Built on the studio's free "Build a Better Non-Alcoholic Drink" framework. Set your base, your occasion, and your sweetness — calculate for a working ratio and a read on all five balance dimensions. It's a starting structure from studio field practice — always taste and adjust from there. Fresh cordials and shrubs are perishable — the Shelf Life & Storage Calculator gives a batch a use-by date. Working with a mild juice like orange, grapefruit, or pineapple? The Acid Adjustment Calculator brings its acidity up to citrus-strength before it factors into this ratio.
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The Non-Alcoholic Balance Calculator is free to use once you're signed in — every input, every calculation, every result. No card required. A paid Studio Membership is optional and adds saving to your Field Log, CSV export, named presets, and sync across every device.
Set your base, occasion, and sweetness to see a recommended build and a five-dimension balance read here.
Drink Theory Studio — Batch Label
Field notes
Alcohol's absence is measurable, not just felt
Published sensory work on alcohol-free beer (Scientific Reports, 2020) found ethanol does three separate jobs: it raises perceived viscosity and body — 0% and 0.5% samples were rated markedly more watery than the same beer at 5% — it measurably increases aroma release by pushing aldehydes and esters into the headspace, partly by denaturing salivary alpha-amylase so fewer aroma compounds get bound, and it adds a warming trigeminal sensation read as fullness. Remove it and you are down three things at once, none of which sugar replaces. That is why Body is the first lens here rather than an afterthought.
Body is the one most people skip
Sweetness and acidity are easy to reach for; body is what makes a drink feel like a drink rather than flavoured water. Tea tannin, a light syrup, verjus, or even controlled dilution all add weight. If a drink tastes correct but feels thin, the problem is almost always here.
Bitterness buys you dryness
Without alcohol, a drink can read as cloying long before it is objectively sweet. A measured bitter element gives the finish somewhere to go, which lets you keep the sweetness that carries the aroma. Build it in small increments and taste after dilution, not before. A fermented base — shrub, kombucha, kefir soda — can supply that dryness on its own; the Fermentation Calculator works out that side of things.
Sweet against acid is an industry metric
Juice manufacture has balanced on the Brix/acid ratio for decades, and the figures are published: Codex sets a 7:1 minimum for orange juice, Florida requires 13:1 commercially, and consumer testing across citrus juices consistently prefers 15:1–18:1, while deliberately sharp juices like lime and blackcurrant run 1:1–6:1. The tool converts its own millilitres into approximate Brix and titratable acidity and tells you which band you have landed in — so "balanced" is anchored to something external rather than being our assertion. The millilitre ratios themselves remain studio practice; change one lens at a time or you will not learn which one moved the drink.
Fresh means perishable
Anything built on fresh juice, cordial, or dairy has a genuinely short life. The Shelf Life & Storage Calculator will give an honest window rather than a guess — worth checking before you batch.
Metric or imperial, your choice
Volumes work in millilitres, litres, or fluid ounces — switch the unit toggle any time before you calculate.
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