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Beyond Babycham there is a whole cottage industry of small-batch fine perries that are surprisingly perfect for pairing with food
“They’re gorgeous little beasts,” Eddie Izzard said on the subject of pears in her mid-1990s show Definite Article, “but they’re ripe for half an hour and you’re never there!” Little did she know that she was touching on one of the difficulties of making perry – the fermented juice of perry pears – a drink that remains, in comparison with cider, a relative cottage industry.
There are some notable exceptions to that rule (anyone familiar with Babycham and Lambrini will have tried a commercial perry, albeit an industrially made one), but the perry I’m interested in is made from specific perry pears grown on vast trees in ancient, biodiverse orchards in the British West Country and northern France; it is made in small batches, because, as Izzard points out, pears are ripe for a notoriously short time; additionally, they begin to rot from the inside out and, such is the height of those gnarly branches, they can be difficult to pick, too. “Perry-making is hard to do well,” says Felix Nash of the Fine Cider Company, a retailer that specialises in craft drinks made from apples and pears.