What role does the Malic Acid play in all this? I made a batch because I didn’t want to throw out 5 limes and it’s been in the fridge for a week. I don’t think it’s something that will “break” the recipe? It’s an Ube Colada I am hoping to batch for a party at a friend’s house but I think I am just going to mix it all there…. 2 oz light rum; 2 oz pineapple juice; 1/2 ounce lime juice (OR SUPER JUICE); 1/2 ounce ube syrup; 1/2 ounce coconut cream (going to use REAL instead of Coco Lopez I think).
Malic acid is simply an organic acid that is present in limes (and apricots, blueberries, cherries, grapes, peaches, plums, etc) and it tastes and hits different from citric acid. It’s one of the reasons that limes and lemons have distinct flavors.
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Umm so I’ve been trying to do a homemade Rose’s replication lately, for some classic cocktails. Something I like about Rose’s, which you don’t get from a fresh-squeezed variant, is that it stays in the background so the gin aromatics predominate. @armin ’s series on the Gimlet was very informative. Armin’s recipe is to use bottled lime juice from concentrate blended with sugar syrup to restore the (“original”?) acid/sweetness balance. It’s an elegant idea, but he’s working with German products, while the bottled lime juice I bought tasted even scarier than contemporary American Rose’s. Then I tried Morganthaler’s recipe, which is a blender-jacked oleo boosted with citric acid, and it tastes pretty satisfying, but I realized, the thing I’m chasing is not sweet or sour, but this mineral, almost alkaline aftertaste. Armin’s series includes recipes for plenty of Rose’s precursors, some of which include limestone. And I started thinking about adding baking soda, or calcium carbonate to chase that flavor…. I do have some very old powdered CaCO3 on hand, but maybe the Instagram bartender thing would be to grind up half an eggshell, even though there’s a risk of Salmonella or organ laceration, though a long time ago I did make a drink called “Leche de Monja” where you let an egg sit in lime juice for two weeks and it totally dissolves the shell, and you just blend it all up with some pisco. This is all to say I don’t want the high fructose corn syrup, but I think the sodium metabisulfite is load-bearing. So before I blow $30 on BRITISH Rose’s, does anyone want to recommend another lime syrup?
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I have eschewed making drinks with powder acids for the most part. However, I was tasked by a brand to prep 150 full servings of a drink for Speed Rack, and I opted for acidifying pineapple to 6% citric to save sourcing and juicing 75 ounces of lemon, allowing me to prep my batch and bottle it a day in advance without the need for refrigeration, and keeping the 4 left over bottles from going bad.
At my last bar, we had lemon super juice, and it made the worst lemonade. We opted away from lime super juice since it made Margaritas taste shallow. The bar before that, we juiced all 4 citruses, but our batches were citric +/- malic to be stable (3 we kept in the well at room temperature during service) without trying to be super juice but trying to be balanced.
tl;dr: powdered acids for balance but not to replace the flavor of real fresh lemon and lime juice.
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