Left: hand-juiced lime front and back Right: machine juiced lime.Īs a juicer (not a machine, but a person who juices)—I like using both techniques. The juice that comes out of the lime first might taste better than what comes out last –so the increased yield of the Sunkist would compromise flavor.ģ. The spinning reamer of the Sunkist might be scraping some bitter stuff out of the pithy albedo. The oil extraction from the peels could be different in the two techniques.Ģ. Why did the juice from the hand press beat out the Sunkist? There are several possibilities:ġ. Lastly, if indeed the aged juice tastes more acidic (and I don’t mean it actually has more acid –ie has a lower pH these are just subjective taste impressions), maybe the fresh limeade would have won the taste test if we had added a couple extra ounces of it to the limeade. Some tasters commented that that the aged juices not only tasted better, but had more of an acid bite. If this is true, making a well balanced pre-batched lime drink several hours before service will result in an unbalanced, overly acidic drink at service time.Īged lime juice –while preferred in limeade, might not be the best for every drink application. Perhaps a margarita is best with aged juice and a non-cordial gimlet is best with fresh –or vice versa. Maybe the bartender I met at Tales will step up, reveal his identity, and give us his results. I don’t know why the 4 hour juice tasted better. Clearly we need to run more tests. What is the optimum aging time? Don’t know yet. If these results are repeatable, hand-pressing makes better juice than machine-pressing (in a Sunkist), but the effect isn’t as important as using slightly aged lime juice. Your drinks are probably tasting better at the end of your shift than at the beginning. I was flabbergasted, and so was the audience. The distant second place was 4 hour old machine pressed juice. Almost no one chose the fresh hand squeezed juice. Before I revealed what the samples were, I asked those who chose the 4-hour hand-pressed juice to choose a second favorite. They all chose the 4-hour machine juice. The overwhelming favorite was the hand-squeezed lime juice that was 4 hours old. The yield from the hand-juiced limes on the left, the Sunkist on the right.Īt 6:15pm I juiced the third pile. We then made limeade by mixing the same amount of each lime juice with measured amounts of water and simple syrup. We served it in a blind tasting at 7pm. I then put the juice in covered quart containers and left them out of the fridge. I juiced 1 pile in the Sunkist juicer and 1 pile with the hand juicer. We were done by 2:15. We weighed the samples –the machine juicer yielded 26 ounces of juice, the hand juicer 21.5. This week I was a guest speaker at the BAR program –the mega bartender class by Dave Wondrich, Dale Degroff, Paul Pacult, Steve Olsen, et al. I was to speak to 55 people who had just gone through a rigorous spirits tasting program. I decided to do the lime juice test:Īt 2pm we separated 1.5 cases of limes into 3 equal piles. When we finished bickering about  juicer merits I launched  into my standard anti-old-lime-juice tirade. Lime juice doesn’t keep. I have spent years and thousands of dollars trying to achieve good lime flavor that sticks around, but neither I nor the corporations that have spent way, way more have found a way to truly preserve fresh lime flavor. I’ve tasted the best that the flavor houses can muster –which are good, but not perfect.Īfter the seminar, a bartender approached me and said his bar had run some tests, the results of which showed that they preferred the taste of lime juice that was several hours old to fresher lime juice. I wish I could remember who he was. His conclusions struck me as odd, and this Wednesday I decided to investigate further. Is inferior to juice pressed by hand using this: Hand juicer: goes anywhere, is only as fast as its master. He insisted that juice made with a machine –specifically the Sunkist Juicer : Sunkist commercial juicer: juicing at the speed of thought. When it comes to lime juice, freshest is best…right? Not so fast!Īt Tales of the Cocktail one of my co-speakers, Death and Co super-star bartender Thomas Waugh, and I got into an argument about lime juice.
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