Brix
Degrees Brix (symbol °Bx) is a measure of the dissolved solids in a liquid, based on its specific gravity, and is commonly used to measure dissolved sugar content of a solution. One degree Brix is the concentration of one unit mass of solute in 100 units mass of solution, thereby representing the strength of the solution as percentage by mass (e.g. the concentration of solute in a solution of 99 g water and 1 g sugar, i.e. 100 g aqueous solution of 1% sugar, is 1 °Bx). If the solution contains dissolved solids other than pure sucrose, then °Bx only approximates the dissolved solid content. For example, when one creates two solutions, one with equal volumes of salt and water and one with equal volumes of sugar and water, the number of degrees Brix of the salt solution is higher than that of the sugar solution because the salt is denser. The unit °Bx is traditionally used in the wine, sugar, carbonated beverage, fruit juice, fresh produce, maple syrup, and honey industries. The degree Brix is also used for expressing concentrations of water-based cutting fluids for metalworking processes. Concentration of dissolved solids can also be measured by using a refractometer, but different solutes affect refractivity differently, and the refractivity is not directly correlated with the specific gravity of the substance, so to infer concentration of any particular substance the correlation between refractivity and concentration for the specific substance must be known.
Comparable scales for indicating sucrose content are: the Plato scale (°P), which is widely used by the brewing industry; the Oechsle scale, used in German and Swiss wine making industries, amongst others; and the Balling scale, which is the oldest of the three systems, mostly found in older textbooks, but still used in some parts of the world.
A sucrose solution with an apparent specific gravity (20°/20 °C) of 1.040 would be 9.99325 °Bx, or 9.99359 °P, while the representative sugar body, the International Commission for Uniform Methods of Sugar Analysis (ICUMSA), which favours the use of mass fraction, would report the solution strength as 9.99249%. Because the differences between the systems are of little practical significance (the differences are less than the precision of most common instruments), and due to wide historical use of the Brix, modern instruments calculate mass fraction using ICUMSA official formulas but report the result in °Bx.
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