A Man About a Dog — Kertelreiter Cider & Perry in Schefflenz, Germany
It’s amazing what the modern British perry scene owes to an Irishman walking his dog in Germany.
“There was something fascinating about all the big old perry pear trees scattered across the countryside that grabbed my attention,” Barry Masterson, founder and maker at Kertelreiter in South-West Germany’s Schefflenz, tells me.
“They're just amazing trees and, it sounds a bit wanky, but I always see them as remains of a disappearing cultural landscape—a forlorn skeleton just begging to be recognised.”
It’s hardly surprising that Barry went on to make perry with them. He was, after all, a cidermaker already by this point, and had been brewing beer for well over a decade. But that’s only a small part of the story.
Since Barry began harvesting pears from ancient trees on those morning walks with his Border Collie, Anu, he has become not only one of Europe’s finest perrymakers, but a leading authority on this most mysterious and understudied of drinks.
“His passion is irresistibly infectious,” cider and perry writer Chris Russell-Smith says. “He has spent countless hours presenting at online cider events, engaging with cider lovers on social media, writing about the history of perry, and promoting the International Perry Pear Project.”
But to fully understand Barry’s importance to the perry scene in general, and Germany’s in particular, it’s worth a brief historical aside.
““There was something fascinating about all the big old perry pear trees scattered across the countryside that grabbed my attention.””
Though it has never been made globally at the same scale as cider—harder to make, more susceptible to problems, trees that take decades to start bearing fruit—perry’s history is far more storied than you might expect.
In the seventeenth century, it enjoyed a brief heyday in Britain as a serious rival to wine. As recently as fifty years ago there were over a million pear trees in both Austria and Normandy, specifically for perry and pear brandy. Switzerland was a true European powerhouse of the drink, with British pomologists describing one Swiss variety—the ‘Turgovian pear’—as behind ‘the most superlative perry the world produces’.
Most eyebrow-raising of all, there was a time (albeit some seven hundred years ago) when the most popular drink in Bavaria was not beer, but perry. Hundreds of years after that, the city of Trier imposed limits on perry to protect the local wine trade. And even in the last hundred years it was a mainstay of the Western Palatinate, just west of Schefflenz, in German wine country.
Today, largely due to the continent-wide mechanisation of agriculture and subsequent devastation of orchards, only a fraction of that remains. And though Britain, France and Austria clung on to perry by their fingertips, in Germany it had all but disappeared.
“In some regions, perry was the everyday drink of the ‘common people’,” Barry says. “In the last century, it was the main drink of rural communities in the Pfalz.”
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Barry arrived in Germany in 2008. He was already a significant figure in the world of drinks, as a homebrewer whose curiosity had led to the co-formation of a forum which became Ireland’s craft beer organisation, Beoir.
Soon after arriving in the tiny village of Schefflenz, he acquired harvest rights to a local apple orchard, adding cider to his repertoire—a drink he still makes outstandingly. But it was the later discovery of pear trees and perry that truly gripped him.
Illustrations by Ellie Kerr-Smiley
“I wanted to know what could be made of them,” he says. “The more I made, experimenting with single varieties, learning the history of them and how to identify them, the more they took over my affections. Never mind that their fruits make such a rare and wonderful drink!”
They certainly do in Barry’s hands. Made in invariably tiny batches—sometimes only double figures of bottles, and from one single tree—they are as faultless, intensely flavoured and faithful to the individual characteristics of their pears as any in the world.
The breadth of their flavour and texture is utterly disarming. From ‘Helden’, which cuts an aromatic swathe of tropical blooms, bright yuzu and fragrant rosewater, to his annual ‘Levitation’ blend, revelling in juicy melon, soft pear and nibbly lime, and my all-time favourite, ‘*insert chef’s kiss emoji*’, a fruit-bomb starburst of quince and pineapple and golden poached pear, each one shows a new inflexion of perry as they sashay in turn from acid to tannin to fruit to sinewy, near-vinous body.
“We are huge fans of his perries,” say Patrick Mann and Wendy LeBlanc of fellow German producer, 1785. “Fermented dry and showcasing the character of the fruit, they take you on a journey to the orchard from whence they come. Opening one of Barry’s bottles is always exciting.”
Barry does not shy away from experimentation. On the contrary, as a disciple of several different drinks, he thrives on it. His 1806 Spiced Perry is made with honey, elderflower and spices, to a recipe dating back to the eponymous year. There have been experiments with yeasts, with co-fermentation; he’s even trialling boiling perry, having read of the practice being widespread across Central Europe, France and Britain centuries ago.
“No drink exists in isolation,” he says, reflecting on the Venn diagram intersection between cider, perry, beer and wine.
“If I hadn’t been a beer geek and home brewer I would never have started making cider. You will always be somehow influenced by everything else you've consumed. I think that kind of joined-up thinking can only benefit, and hopefully inspire, the appreciation of any given drink.”
Ah yes. ‘Joined-up thinking’. This is where Barry really stands out from the crowd—his contribution to joining up the perry world is what makes him truly inspirational.
“Frankly, it's absurd how great the contributions of Barry have been to cider and perry,” Albert Johnson of Ross on Wye Cider & Perry Company says.
“He acts as a bridge between two worlds, connecting the English-speaking realm to the otherwise relatively unknown German cider and perry culture. His efforts to replant heritage varieties from all across Europe are as inspiring as they are necessary.”
““Frankly, it’s absurd how great the contributions of Barry have been to cider and perry.””
The more Barry dug into perry’s history, the more he saw how interconnected the world of perry had once been. Not only Swiss and English makers and pomologists exchanging notes, but varieties with names like Schweizer Wasserbirne (Swiss Waterpear) and Oberösterreicher Weinbirne (Upper Austrian wine pear) slipping across borders and into German orchards.
At the same time, a realisation of how rare and endangered some of the great international varieties were—Flakey Bark, down to six mature trees, Coppy, down to one—inspired him to set up the International Perry Pear Project, a traditional meadow orchard dedicated to historically significant, rare or endangered perry pear trees from Germany, Austria, France, England and Switzerland.
So far his orchard boasts some several dozen varieties and growing. Including, perhaps most excitingly, the first scion wood Barry has found of the Bergbirne, which after months of digging through ancient pomological tomes he established as the true identity of the legendary ‘Turgovian pear’.
Most importantly, he has accomplished all this whilst being one of the most engaging and inspiring voices on the ever-small, ever-quiet cider and perry social media scene.
“Barry has almost single-handedly put Germany on the map for cider and perry lovers in the UK,” acknowledge Patrick and Wendy.
I can only agree. Without Barry I would have a fraction of the knowledge I’ve gleaned on German cider and perry—indeed perry full stop. His expertise and his enthusiasm for sharing that wealth of information is almost without parallel in this small and often poorly-connected world. It speaks volumes that even Jim Chapman, world-renowned perry expert, pomologist and co-founder of the National Perry Pear Centre, looks to Barry as a source of knowledge.
“Barry is that rarest of creatures,” says Chris. “A world-class producer who is also a brilliant communicator. His tireless endeavours and boundless enthusiasm have earned him a more central place in the UK’s craft perry scene than any other European maker I can think of.”
Perry is a more complex, varied, international, fascinating and delicious drink than it is ever given credit for, with a deeper and richer history to boot. But it is also painfully fragile, and in the last sixty years has dwindled from existence in many of its historic heartlands, and flirted with extinction even in those countries in which it just about survived.
It deserves championing, it deserves celebration; it deserves someone who understands its true potential and place in the broad spectrum of drinks, how special it has been and can be again, and who wants to share all of that with the world. It deserves someone curious and inspiring enough to spot centuries-old pear trees whilst walking their dog, and to see in them the faint glimmerings of a soul. It deserves a future. It deserves Barry.
