When making a sweet alcoholic drink (liqueur, cocktail, cream, etc.), calculating the final alcohol content might seem as simple as adding up the volumes of alcohol, water, and sugar. But once sugar dissolves, it takes up space — and that extra volume can throw the math off.
👉 Can we really predict the final ABV from the starting ingredients alone?
👉 And why does sugar make the calculation so tricky?
It all comes down to how sucrose behaves in a water–ethanol mix — a process still not fully understood.
To shed light on this, we teamed up with Labox Applications to:
Measure the actual volume that dissolved sugar occupies in different mixtures,
Explore the dissolution process in water and ethanol,
Test whether the final ABV can be calculated accurately.
Full results in the article.
