All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Some kitchen truisms are practically hard-wired into our brains: A dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. Cast iron doesn’t belong in the dishwasher. Citrus juice is always best when it’s freshly squeezed.
But what if I told you that everything you knew about freshly squeezed lime juice was a filthy lie?
Okay, that might be a little extreme, but the myth of fresh-squeezed superiority was apparently busted when cocktail expert Dave Arnold published the results of a taste test to his blog, Cooking Issues, all the way back in 2010. Conducted with a handful of bar industry folk—whose palates are almost certainly more attuned to the subtleties of lime flavor than the average schmo—the blind taste test revealed that participants vastly preferred four-hour-old lime juice over just-squeezed (a.k.a. “à la minute”) juice.
Many questions were left unanswered in the post—most critically, why four-hour-old juice tasted better than fresh-squeezed. “Clearly we need to run more tests,” wrote Arnold, who went on to found the lauded but now shuttered Manhattan bars Booker and Dax and Existing Conditions, the latter of which he opened with PDT alum Don Lee. “What is the optimum aging time? Don’t know yet.”
Those details aside, this was nothing short of a revelation for bartenders, and one that had particular impact on bar prep, as many bartenders squeeze a whole batch of juice at the start of the evening rather than individually to order. “Your drinks are probably tasting better at the end of your shift than at the beginning,” Arnold wrote.
Inspired by Arnold’s findings, which he expanded upon in his 2014 cocktail book Liquid Intelligence, other cocktail enthusiasts tried to determine exactly why hours-old juice might taste better. One researcher theorized that a process called “enzymatic bittering” could be involved. Liberated from its cells by being squeezed, lime juice and the terpenes within it undergo a series of enzymatic reactions that create bitter undertones. The researcher argued that “a mellowing of the acidic taste by an increase in bitterness (thanks to enzymatic bittering) can allow for a deeper appreciation of the flavor of the respective citrus juice.” In other words: A dash of bitterness could be rounding out the sharp edges of acid.
I called up Arnold to see if he had any insight into the chemistry at play, but he was skeptical of the bittering theory. “I mean, is it bitterness? Or is it something else?” he asks. “In my mind, the flavor of old lime juice is detergenty. Like lemon Pledge.”
Without more rigorous testing, it’s difficult to say exactly what might make a group of taste testers prefer slightly aged juice. One problem with citrus juice is that it’s a natural product that’s not consistent everywhere and every time. The precise chemical makeup of lime juice can vary widely depending on the cultivar, the region it’s from, and the season in which it grew.
Arnold also notes that the preference for four-hour lime juice also may be a local one. “Don Lee did the same [taste] test with a group of European bartenders at the Bar Convent Berlin,” he says. “In that test, fresh juice won.” He chalks this up to different styles of prep in Europe and the US. On this side of the Atlantic, bartenders typically squeeze their juice at the start of the shift. In Europe, juice squeezed à la minute for each order is more common. Taste testers may simply have been selecting the juice that tastes most familiar to them.
In any event, one thing is for sure: Day-old lime juice tastes nasty to everyone. The bottled stuff you find in stores is usually treated with heat or preservatives to stabilize its flavor, as is orange and lime juice, which also suffer in flavor and color over time. Arnold tells me that he knows some bartenders who flash-pasteurize or bubble nitrogen through their lime juice in order to keep its flavor consistent in cocktails from day to day, but that’s not exactly feasible for those of us at home. Instead of trying to arrest the flavor of fresh lime or standing by with a stopwatch to capture its peak lime-ness, it’s better to think of “freshness” as a window of opportunity before your lime juice crosses the River Styx of oxidation.
“From the minute the juice hits the air, it starts to oxidize,” writes Toby Maloney, founding partner at Chicago’s lauded Violet Hour, in The Bartender’s Manifesto. “At The Violet Hour we say citrus juice is at its best between the stages of ‘squeezed à la minute’ up to 12 hours.”
With respect to Arnold’s experiments, however, Maloney writes that the difference between fresh-squeezed and four-hour juice is “mostly splitting hairs” to him.
“I've had many cocktails made with juice squeezed à la minute that were amazing, and I'm not sure if I could have possibly enjoyed them more if the juice had ‘breathed’ for a couple of hours,” he notes. “So, this is one of those nerd-out-if-you-please or don’t-worry-and-don’t-bother kind of situations that’s best left up to your discretion. Do tests yourself to find what works for your palate.”
Arnold agrees that the distinction is subtle, and one that has more relevance for a bar program than for home cocktail enthusiasts. “The difference between four- and five-hour-old lime juice and à la minute lime juice is real, but it’s not as big of a difference as that between either of those two juices and a day-old juice,” he says. “I would doubt that anyone could go to a bar, be handed a drink and say with certainty ‘this was four hours old’ or ‘this was squeezed just now.’”
If you want to be fastidious about cocktail consistency at home, you can set up a blind taste test with lime juice that’s been slightly diluted with water to bring the acidity down to a level where it won’t fry your taste receptors and allow you to detect slight flavor differences. My own test was not entirely scientific—it consisted of only two taste testers and limes of middling quality. But after blindly sampling juice that was fresh, four(ish) hours old, and six hours old, my fellow tester and I found that the four-hour juice did taste ever so slightly more lime-y than the fresh juice—a quality that was hard to pin down but certainly didn’t feel like it was balanced by bitterness. In a Lemon, Lime and Bitters cocktail, however, all three samples tasted nearly identical, as the other ingredients drowned out the subtle differences between them.
Wherever you end up landing on the timeline, it certainly won’t be with day-old. But if you want to squeeze some citrus a few hours ahead of your cocktail party, rest assured that your juice will still taste like it’s been freshly squeezed—or perhaps even better.
