How to Quickly Cool Down Juice

It is very important to cool the juice down as quickly as possible to avoid time and temperature abuse. Making sure the juice quickly reaches proper temperature will keep it bright, fresh, and tasting great longer.

When making juice commercially, you are probably making juice in large batches. While large, national producers of cold-pressed juice have the advantage of a factory that’s kept at a cool 41 degrees, you may not. Working in a room temperature kitchen, your juice may not be very cold after it’s made if it’s made from room temperature produce (try to always use cold produce when you can), or kept out in the warm air very long.

Putting a large container of juice, or many bottles of juice, in the refrigerator may not be enough to get it down to proper temperature fast enough. As part of my HACCP training, we were taught something interesting. If you were to put a large pot of hot soup in a refrigerator overnight, the soup near the middle may still be hot in the morning! It takes too long for the cool air of the refrigerator to completely cool down the entire batch of soup.

That same concept can apply to a batch of 20 bottles of juice sitting next to each other in a fridge. The bottles near the middle of the shelf may take a very long time to cool down since they have limited surface exposure to the cold air. The maximum amount of time you should ever give juice to cool down completely to under 41 degrees is four hours.

For that reason I recommend making sure the juice is as close to the proper temperature as possible before putting it into the refrigerator. Here are the top three ways:

Top 3 Ways to Cool Down Your Juice Quickly

1. Using an ice bath: Placing your bottles of juice into a bin of ice can cool them down fairly quickly. Make sure each bottle is surrounded by ice.
2. Cooling paddles: Fill these paddles with water and freeze them. They basically become giant ice cubes that you can stir your juice with to cool it down if your juice is in large buckets. After stirring, you can leave the paddle
3. Blast chiller: Although more expensive than the other options, a blast chiller will cool down a batch of bottles in a matter of minutes without the need for ice. A blast chiller is a device that blows forced, cold air over whatever is inside. A blast chiller may also offer a thermometer that can be submerged in one of the bottles of juice to get a temperature reading.