The base: juice, tea, extract or infusion

What the drink is actually made of, and the choice that decides which regulatory regime applies.

Four kinds of base

Juice, pressed from fruit or vegetables.

An infusion, where something is steeped in water: tea, herbs, coffee.

An extract or concentrate, bought rather than made.

A ferment, where a culture converts a sugared base into something else.

They behave differently, they spoil differently, and only one of them brings a HACCP question.

Juice brings the five-log question

The important consequence. If there is juice in the bottle, the juice HACCP regime is in play, and it reaches juice ingredients rather than only products sold as juice.

A lemonade with real lemon, a kombucha with a fruit addition, a mixer with citrus: the juice in it is juice.

Which makes the base decision a regulatory decision as much as a flavor one, and it is worth taking with the five-log page open rather than after.

Tea and infusion

No juice question, and its own set of problems: extraction is time-and-temperature dependent, tannins change with both, and a tea base is where haze comes from.

Hot extraction is fast and pulls more tannin. Cold extraction is slow, smoother, and holds a microbial risk because nothing is being pasteurized along the way.

And tea is the base for kombucha, where the culture is fed on the sugared tea rather than on the tea itself.

Extract and concentrate

Bought, consistent, storable and the easiest to reproduce.

What you give up is the story, which for a small maker is frequently most of the product.

Two things to check before building a range on one: whether it contains juice, which brings the HACCP question back, and whether the supplier will keep making it, because a discontinued concentrate is a discontinued product.

References