13.5
Brix in the finished drink
Brix is how much sugar is dissolved in the mix, measured with a refractometer. Below about 12 it freezes too hard. Above 16 it never sets. 13.5 is the middle.
The second recipe
The one where we squeeze the limes. Real citrus, real fruit, agave instead of corn syrup, and no artificial dye in any of it. Same machine, same delivery, same next-morning pickup — a completely different drink in the tank.
You cannot book this yet, and here is exactly why. A frozen drink machine needs sugar to freeze properly. Take too much sugar out and the mix freezes into a block, the machine strains, and someone’s party has a broken machine in the corner of it.
So we are running the freeze test first, on our own machine, in our own garage, until the recipe is reliable at the temperature the machine actually holds. When it passes, this page changes and you can book it. We would rather be late than be the reason your party went wrong.
Where it is up to right now: the maths is done and both recipes are worked out. What is not done is the measuring — we have never checked how sweet our agave or our limes actually are, and the whole recipe rests on those two numbers. That is a $30 tool and about ten minutes. After that comes the slow part: making a batch and watching it sit in a hot tank for four hours to see whether it separates.
Follow it in the Lab, including the bit where we are still guessing →
Every rental company in Austin will tell you their drink is good. None of them will tell you what is in it or how they know. These are the numbers that make “good” checkable.
Here is the part we did not expect. Measuring sugar in an alcoholic mix is genuinely hard — alcohol bends light differently than sugar, so the reading comes out wrong and you need correction tables to fix it. Harper and Finley only ever handle the base, before any alcohol goes in. So their reading needs no correction at all. The rule that keeps two kids away from tequila happens to give them a cleaner measurement than most bars have.
And here is what the arithmetic told us afterwards: Fresh Press needs two recipes, not one.
The base is built sweet on purpose, because the tequila a grown-up adds waters it down by about a fifth and lands it at 13.5. But nothing gets added to the kids’ tank — so that same base stays at 16.9, which is too sweet to freeze properly. It slumps in the cup instead of holding a shape.
Same limes, same agave, less of it. We did not know that until we did the sums, and you can do them yourself in the base builder in the Lab.
The kids’ no-dye version costs the same as the grown-up one. We thought about charging more for it and decided that was a bad thing to do — asking a parent to pay extra to take Red 40 out of a six-year-old’s drink is not a business we want to run. One price for the tier, both tanks.
Because you are not buying limes.
We looked this up properly. The ingredient difference between bulk syrup and fresh-squeezed citrus, for one party’s worth of mix, is somewhere between $20 and $40. There is a bartender technique called super juice — you use the peels plus two acids you can buy in a tub — that gets the same sourness and the same lime smell out of about seven limes instead of fifty. We are going to use it, and we are telling you we use it.
So the extra $125 is not the ingredients. It is the morning spent squeezing, the shopping trip, the mix that cannot sit in a garage for a week, the recipe testing that had to happen first, and the fact that nobody else within thirty miles will do it.
If that is not worth $125 to you, book the Classic. It is a good drink and it is what most of our parties are. We would rather tell you the honest difference than dress up a syrup drink.
No. It is the same mix every margarita machine company around here uses, and people love it. The difference is that Fresh Press is made by hand on the day and has nothing artificial in it. Both are real products. One costs more because it costs more to make.
Because fresh means fresh. There is a shopping trip attached to every Fresh Press booking, and the mix gets made the morning of your party rather than pulled off a shelf. Five days is what makes that possible without rushing it.
Ask us. The machine does not care — the two tanks are independent. We just have not decided how to price it yet, and we would rather answer you honestly than guess on a website.
No, and we never will. We make the mix, which is the part with no alcohol in it. A grown-up adds their own spirits at setup. That is a rule we published on purpose, before anyone asked.
No Red 40, no Blue 1, no Yellow 5. The colour comes from the fruit, which means a strawberry drink is a slightly duller pink than the bright one you are used to. That is what real strawberries look like. We will show you a photo before you book so there is no surprise.
Then we say so here, on this page, and we do not sell it. A recipe that freezes into a block is not a product. We would rather write “this did not work” than hand somebody a broken party.
Book a Classic now, and tell us in the notes that you want Fresh Press when it is ready. We will come back to you first.
Book your partyOr read the seven rules we hold ourselves to.