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Cidery wastewater, lees and by-products

Can I pour cider lees and washings down the drain?

In short

Not without checking. Juice, cider and lees are many times stronger than domestic sewage, and at least in England, cider discharged to a sewer counts in law as trade effluent, which needs consent from the sewerage company. The rules elsewhere are different, and the local water company or environmental regulator is the one to ask.

The bigger saving is upstream. In breweries, the effluent from fermentation and filtering is about 3% of the wastewater volume but 97% of its polluting load, so keeping lees, spills and first rinses out of the drain does most of the work.

How strong it is

The usual measure is biochemical oxygen demand (BOD): how much oxygen microbes use up breaking down what is in the water. It is what a sewage works or a stream has to supply. A Virginia Tech enology guide gives figures that set the scale, shown in the table.

Anglian Water puts the same point in brewery terms: one cubic metre of beer delivers a load equal to a day's domestic sewage from more than 1,000 people. A spilled tank is a large pollution event, not a large volume of dirty water.

Typical BOD from a Virginia Tech winery wastewater guide. These are wine figures; cider juice and lees are similar materials, but no cider-specific survey was found.
MaterialBOD, mg/L
Domestic wastewater, averageAbout 200
Winery process wastewater, averageAbout 7,700
LeesCan exceed 100,000

Where the load comes from

The batch yield tracker shows where volume is lost between pressing and packaging, and so where to look first.

Keeping it out of the drain

Most of the gain is in handling. Lees can be collected and settled rather than rinsed away. Spills can be squeegeed and collected before the hose comes out. The first rinse of a tank can be kept separate from the later, much weaker rinses. Every one of these makes the remaining wastewater weaker, smaller, or both.

What happens to what has been collected is the local question. Spreading, tankering, treatment on site and discharge under consent each come with their own rules, and this page does not say which is allowed where you are.

A legal question, not a technical oneAnglian Water's guidance says that beer or cider disposed of to a sewer is trade effluent in law, and that discharging it without consent is an offence under the Water Industry Act 1991. That statement is one English water company's, about its own area. Ask the sewerage company and the environmental regulator for the site before discharging anything other than domestic sewage.

Pomace and other solids

Pomace is the largest solid by-product. Feedipedia, the animal-feed database run by INRAE, CIRAD, AFZ and FAO, gives fresh apple pomace as 15–30% dry matter and pressed pomace as 30–40%. It is poor in protein, at 3–11% of dry matter, rich in fibre and sugars, and spoils readily. It can make up to 30% of a dairy cow's diet and is not recommended as a feed on its own. Because it includes the skin, it carries much of the fruit's lipophilic pesticide residue.

Selling or supplying it as feed is regulated. In the UK, government guidance treats selling co-products of food manufacture as feed as a feed business activity, registered with the local authority, with a narrow exemption for direct supply of small quantities of primary production. The pomace topic covers the practical routes in more detail.

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