About

What the heck is Super Juice?

A nearly shelf stable, wildly efficient technique for cocktail prep, Super Juice is made by combining citrus peels with powdered acids (citric, and depending on what recipe you're using, malic acid).

Letting these ingredients co-mingle for a while extracts the essential oils from the peels and forms a slurry called oleo citrate. Water is then blended quickly with the slurry and peels, incorporating all that good concentrated oil and acid. It gets fine strained to remove solids, then fresh juice from the peeled fruit is added to the mix.

Who came up with all this?

Super Juice was actual Kentucky colonel and owner of the Expo in Lexinton, Nickle Morris. He came up with the original recipe for "super juice" oleo citrate, which harnesses the power of the oils in citrus peels and is based in the same science as oleo saccharum. You may have heard of the latter, because it's been a thing in baking for a very long time.

Nickle was inspired by the work of Dave Arnold, author of the James Beard Award Winning book Liquid Intelligence and owner of Booker and Dax in New York City. Arnold has done a lot of work with acids and their effects on flavor in cocktails, and has a recipe for a similar product called "acid adjusted citrus juice" in his book.

Kevin Kos, a cocktail influencer, innovator and creator of a lot of popular online content, has a slightly different formula than Nickle Morris, and has been a big source of the technique's popularity. Whose recipe is the best depends on who you talk to, but they all work! The nuance is ultimately up to personal preference and what you're using it for.

My calculator uses an amalgamation of Morris' and Kos' recipes, adjusted slightly in accordance with the most frequent takes shared by bartenders and bar owners that I respect in real life, and on Reddit. By sheer personal preference, I lean toward Morris' specs, so take that for what it's worth and adjust accordingly. I do hope to make the time to add the ability to adjust acid ratios before entering your weights into the calculator. I will add more fruits as well, but for now this project is about mobile-first design and core functionality. Thanks!

Why should I care?

Super juice is exciting because it drastically reduces the tremendous amount of waste that many cocktail bars make in order to have quality, fresh citrus juice prepped for every service. As you may be aware, citrus juice, especially those that are more acidic and less sweet, starts degrading the instant it hits the air. This is called oxidation, and if you've never tested it yourself - know that fresh squeezed lime juice, for example, will taste markedly different in the first hour than it does in the 4th, or 7th, or 24th.

That's why any decent bar has to do so much citrus prep for every single shift. The product just doesn't taste the same the next day, so fresh citrus is the bare minimum standard.

The last craft cocktail bar that I worked at went through two 23-gallon trash cans of lime, lemon and orange carcasses per shift, Monday through Saturday. Super Juice not only cuts the quantity of fruit down tremendously, but because the end product maintains its flavor for a full week or two, you don't even need to prep juices every shift!