> The organic apple had significantly better flavor.

What are you concluding from that? You can get the same apple 1 week apart and have a significantly different experience.

Or you could get the same apple at the same time from different batches and have a significant difference.

Or you could get two apples from the same batch at the same time and they could vary a lot.

Well, I suspect at a minimum that the organic apples were turned over quicker, and possibly were picked recently.

Anecdotally, I find this to be the case with many fruits, especially citrus. I always figured that a lemon is a lemon and a lime is a lime, but after getting into cocktails and mixology, I realized that there is a night-and-day difference between high-quality fruit and the cheap stuff at your discount grocery store. This doesn't mean organic fruit is always strictly better, but I have found it to be a pretty reliable proxy for quality.

Fruit at the discount grocery store is usually old/nearing end of life. Citrus, and limes in particular, get noticeably more bitter as they age and oxidize.

This actually leads to a schism in European/American bartending. Europe juices their citrus a la minute, so the juice has no time to oxidize, making the acid component punchier. American bars pre-juice before service, and it has time to mellow out a little.

Someone (Dave Arnold maybe) ran a blind taste test with bartenders from Europe and America and found that the their preferences lined up with the customs in their country.

Personally I follow the Europeans. Not because I like it better, but because I don’t have the kind of foresight to juice hours before I’m making drinks :-)

And god forbid you have premade line juice. Roses is the absolute worst (and people keep bringing it to make daquaris), but the extra effort for fresh juiced is worth it.

You might want to reconsider that, at least for homemade pre-made juice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RA3AaCO7A8

I love Super Juice! If I'm going to have friends over for a get together or party, I'll make a batch (or multiple if I want more than 1 fruit) a few days ahead of time to increase the speed in which drinks can be made. The downside is that garnishes still generally tend to need peels, so I still need to have a couple real fruits hanging around.

For garnishes, unless expressing the oil of a citrus peel is essential to the aroma of your cocktail (like in a Negroni), my "hack" has been to dehydrate citrus wheels as garnish. You can get ~2-3 wheels out of the middle of every citrus fruit and use the rest for super juice. Plus, they look really cool.

Thank you for the link. I hadn't heard of this, and I'm going to give it a try now!

Rose's is barely juice, probably only really suitable for gimlets. You can get straight lemon/lime juice in glass bottles. I find that works as a mostly fine alternative if I don't feel like squeezing.

We got organic bananas because the regular bananas were all green. They were SO GOOD. Bananas are so damn cheap overall we just always get the organic ones and they do seem overall better.

That's because conventional store apples are coated with wax and organic ones are not. Wax often has bad, usually bitter, taste and unpleasant texture.

Organic apples are not coated with wax, so they taste better, but will dry up faster.

I’ve long held a notion that organic produce is better mostly because it’s fresher - it has to be since it doesn’t have an unnaturally long shelf life.