out of love with whisky a bit. Or maybe not out of love with whisky itself, but out of love with most of the whisky industry.

It seemed increasingly cynical to me. I don’t know how much you maybe know about whisky, but it’s almost entirely owned by these huge, huge conglomerates, it was quietly introducing all sorts of efficiency savings at the expense of the actual product, and all the while it was premiumising and pricing itself out of reach of most people. To the point that there was no way I could have got into it properly if I was at the start of my journey again.

This is the point where I should admit that I currently work in the whisky industry. But, you know, it’s very, very different in my case, obviously. Come chat to me about it afterward and I’ll chew your ear off.

And so anyway I was increasingly wondering why I was writing about this industry which got so much fanfare, so many column inches, and didn’t necessarily deserve much of the praise it was being given.

And at the same time, somewhere along the way, I’d come across ciders that weren’t the ubiquitous macro brands. That talked about things like ‘high juice content’ and apple varieties and styles and something called keeving, which I didn’t understand one bit but sounded very exciting.

And here was this whole world of flavours and textures and stories and characters that no one seemed to be writing about all that much, and which was fascinating and complex and clearly deserved more than it got.

And I had all these questions about it – what do the apple varieties actually taste like? What are the different styles? What are the flavour differences between countries and regions?

And some of those questions could be answered by makers, or by brilliant books by people like Gabe and Susanna and Pete Brown and Bill Bradshaw and Felix, but lots of them I still couldn’t find the answers to.

And so I said to my editors, ‘sorry, I don’t think I can write about whisky any more, I want to write about cider’. And quite surprisingly they said ‘well, how would you like to write about cider on our whisky website?’

And I thought a bit about it and eventually I sad ‘sure, that sounds like something that’ll only confuse and annoy a few people.’ And off we went. And we confused and annoyed a few people, who wondered why their Saturday whisky content smelled so much like apples now, but also quite a few people seemed to be up for learning about something new.

And eventually that cider column broke off from the Malt Review mothership, and became its own site, called Cider Review, because I’m nothing if not inventive when it comes to names. My book’s called ‘Perry, A Drinker’s Guide,’ so basically I think I’m going to be first against the wall when ChatGPT steals all the writing gigs.

So anyway, I was writing about the world of whatI’ve come to call ‘aspirational cider’, and spending a lot of time in Herefordshire.

And inevitably when you spend a lot of time in Herefordshire you notice that there’s this other drink that a lot of cider producers seem to be making. And it’s even smaller and rarer and more niche than cider, and it’s made from pears, not apples, and it tastes quite different.

And honestly, having learned just a very little bit about this other drink called perry, I gave it a little bit of thought and I thought ‘golly. These perrymakers. They actually … they kind of seem like idiots.’

I mean, I’m not being funny. I’m very serious. Like, on the face of it what part of the human brain looks at anything to do with making perry and thinks it’s a good idea?

But having concluded that perrymakers were idiots, I looked deeper into it all, I really learned a bit more about perry, I went down the rabbit hole of this drink. And what I came to realise is that I am an excellent judge of character. Perrymakers, absolutely, are idiots.

So, starting with the fruits, right? I mean perry pears, they’re just not sensible at all.

Like as far back as written records in Britain go, perry pears have been slapped with a big warning sign saying ‘these are inedible. Do not eat them.’

John Beale, mid seventeenth century. Godfather of British pomology – so another idiot. He says of the Barland pear, which is the first properly named pear, ‘without hyperbole I tell you that our hungry swine will not bit into these pears.’

So, fruits that are rejected by pigs. And the reason I say that the Barland pear is our first properly named pear is that most of the fruits talked about before that were just called ‘choke pears.’ One of them was called ‘the great choke’.

Now I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that having a crack at fermenting something called the great choke, or something inedible to pigs is very much the same energy as a teenage boy seeing how close to his eye he can get the flame of a cigarette lighter.

And it’s not just that some of these pears will literally take the skin off your mouth. It’s everything else. Oh, grow on 60 foot tall trees is it? That’s convenient. Can’t see any possible challenges there.

Ripening habits. Oh great, rock hard, oh great, rock hard, oh great rock, hard. Hang on let me just quickly do something over here… oh great, mulch. Nonsense.

Pears with 24 hour ripeness windows are not something that want to be made into a drink thank you. Pears that rot from the inside out on the branch are not pears that want to be made into a drink thank you. 

And the hits just keep coming. I mean fruits that don’t want to float, that just gum up presses, that take ten times as much unclogging as apples – these just aren’t sensible.

A drink that you can put through a filter, and then on the other side will still manage to conjure sediment that looks like ET’s frontal cortex – this is not a sensible drink.

Why on earth would you bother with something which cannot go through malolactic fermentation without turning into acetic acid? Why would you make something which goes ‘oh, nice sulphites you haven’t added there, shame if there was an at least even chance I’ll develop mouse.’? Why would you make something where you can take one perfectly clear drink, another perfectly clear drink, blend them together and get milk?

I mean there’d have to be a really, really big upside to all that, right? And yet you go through these thousand natural shocks and what you’ve got is something that barely anyone outside this room has even heard of, and the ones who don’t think you’ve just made babycham are asking ‘do you mean pear cider?’

And of course, if I’m standing here saying you’re all idiots for making perry, I mean God, how much of an idiot do you have to be to write about perry, entirely in your own time and mostly for free? What on earth would possess you?

*           *           *

And the answer, of course, is that drink. That frustrating, remarkable, magic, evocative drink.

I’ve ended up spending most of my adult life, and a couple of years before it, doing my damnedest to try any liquid that yeasts have acted on in anger. Wine, whisky, cider, beer, mead, mezcal, brandy, rum, you name it. Traditional method Danish Rhubarb, yes please. Carrot wine co-fermentation? Bring it on.

So I speak with total conviction and a healthy wodge of practical research when I say that perry is a total one-off. A complete original, nothing like it. And that great perry, really great perry, has the potential to be the equal of anything ever fermented.

And it feels like a crime to me that something that can be this good, this distinctive and characterful and elegant and ethereal, but also this evocative and insistent and robust, which has this huge, huge potential breadth of flavour and character, should be so little known about. Should get so little attention. And be so generalised about and almost wilfully misunderstood.

And the most remarkable, frustrating thing of all is how compelling the whole story of perry is. That it isn’t just something delicious to drink, but that it contains this wealth, this library of characters and plots and twists and turns through history.

*           *           *

Some of it, obviously, most people in this room already know. The sixty foot trees – trees that can age for over 300 years – I mean that is absolutely wild. When they started harvesting some of the oldest existing trees still standing in the Three Counties or France or Germany or Austria the French revolution hadn’t yet happened. It was closer to Henry the Eighth or the Wars of the Roses than it was to today.

And those trees are still going, they’re still bearing fruit, they’re still making perry. I mean if that doesn’t blow your mind then frankly you don’t have a mind worth blowing.

But there are other stories too, stories that haven’t really been brought up much before – at least not in the UK. In fact it’s amazing, once you really start digging, just how many kind of astonishing stories there are that swirl around this amazing, mysterious drink.

For instance, did you know that at one point the most popular drink in Bavaria wasn’t beer, but perry? I couldn’t believe it when I found that out, but it’s true.

It probably isn’t true that Napoleon called perry the champagne of the English – at least I’ve not found any proper evidence for it whatsoever – but it is true that English wine merchants were filling bottles labelled as wine or champagne with perry for centuries. In fact winemakers in the Loire valley were still padding out their wines with perry within the last century. And trains packed with tanks of perry were constantly heading from Normandy to champagne itself for the same reason.

There are a few less wholesome stories like the men in 18th century America who smashed up a man’s house and threw stones at his adopted son because he wouldn’t share his perry with them. And there are wonderfully wholesome stories like the Swiss pear rated the best for perry in the world in 17th Century Britain, but whose identity was lost until an Irishman in Germany went on a personal quest to rediscover it.

Or the French pear spirit smuggler who was inspired by James Bond to modify his Citroen so it could billow smoke, drop nails, dazzle pursuers with ultra-strong lights and change its registration plates whilst driving. He was only caught in about 1987, and he had a whole fleet of these cars – and all of them could carry about 400 litres of illicit spirit at a time.

Almost everyone in this room has probably heard of May Hill, and they may even have heard the story of Gods sitting at the top of it, spitting out perry pear pips. But did you know there’s a real reason that perry pear trees grew so profusively here? That it isn’t Gods, it’s dirt. It’s the change in the soil round the south west and heading into the Severn Valley that meant apple trees got a bit fussier, so pear trees were planted and left there instead?

As an aside though, we should definitely pick our stories when it comes to perry. For some reason, the classic story that everyone loves to share is that perry contains sorbitol and is therefore a ruthless laxative. I’m not sure quite how they think that passing this on will massively help increase perry’s sales and popularity, but let me just say here and now that if that was actually the hard and fast case I would be a ghost.

In fact Ray Williams, who probably knew more about perry and perry pears than anyone before or since reckoned that the bad reputation mainly came from the historic harvesting of rotten fruit, so unless you have a real sorbitol sensitivity, and the overwhelming majority of people don’t, let’s maybe stop telling everyone that perry makes people shit themselves, yes?

*           *           *

All of us – everyone in this room – is in a remarkable, privileged position when it comes to perry. Not only for being in the tiny minority of people anywhere in the world who knows what perry is and how wonderful it can be. But because right now we are sitting just a few miles from one of three places in the world where perry is still made in abundance.

One of three places in the world where there are still relatively high quantities of perry pears – of these inedible, tannic, acidic pig-reject, troublesome, inedible fruits that ferment, with care, into magic.

And that is so special and such a privilege, but it is so, so critical that we share that. We need to tell people about perry – we need to shout about it – we need to go out of our way to get it in front of new people, new drinkers, more diverse audiences, because they are not just going to happen upon it. No one in recorded human history has ever just accidentally stumbled into Herefordshire.

I’m sorry, it just doesn’t happen. We can’t just wait in the Three Counties telling ourselves that the gate’s open if anyone comes along – we have to take the best perries we can find and we have to go to people, new people, and say ‘try this, it’s amazing, it is genuinely like nothing you’ve tried before.’ And I know that can be hard, and out of a lot of peoples’ comfort zones.

I always think most cidermakers, and especially most perrymakers, are miles too self-effacing. I’ll go up to them and say ‘wow, this thing you’ve made is incredible,’ and they’ll go ‘ooh, no, not really, not sure, bit rubbish.’ I say to Justin, one of my Cider Voice co-presenters that one of these days we should just reply with ‘oh, sorry, you’re right, my mistake, what a horrible drink you’ve made’. Except it isn’t, it’s a brilliant drink, and you should be proud, and you need to be proud, because if you aren’t, if you don’t shout about this wonderful thing you’ve made, perry will die out. It will come to an end. It’s as simple as that.

A hundred years ago, you could draw a band right across the upper-middle of Europe. From here in the UK, right across Normandy, northern France – including champagne itself, incidentally, through Luxembourg, south Germany, Switzerland, Austria, maybe even a bit further. All along the line where people stop making wine and start making beer. And all along that band people weren’t just making a bit of perry, it was a central part of rural culture.

A couple of hundred years ago, winemakers in the city of Trier in Germany were so worried about being edged out by perry that the city started taxing imports to protect vintners. This caused such an outcry that the mayor had to row back and offer a ‘personal consumption’ perry allowance, tax free, of 320 litres per person.

At the start of the 20th century France’s average national perry production – not including what they were distilling, was 2 million hectolitres a year.

The Mostviertel region, in Austria, had over a million perry pear trees in the 1930s. The Domfrontais in Normandy had almost one and a half million and it’s about twice the size of this room. Germany probably had more than either. Switzerland definitely did.

Today, Austria, a million trees down to about 200,000. Domfrontais, one and a half million, down to 100,000. In the UK no one’s kept count because the Tories shut down the Long Ashton Research Station who were the only people who did.

In Switzerland there were over 16 million fruit trees in 1950 and by 1975 over 11 million of them had been torn down, burned down or blown up with plastic explosives. It had the highest concentration of fruit trees per square kilometer in the world, a perry culture probably beyond anywhere else and today I only know of two perrymakers in the whole country, and one of them’s bought up a farm in the Domfrontais because getting pears in Switzerland is just too hard.

Makers in Luxembourg? One off the top of my head. Perrymakers in Germany, a handful.

Add to that the likes of fireblight, an incurable bacterial disease that’s ripping through orchards in the Three Counties at the moment. Or pear decline, spread by insects called pear psylla, that attacks the graft union and can kill a tree in weeks.

And that’s before you consider that most people don’t know what perry is. And before you factor in the criminal insouciance of a government that doesn’t give a damn about sustainability, biodiversity or the environment, thinks nothing of tearing out centuries old trees for train lines that haven’t been built yet, which may never be built, has no interest whatsoever in promoting things being made well and with care – in fact actively discourages it and rewards the worst excesses of capitalist cynicism. Not to mention local councils in the heart of the 3 Counties themselves who will wave through the destruction of perry pear trees because they attract wasps on a road called fucking Pear Tree Close.

Perry is not safe. Perry cannot be complacent. Perry cultures can disappear – some already have.

*           *           *

And breathe.

The most wonderful thing about watching aspirational British perry across the last few years has been the space it has given us to hope.

All the challenges, the threats, the risks, they’re all still there. Perry is still a niche. But thanks to the advocacy of people like Jim Chapman, Charles Martell, Gabe Cook, Susanna Forbes, Dick, Cath, Nicky and the Manchester Cider Club, Alison and the team at the Hop Inn, Helen and Rachel at Burum Collective, James Finch of course. Thanks to online retailers like the Fine Cider Company, like the much missed Scrattings, like The Cat in the Glass, Aeble, The Cider Vault – and most of all thanks to makers like Tom Oliver, Chris at Ragged Stone, the team at Ross on Wye, Cwm Maddoc, Bartestree, Gregg’s Pit, Little Pomona and so many others, really great perry has started to lift its head up.

It’s sometimes hard to think back to 2019, when the first CraftCon took place, and remember the scene as it was then, but I promise you that the face of British perry looked nothing like it did today. Online conversation, advocacy, interest has flourished. People who never or barely ever drank perry before are now devotees – I’m one of them. National newspapers have written on it, big beer publications, big wine publications have covered it.

And all those makers I just mentioned have been augmented by a corps of brilliant small producers from Herefordshire to Kent, from Cornwall to Merseyside, from Wales to Lancashire, from the East Midlands to Scotland. Perry is ascending.

And what’s really marvellous – what’s so, so exciting and inspiring – is that it isn’t just ascending over here.

In fact if anything, Britain is just catching up with an international perry renaissance. There’s the Domfrontais, in Normandy, that lobbied for protected designation of origin status for their perry in 2000, has since planted 60,000 perry pear trees, saved their category, improved their product and started to push boundaries in innovation, in bringing in new producers and engaging with other drinks.

Or Austria, where perry culture was almost dead in the early nineties until a group of makers banded together to stop the rot, join up with restaurateurs, sommeliers and retailers to form a group dedicated to promoting perry, improving standards and championing the drink. Again, tens of thousands of trees planted, best practice on hygiene in the cellar absolutely ubiquitous, perry up from its knees and standing proud again.

And how about America? Such an inspiring, dynamic, joined-up cider movement as we all know, with the American Cider Association, over a thousand makers across every state, incredible, incredible ciders being bottled – and of course CiderCon, the inspiration for CraftCon – the biggest conference in the world.

And you know what? They absolutely love perry, they’ve been quietly making it for four hundred years on and off, they’re taking it seriously again, and they’re getting really, really good at it. The likes of Eve’s, South Hill, Blackduck in the Finger Lakes in New York State, Dragon’s Head, Raw, Nashi Orchards, Empyrical, Blossom Barn in the Pacific Northwest. Makers in the MidWest, makers in California. I was lucky enough to be talking about perry at CiderCon this year, with Tom and Albert, and the room was packed with people who absolutely love this drink.

And it’s not even countries with perrymaking history that are interested. We’ve got Marco and Andrea over for this year’s CraftCon to tell us about Italian cider, well they got in touch with me whilst I was writing the book to tell me about all the makers who are having a go at perry. There are makers in the Netherlands – UWE, Elegast. Makers in Poland, makers in Ukraine, makers in Spain and Canada and Estonia, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan.

And the coolest thing of all is that each of those countries is bringing its own pears, its own mindsets, its own cultures and techniques and food pairings to the drink. They’re broadening the perry flavour spectrum that we thought we understood into something greater and more inspirational than we could have imagined but every single one of them looks over at you, at perrymakers in the UK, at the perry pears that grow not so far from where we are now, and thinks ‘I want to drink more of that. I want to learn from them. I want to work with those fruits’.

Alright, fair enough, the makers in Normandy might not so much.

All of you who make perry in this room, you are all part of a global perrymaking family that I think is probably bigger than any of you know. You make drinks that people all over the world are aware of and wish they could have access to. I cannot begin to tell you how many people – makers and drinkers – in America told us they wished they could get your perries over there.

Perry has always been a little insular. A little shy and maybe a little inward-looking. A little unwilling to join up across cultures; to shout about itself and get the praise that it so richly deserves.

So if this speech is anything at all – and don’t worry, I have my doubts too – it’s really just an urging to perrymakers and perry retailers and perry lovers to do that shouting. To build on the incredible, inspiring work that has already begun. To reach out to other cultures, engage with what they’re doing and making. Join this world, this amazing secretive world up and drag it into the limelight.

Because there is so much to know and learn and share here. Such a mesmerising world of flavour to unlock. Those pears, those maddening, wonderful pears – pears like Barland, harvested in the 17th century, still making beautiful perry today. Taynton Squash, championed for centuries, saved from extinction by the Woolhope Club, still giving those big, bold, tropical flavours.

Pears like Green Horse and Thorn that are all lime and elderflower and hedgerow and vivid, electric brightness. Or soft, juicy, floral charming pears, pears like Blakeney Red or Hendre Huffcap. Huge, fruit-bomb, tropical pears, your Moorcrofts, Tayntons, Winnal’s Longdons maybe. And those glorious, enigmatic, evocative, impossible to pin-down pears that taste of woodland walks and herbs and minerals and earth and petrichor, your Butts and Flakey Barks, your Oldfields, maybe your Gins.

And that’s just twelve varieties from one country. Just think of the flavours there are across the hundreds more here alone, the hundreds of different pears in France, in Austria, in Germany. Think of all the ways those flavours can be unlocked and expressed and augmented by all the different styles and mindsets across the hundreds of perrymakers throughout those cultures.

Think of the keeved perries, the bottle conditioneds, pet nats, traditional methods. Think of fortified perries like Austria’s sumptuous Mostellos, or fortified pear juices like the mistelles of France, or the one Charles makes in Gloucester. Perhaps some of my favourites of all, think of the perries that are simply beautiful, still evocations of pear or pears, of place and maker and time.

I’m making myself far too thirsty, so I’m going to start winding up. But I just want to leave with a last half-thought.

I took a long and winding road to perry through a lot of different drinks. And it is partly because of that road, because of that frame of reference that I can stand here and tell you that perry is beyond special. And Three Counties Perry – indeed British perry full stop – is one of the jewels in its crown.

It has been kept alive because it is special. Because a small number of dedicated, optimistic, brave, resilient, creative, stubborn souls knew what a treasure it was. A good few of those people are in this room today and we owe them a huge, huge vote of thanks.

The fact that I’m here today in front of you is testament to the power of the miracle drink that is perry. A drink so precious and elegant and distinctive and gorgeous and soulful that it’s worth going through all the endless tribulations that making it entails. A drink so compelling it’s worth sitting down in the evenings after work for a year and trying to write a book about.

Because honestly. Honestly. If you knew that a drink like that existed, wouldn’t you want to share it?

It’s about time perry had its moment. So cheers to perry, and if you make or sell or drink it, cheers to you. Thanks for listening.

All photos courtesy of, and copyright © Helen Anne Smith and TCCPA 2024.