It Started With the Apples
Pome did not begin with vinegar. It began in an orchard.
In 2010, founder Galen Williams began planting cider apples in Oregon’s northern Willamette Valley, at a time when dedicated cider orchards were still uncommon in the region.
The goal was not simply to grow apples.
It was to understand which traditional cider varieties actually belonged here.
Learning an Orchard One Variety at a Time
Traditional cider apples are very different from the apples most people encounter at the grocery store.
Many were selected centuries ago not because they were especially good to eat, but because of what they contributed after fermentation: tannin, acidity, aroma, sugar, structure, and complexity.
But a variety with a long history in England or France does not automatically thrive in Oregon.
So Galen planted them.
Bittersweets. Bittersharps. Sweets. Sharps. Heirloom varieties. Apples with unfamiliar names like Dabinett and Zabergau Reinette and sometimes even more unfamiliar flavors.
Then he watched.
- Which trees grew vigorously?
- Which struggled?
- Which produced consistently?
- Which ripened properly in the Willamette Valley?
- Which apples looked promising on paper but produced disappointing cider?
And most importantly: which varieties made the best cider here?
Those answers could only come with time.
Growing Apples Changed the Way We Thought About Cider
Over the seasons, patterns began to emerge.
Some varieties proved better suited to Oregon than others. Some produced beautiful fruit but were less interesting after fermentation. Others might have seemed harsh or bitter when eaten from the tree yet became extraordinarily valuable when blended into cider.
It became clear that cider quality starts long before fermentation.
It starts with choosing the right varieties for the place where they are grown.
That lesson eventually became one of the central ideas behind Pome:
The raw material matters.
If you want to make something exceptional from apples, starting with apples bred only to be sweet, crisp, and pleasant to eat places a limit on what the finished product can become.
Traditional cider fruit gives us another palette to work with.
Bull Run Cider Became the Workshop
The orchard was only part of the education.
Through Bull Run Cider, Galen spent years working with those apples after harvest: pressing them, fermenting their juice, blending varieties, managing native fermentations, aging cider, working with barrels, and watching how fruit changes over months and years.
The cidery became a working laboratory.
Not a laboratory in the sterile sense, but the kind built around tanks, barrels, pumps, harvests, microbes, mistakes, experiments, and thousands of small observations accumulated over time.
Every vintage provided another opportunity to understand fermentation a little better.
That experience would eventually make vinegar seem like a natural next question.
Then Came Vinegar
There was no inherited vinegar recipe. No family vinegar cellar. No master vinegar maker handing down a secret process.
Galen learned to make vinegar himself.
But he had an unusual workshop in which to do it.
Years of cider making meant access to cider apples, native fermentations, barrels, tanks, a working cellar, and an understanding of what happens when fruit is allowed to ferment slowly.
The question became: what happens if we give vinegar the same attention we give cider?
Instead of treating apple cider vinegar as a commodity ingredient, what if we approached it as another expression of the apple?
- What if the variety mattered?
- What if tannin mattered?
- What if fermentation mattered?
- What if barrels and age mattered?
- And what if we were willing to wait?
Learning a Second Fermentation
Making cider had taught Galen how yeast transforms apple juice into alcohol.
Vinegar required learning another biological system entirely.
Acetic acid bacteria use oxygen to transform the alcohol in cider into acetic acid. Under the traditional Orléans method, that conversion takes place slowly, often beneath a living mother of vinegar growing across the surface.
Galen experimented.
Different vessels. Different ciders. Different amounts of surface area. Stainless steel. Oak. Time.
Some batches developed differently from others. Mothers formed, thickened, sank, and formed again. Vinegars matured.
And just as years in the orchard had revealed which apples were worth growing, years in the cellar began revealing what kind of vinegar those apples could become.
The Same Lesson, Again
The longer we worked with vinegar, the more familiar the conclusion became:
You cannot separate the finished product from the fruit you started with.
The bittersweet and bittersharp apples that had proven so valuable for cider brought something unusual to vinegar as well.
Their tannins, acidity, and complexity survived the journey from orchard to cider and from cider to vinegar.
That observation eventually led us to begin independently testing our vinegars for tannin content and comparing the results with nationally available apple cider vinegar.
The numbers gave us another way to understand something we had already learned through years of growing and fermentation. They are published on Tannins and Testing.
Different apples make different vinegar.
Pome
Pome grew out of more than a decade spent working backward from a simple question: how good can something made from apples become if the apples themselves come first?
The answer began with planting cider varieties in Oregon.
Then learning which ones belonged here.
Then learning what they could become through fermentation.
Pome is the continuation of that work.
We make vinegar from apples chosen for cider, ferment them using the methods we believe preserve their character, and allow the vinegar the time it needs to develop.
There are faster ways to make apple cider vinegar. There are easier apples to source.
But neither of those questions is particularly interesting to us.
We are more interested in what happens when you start with the right fruit and follow it all the way through.
Still Learning
An orchard never really stops teaching you.
Neither does a cellar.
Every harvest is different. Every fermentation develops in its own way. Every barrel changes with time.
More than fifteen years after those first cider trees went into the ground, we are still learning from them.
Pome exists because we think that work is worth continuing.
From the orchard. Through two fermentations. Into the cellar. And eventually, into the bottle.
Grown From Experience
Cider apples planted in Oregon. Years spent learning the fruit. Two living fermentations. Time in the cellar.
That is where Pome came from.