Brix is a unit of measurement for the concentration of sugar in a liquid, which is important in the production of wines and other distillers’ washes, liqueurs, bar syrups, and a great many other things besides. (Beer producers most often use a closely related and functionally identical unit called Plato.) The unit is named for Adolf Ferdinand Wenceslaus Brix (1798–1870), a Prussian engineer and mathematician who made detailed measurements of sugar solutions’ specific gravity in the mid-1800s.
Sugar concentration is expressed in degrees: 1° Brix (abbreviated as 1° Bx) is the concentration of a solution of pure water and 1 percent sucrose by mass; thus in theory a simple syrup made up of equal parts by weight of sugar and water is at 50° Brix, while a rich simple syrup, with two parts sugar to one of water, is at 66° (in practice they are a little lower—48° Bx and 64° Bx—due to the chemical interaction of sugar and water). Brix is most often measured using a hydrometer or refractometer, which analyzes the specific gravity of a liquid to determine its sugar concentration; both instruments are commonly calibrated to the Brix scale. Such instruments actually measure the total amount of dissolved solids in a solution, not just sugar, and so measurements of Brix are generally somewhat inexact.
See also rich simple syrup; simple syrup; and sugar.
Karmarsch, Karl. “Brix, Adolf Ferdinand Wenceslaus.” General Deutsche Biographie 3 (1876), 335. Available online at https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd11763199X.html#adbcontent (accessed February 4, 2021).
Reid, Matt. “Brix.” In The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, ed. Darra Goldstein, 77–78. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
By: Jason Horn