How to calculate liqueur alcohol percentage and final volume

I'm planning to make an homemade liqueur, like Limoncello, but with oranges. To begin, I've added orange zests to 500 grams of 96% alcohol. Now, I'm puzzled about the sugar syrup.

In the beginning I thought that 500 grams of alcohol + 500 grams of water + 500 grams of sugar = 1.5 liter of liqueur at 33% of alcohol. After some research I learned it's not that simple. I should consider density, convert mass to volume, and probably something else.

So here I am, looking for a tool/spreadsheet/formula to do this math. Something as simple as: given the amount (in grams) of alcohol, sugar and water, you will obtain a solution of a certain amount in liter with a certain percentage of alcohol.

Any help would be appreciated, I'm a total newbie.

Topic alcohol alcohol-content homebrew

Category Mac

1
answered at

Let's see if we can reverse engineer this :)

The density of 95% ABV spirit is ~ 0.8

Therefore: 500g/0.8 => ~625ml of 95% spirit.

500g water is 500ml. but your 500g of sugar as it disolves will affect the volumes. In future I would make your sugar syrup, and then measure it in your 250ml cup, and measure out your spirit also in said cup. Will make the calculations much easier and remove the guess work.

Having said that ... 500g sugar in 500ml water is 50/50 w/w solution and is a 50 brix solution. Using a Brix lookup table we can see that the density of this solution is 1.22854.

Therefore your 1kg of sugar solution 50/50 w/w has a volume of 1/1.22854 => 814ml.

If we take the 95% abv volume as roughly what it would be for 96% and take the 814ml. Then we have:

0.96*625 => 600 ml of total alcohol.

625+814 => 1439 ml total volume

that gives us 600/1439 * 100 => 41.69% ABV.

Or at least something close to that. Hope that helps.

1
answered at

Most alcohol is labeled with ABV (Alcohol by Volume). Therefore, if you have 1L of 96% alcohol mixed with 1L of water, you will have 2L of 48% ABV. Looking at density is something we do when fermenting to determine how much sugar has been converted to alcohol, but here you are just diluting and adding sugar; so you will not need to worry about densities of liquids.

Summary: Use volume to calculate your ABV

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