Making extract with fresh fruit is a fun way to preserve the taste of fresh fruits while they are in season. Using fresh or frozen fruit in extracts is a lot less expensive than using freeze-dried fruits. However, when you use fresh fruits you are adding a lot of water due to their high moisture content. So you need to start with higher-proof spirits to account for the dilution rate. The higher the proof that you begin with, the more fresh fruit you can add to make your finished fresh-fruit extract taste even more concentrated.
We recommend starting with a 195 proof everclear, though in some states you can only get as much as a 155 proof. Use the calculator below to figure out how much fruit you can use to maximize flavor, while still making sure that your extract stays above 80 proof (40%abv) as it should
Happy extracting!
🍓 Fruit Dilution Calculator for Vanilla Extract
Use this tool to calculate how much fresh, frozen, or slightly dried fruit you can add while maintaining a final alcohol content of 80 proof (40%).
Commentaires
Hi Rickie, thank you so much, this is great feedback, of course it would be good to know how much alcohol to use for a given amount of fruit without having to play a guessing game! We’ll see what we can do :-)
This tool is only available online at the moment. Stay tuned!
This would be great with a few enhancements. For example I have 16 oz of fresh strawberries and 151 proof alcohol. How much alcohol would I need? There needs to be a way to calculate without knowing all of the variables as it is set up now.
Is there a version of this calculator that can be downloaded?