The Skip Full of Gold: What Britain Actually Does With Its Spent Apples

By eleven in the morning, a decent-sized Herefordshire press house smells of two things: fresh cider and hot metal. The racks have been stacked, the cheese cloths rinsed, the juice run off to its chilly settling tank. And on the yard, quietly steaming in the November air, sits the other product of a good day's work — a heap of pale, damp pomace that looks like the contents of a giant's fruit bowl after a tantrum.

Skins, cores, pips, stems, a bit of leaf, a great deal of moisture and the ghost of juice that refused to leave. That's pomace. It is the bit nobody photographs for the label, and it is also, by most reckonings, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the fruit's original weight. Press forty tonnes of apples and you have a skip problem on your hands.

The skip is not a metaphor. It is a skip.

The arithmetic nobody puts on the bottle

Cider is usually told as a story about apples and patience. Pomace makes it a story about logistics. Every maker in Britain has an arrangement — a farmer, a compost contractor, a digester, a neighbour with a trailer — and the arrangement is rarely discussed because it doesn't sell bottles. Which is a pity, because it is one of the more interesting things about the drink.

The good news is that hardly anybody simply throws pomace away. The duller news is that 'not in landfill' covers a wide range of outcomes, some genuinely elegant and some merely convenient. Working out which is which takes a bit of asking.

Four legs, a fork and a word of caution

The oldest answer is livestock. Pigs are the traditional recipients — an apple-fattened pig is a fine West Country cliché and, in many smallholdings, still broadly true. Cattle and sheep will take it too. but here the picture gets less charming and more technical: apple pomace is wet, low in protein and high in fermentable sugar, and a ruminant given a heroic bucketful can end up with a rumen in open revolt. Fed fresh in sensible quantities, or ensiled properly alongside other feed, it is a useful resource. Fed carelessly, it is a vet's bill.

Mouldy pomace is worse than useless — mycotoxins don't care about your good intentions. So the honest version of the pig-trough story is this: pomace feeding is a real and long-standing second life, but it is a farming decision, not a romantic one.

The heap, the worm and the quiet radicalism of compost

For most small and medium cideries, the answer is the muck heap. Pomace composts beautifully — it's full of sugar, moisture and structure — and the resulting material goes back onto the orchard as mulch or soil improver. There is something pleasingly neat about an orchard that eats its own leftovers and pays itself back in grass and blossom.

Larger operations tend to send pomace to anaerobic digestion, where it produces biogas and a digestate that also returns to land. It's less picturesque than a pitchfork and a steaming heap, but it keeps the carbon in the loop rather than the sky.

The catch, as ever, is transport. Carting wet pulp twenty miles to a digester burns diesel to save carbon, and pomace is heavy with water — a fact that quietly ruins many a circular spreadsheet. The best schemes are the ones where the farm, the press and the recipient are all within sight of each other.

The still: pomace with ambition

Then there's the glamorous option. Pomace can be fermented and distilled, and in parts of Europe that's practically a religion — marc, grappa's apple-shaped cousin, an eau-de-vie made from what the press left behind. Britain has its own distilling tradition around cider, and several small producers have experimented with pomace spirits, often as a limited bottling rather than a breadwinner.

It is fiddly, licensed work, and the results vary from floral and fierce to something alarmingly close to paint thinner with a story attached. But as a demonstration that spent apples still have fire in them, it's hard to beat.

Pectin, pips and other experiments

Historically, apple pomace was a commercial source of pectin for jam-makers, and there's a small modern fringe — pomace flours, apple crisps, pet treats, cosmetics — that treats the heap as raw material rather than rubbish. Some of it is genuinely clever. Some of it is a founder's LinkedIn post with a fermentation tank attached.

A cautionary note: apple pips contain amygdalin, which is not a superfood, whatever a wellness blog tells you. Nobody is pressing pomace into your smoothie by accident, but it is worth remembering that 'natural' and 'harmless' are different words.

What a circular orchard actually looks like

The romantic version of this article would end with the word 'closed loop' and a picture of a worm. The truthful version has to admit that cider's environmental ledger is dominated by glass, bottles, packaging and distribution long before you get to the pulp. Pomace is the visible leftover, not the biggest one.

Still, it's a useful test of a producer's character. Ask where the pomace goes and you'll learn a lot. You'll learn whether the answer is a genuine local arrangement or a shrug. You'll learn whether the phrase 'sustainable orchard' means a soil plan or a font choice. And you'll learn whether the person in front of you has ever actually stood next to a skip full of apples at seven in the evening.

And if you press at home

Your two kilos of spent apples have options, none of them complicated. Compost them, in a mix with dry brown material so they don't turn into a sour pudding. Feed a little to the hens — but only a little, and never mouldy. Mulch the apple tree, keeping the pulp off the trunk. Or start a cider vinegar jar, and accept that it may become a science experiment before it becomes a salad dressing.

The second pressing

Pomace doesn't want your pity. It wants a plan.

The next time you open a bottle of dry Herefordshire or a cloudy Somerset pint, spare a thought for the heap out the back. The first pressing goes into the glass; the second act decides whether the orchard is a business with a compost heap or a compost heap with a marketing department. Both look similar from the road. Only one of them smells right in July.

And if you want a genuinely good question to ask at a farm-gate stall this winter — better than 'is this dry?' and far better than 'do you do a fruity one?' — try: 'what happens to the pomace?' Watch the face. You'll get your answer.