Overview

Super juice is when you peel your citrus and blend the peels with water, acids, and the juice from the peeled fruit.

It has a number of benefits:

  • You get more juice from the same amount of fruit. This is why bartenders invented it--they wanted to reduce waste. You can increase your yield 3 to 8 times, depending on the recipe used.
  • It lasts for weeks instead of oxidizing within minutes. The citrus oils in the peel keep it stable in a fridge for up to around 20 days, instead of getting off flavors within half an hour. The convenience of this can't be overstated. You can make drinks at home without remembering to buy fresh fruit, and you can choose not to make drinks without feeling guilty about your fruit going bad. You can make drinks in situations where you can't make a mess juicing. You can batch cocktails with citrus in them, instead of being limited to pre-bottling shelf-stable cocktails like Negronis and Old Fashioneds.
  • The flavor and acidity is consistent across drinks. Every lemon and lime is different. But when you juice half a dozen of them at once, and supplement with your own acids, you can maintain consistency so every drink tastes the same.
  • It can taste better than the real thing? This is subjective and possibly controversial, but when I first heard about super juice I thought of it as a curiosity, and had no interest in making it myself. I happened to try a cocktail at a local gastropub, the The Little Lamb, that featured super juice, and I was blown away. The citrus flavor was stronger and deeper than with fresh fruit, coming through more clearly than the balanced acidity. I ordered my citric and malic acid powders from Amazon that night.

Recipe Variants

Super Juice was originally invented by Nickle Morris. These were his recipes for lemon and lime (he also had orange and grapefruit). The idea is you peel enough lemons or limes to get 100g of peel. Then you mix them with the acids for a couple hours to create an oleo citrate--extracting the oils from the peels. This gets blended with water to create a solution. And that is mixed with the juice from the fruit to create super juice.

Lime

  • 100g lime peels
  • 44g citric acid
  • 7g malic acid
  • 1L water

Lemon

  • 100g lemon peels
  • 47g citric acid
  • 9g malic acid
  • 1L water

Speeding it up

The Art of Drink YouTube channel, which specializes in beverage chemistry, has convincingly argued that you can skip the step of letting the acids rest with the peels, and just blend it all immediately.

Scaling it

Reddit user elkoubi built a spreadsheet that simplifies the process. If you're not practiced at this, you're not going to know how many limes to peel for 100 grams of peel. What you do instead is get some number of limes, peel them, weigh what you have, and measure the remaining ingredients to match. Then the ratios are, in grams:

Lemon

  • Water
    • 10x peels
  • Citric acid
    • 0.047x water
  • Malic acid
    • 0.009x water

Lime

  • Water
    • 10x peels
  • Citric acid
    • 0.044x water
  • Malic acid
    • 0.007x water

Tips

You want rough-looking citrus. You want to think of Admiral Adama when you peel it.

If you've never peeled citrus before, it is not anywhere near as easy as a potato. You are going to want a new, sharp peeler. And that means you probably should get a cut-resistant glove to wear, so you don't let the red water out.