Hi, Friends of Cocktails! Is Super Juice dead? Today I'm responding to all the Super Juice videos and strong opinions out there, and it might be different than what you expect. I’ll also answer a few burning questions asked about Super Juice and why I make it the way I’ve been making it for almost 3 years now.
But first things first, if you’d like to learn more about Super juice and other super ingredients I’ve shown on the channel–like Super Syrup and Super Foam, the vegan foaming alternatives to egg white–you can grab my recently released e-book over on Patreon at a discounted price until the end of the year! We’ll be dropping new e-books monthly, with all of them available to our Patrons, with the Wall of Fame members receiving signed physical copies delivered to them.
Now let’s start with the question you might be asking yourself if you’ve seen any super juice videos in recent months, is Super Juice dead? No, it’s alive and well! Better than ever if you ask me. That’s because Super Juice is a concept, an idea, and a recipe, born from the desire to waste less fruit, make better cocktails, and save bars some money in the process.
And even with all of its variations, including the one I posted back in February of 2022, we’re helping so many around the world achieve just that. I’ve seen it in my travels to bars worldwide, as a guest, or giving a masterclass and doing guest shifts. It’s a great feeling seeing the impact Super Juice has had. Next big question - what’s the best Super Juice recipe?
Just like with a cocktail recipe, that should depend on who you ask. We’ll get into this a bit later as well. To me, it’s my recipe, but even that has changed slightly, to include ascorbic acid, or vitamin C, for even longer freshness and shelf life, and I now I skip the oleo citrate part and go straight to blending, thanks to Art of Drink’s Super Juice video.
That’s the beauty of developing recipes and learning about what we like the best! That’s also how the original recipe was created by Nickle Morris and Ryan Leclaire from Expo Bar in Louisville, Kentucky. In their first presentations of Super Juice in August of 2020 they said
“We’re not creating a new product, we’re improving upon an old one. Ryan and I have figured out one part of a much greater story. This is kind of like one step, so it's really fun but I encourage everyone to take this and try it on their own, try your own thing. So there were no wars, just bartenders doing what bartenders do - experimenting, creating, and sharing what they’ve learned.”
If you ever meet Nickle or Ryan make sure you pay those guys a drink, I’ll do the same for sure. Cheers guys! So let’s get down to these different recipes.
The ones that are most commonly used and compared are Nickle Morris’s Super Juice, my version of Super Juice, and Brian Tasch’s Pseudo Citrus. Brian is a Brooklyn-based bartender who added plenty of sugar and some salt, and gave his juices pretty cool names - Lemon Aide and Lime Support. If we do a direct comparison, Nickle used more lime peels, meaning more essential oils and citrus flavor.
Even my recipe has boosted flavor compared to regular juice, but to my taste it’s not so much that it would throw off the cocktail and push the spirit into the background. I went for a 6% acidity, for both lime and lemon, using citric acid for lemon and a combination of citric and malic acids for lime juice, as per Liquid Intelligence by Dave Arnold.
There’s some difference here between the recipes, with both Nickle & Brian even changing the percentage of acidity between lime and lemon. It’s true that fresh citrus can vary in acidity, but I like the consistency I get from my Super Juice. A big change in Pseudo Juice is that it adds sugar, the same amount as the weight of the peels, and a bit of salt.
For salt, you know I always add it to the cocktails in the form of saline solution, to boost the flavors, so no need to have in my super juice. As for sweetness, all citrus juices have some of it, but as a cocktail ingredient I think Super Juice works better without it. We’re already boosting the citrus flavor, if we also boost the sugar and we try to keep the same classic recipes we’re just overpowering the spirit and that’s not the point of cocktails.
If you’re just making and drinking lemonade or limeade from your Super Juice and you want it to be sweeter you can of course add sugar later as well. But keep in mind that you’re drinking a lot more essential oils than you would when squeezing fresh juice. But with a Daiquiri or two I think that’s more than fine.
This also partly answers the question I’ve gotten a lot - why is my Orange Super Juice acid adjusted and doesn’t taste like fresh orange juice? As a cocktail ingredient it’s made to directly replace lime or lemon juice, but with an orange flavor. That opens up the classic sour cocktails to interesting flavors of bergamot, yuzu, mandarin, kumquat, orange, grapefruit, pomelo.. any citrus basically.
Two honorable mentions for great Super Juice videos go to Art of Drink and Very Good Drinks. Darcy O’Neill threw the whole concept of oleo citrate out of the window by saying a high power blender will do a good job of extracting essential oils, saving you even more time. But his improved Super Juice recipe has a few harder-to-get ingredients like alpha-Terpinene, Potassium citrate, and even food grade lime essential oils, so it’s a bit harder to replicate for the masses… but don’t worry, we got you covered!
Whether you want to try the classic Super Juice, or Darcy’s elevated version, Special Ingredients prepared a shopping cart for you, so just click here if you are in Europe or here if you are in the US or the UK and you’ll get a shopping cart ready with all the ingredients you need! On the other hand Jazz from Very Good Drinks created a recipe that’s somewhere between my recipe and Brian Tasch’s recipe, after he did a really great deep-dive into the whole Super Juice development.
Now for the comparison videos, Leandro from Educated Barfly made his recently and wasn’t a fan of my version. It was great to see so many comments saying you’re making my Super Juice recipe and have been happy with it though. Interestingly, while he first preferred Tasch’s juice for the boosted lime flavor, he finished the episode by picking the fresh juice Daiquiri as the best.
As for the cocktails compared, I gotta say the color of my Daiquiri seemed a little off, so something might have gone wrong with the prep work. Also, a question was asked in the video about why my recipe adds all the juice from the peeled limes. It’s simple, it’s because it already has the right acidity, plenty of flavor, and we’re not wasting any of it.
The small amount of oxidation you’ll get from an ⅛ of the total volume is negligible, especially since you can easily save super juice in the freezer. With that said, I made 3 Daiquiris with 3 different Super Juice recipes. I don’t know which one is which… and it doesn’t matter. I’ll share these with my Cocktail Time partners, Sašo and Robi, because I think the best Super Juice is the one that’s in the Daiquiri in front of you.
Cheers guys. Here’s to everyone that has seen a Super Juice video, made Super Juice, and shared their passion for cocktails. So, what's my final opinion on creating alternatives or versions of this juice? I love it. We humans are wired to try and find something new and better, and by doing so, we push each other to improve. So keep experimenting and making new things.
That’s why, when I see something like Steve the Bartender’s video on Pseudo Citrus, saying Super Juice is dead I say - good on ya’, mate! I hope it gets millions of views! As for me, I can say that in 2025 you can expect something big regarding Super Juice. And with that, we’ve reached the Bottom of The Glass and let’s answer one last question - should you really use citrus with unwaxed, food grade peels? Yes.
It’s not safe to add those waxed peels into your drinks, especially if you’re blending them or putting them into alcohol. Super Juice saves you enough money spent on citrus that it’s worth it to buy organic fruit with edible peels. Safety first, Friends of cocktails. Cheers!