To test the sweetness of dragon fruits, you can use a little tool called the BRIX refractometer (or Br for short). It measures the sugar content in the juice. On this Brix scale, Brix 1 means there is 1 gram of sucrose sugar in 100 grams of juice. For dragon fruits, the sweetness often goes from Brix 10 to Brix 20 and more.
A Brix refractometer looks something like this:
To test the sweetness, you can first cut open your dragon fruit. Scoop out a little piece & mash it until it's a bit watery. Then, scoop some of that juice & put it on your Brix meter. The trick is no flesh, no seeds, and only the juice.
After pouring the juice on, you can look through the eyepiece with some light shining through the glass lid:
Inside it, you may see something like this:
This is the Brix scale. It goes from 0 to 30 as you can see. There are two distinct parts: the yellow & the blue. Where the yellow part stops is the reading for our dragon fruit's sweetness. In this case, it shows about Brix 29.4, which is insanely high. But it is an example to see how you can use this tool for sweetness testing.
Usually, dragon fruits with a Brix 20 or slightly higher are super sweet already. Sometimes, it may be around 15 but the taste is still very good. Check out this table below to see how the sweetness stacks up on the Brix scale.
| Brix | Dragon fruit sweetness |
|---|---|
| 18-20+ | Super sweet |
| 15-17 | Medium sweet |
| <15 | Just okay |
If you want to see the tool in action, here is how they test the sweetness of the Asunta variety.
If you want to get a Brix refractometer for your plants, check out this great one for less than $20:
| Good Brix meter |
|---|
 |
| Easy to use |
| Built in Brix scale |
| Accurate reading |
There is another style of Brix meter that doesn't require any look-throughs. It works similar to the other one. You juice out what you want to measure (no seeds, no pulp). And you put some of that liquid into the measuring container.
After a couple of seconds, the number will show up automatically on the screen. See it done here:
| Best digital refractometer |
|---|
 |
| Excellent sugar check |
| Portable |
| Clear digital display |
How sweet is that!
That's so sweet. As you can see, it's really easy to get a tool & measure the sweetness of a dragon fruit. Many folks get the look-through Brix meter because it works & is much cheaper. If you want something fancy, a digital meter might help. It is a lot more expensive though. So grab one that you like & let's see how sweet that thing is. Enjoy!
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