Calculators
Saline solution calculator
A few drops of salt solution make a drink taste rounder without tasting salty. This works out how strong yours is and how much salt each drop carries.
- Strength
- 20% salt by weight
- Salt per drop
- about 11.5mg
- In 2 drops
- about 23mg salt (9mg sodium)
Drops are taken at 0.05ml. Droppers vary, so treat the milligrams as an order of magnitude and season by taste.
How this works
Saline is salt dissolved in water and added by the drop. The strength that matters is salt as a share of the solution's weight; from that and the size of a drop comes the amount of salt in the glass. Bartenders commonly make it with one part salt to four or five of water by weight — about 17–20%. The point is that a drink can be seasoned in steps far smaller than a pinch.
What it does
Below the level where it tastes salty, salt suppresses bitterness and makes sweetness and citrus read as rounder. It is the same reason a pinch of salt goes into a dessert.
Past that level the drink just tastes salty, and you cannot take it back out — which is why it goes in by the drop, and why the per-drop figure is worth knowing.
Making it
Weigh the salt and the water: 20g of fine salt in 80g of water is a 20% solution. Stir until clear, bottle it in a dropper bottle and label it. Sealed, it keeps well; make a small amount at a time.
Use plain fine salt. Flaky sea salt works but dissolves more slowly; iodised salt can add a faint off-note.
A worked example: two drops in a Daiquiri
- 20g salt in 80g water: 20% salt by weight.
- A 20% solution weighs about 1.15g per ml, so a 0.05ml drop holds about 11.5mg of salt.
- Two drops: about 23mg of salt, of which about 9mg is sodium.
What it does not account for
- Drop size, which depends on the dropper. The milligram figures are an order of magnitude, not a dose.
- Taste. The calculator says how much salt is going in; only tasting says whether that is right for the drink.
- Medical sodium limits. The amounts here are small, but this is not dietary advice.