The art — and science — of the mojito

The Bacardi Bottling Corp plant in Jacksonville, Florida uses a blend of science and art to produce its Mojito premixed highball. Because while the natural ingredients used can give the mojito its mojo, they can also make the end product a little unpredictable.

“We can’t just follow the exact same recipe for every batch of Bacardi Mojito that we mix because of the incoming colour variations of a few ingredients. Using natural ingredients can make final product appearance notoriously difficult to control,” explained John Scussel, lab supervisor for the beverage plant. “A small change in lot-to-lot colour of these can make quite a difference in our Mojito, and our consumers demand consistency in not only taste, but appearance in our products.”

It’s a costly error to mix a 38,000 L or more batch of Mojito only to find that its colour doesn’t match Bacardi’s strict standards, so the Bacardi plant has begun using X-Rite’s Color i7 benchtop spectrophotometer in transmittance mode and Color iQC software to measure 2 L samples of test batches and determine just the right recipe for a full production batch.

“Now that we have this instrument, I think we can do things we never dreamed of, things we couldn’t do with our previous colour software and hardware,” Scussel said. “For instance, the software has just about every colour theory system that anyone could possibly want, so using a different system is just a matter of telling the software what you need. And the graphic representations are great. We build what we call the colour box — a rectangle that gives you a graphic representation of the colour specs. It’s easy to see, to understand and to print out. You can put it in someone’s hands and show them why they are out — ‘Oh, it’s a little too yellow’.”

The Color iQC software allows customers to record measurements, process parameters, history and other information in files that can then be easily shared among individuals or managed between multiple locations.

Since Bacardi is an international company operating 27 production facilities in 17 countries, it’s desirable for instruments at various locations to be using the same standards when they are sharing results. Scussel says X-Rite’s NetProfiler technology enables him to share standards and data with colleagues at a Bacardi plant in Spain who are also using the X-Rite system.

The NetProfiler2 system allows companies to automatically test, measure and profile their instruments over the internet, ensuring that every instrument is running at peak accuracy. Using proprietary software and certified physical standards, the system takes just minutes to produce performance NIST traceable statistics on every instrument within a network. That allows plants to exchange spectral colour data with confidence they are using the same standards.

Scussel says he is also thinking about enabling other aspects of the Color iQC software that can help with predicting the colour of products by inputting information about the ingredients of recipes — essentially performing virtual trials without mixing the formulas.

Image credit: ©Jag_cz/Dollar Photo Club