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Comment by el_duderino | Hacker News Reader

Can you ask your wife what the stuff that appears to be floating in my Martinelli apple juice is?

It's a cloud looking like substance in my juice. Does that mean it's been sitting too long? Fermented apple by chance? Smells almost like alcohol when opening it.

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I may know what the cloudy stuff is. First, if the juice is outside the "best buy" date, just throw it away. The "cloudy juice" problem happened when they moved to a new production line in Watsonville. They discovered that as juice aged it got cloudy and then started to grow a "tree looking" like thing inside the bottle. It took them months to figure out that the big warehouse doors where they brought in apples was allowing mold spores to blow into the air and contaminate the juice. You've probably been holding on to that bottle for a while. (Some other brands don't filter their juice, and will appear cloudy.) This isn't a problem that anyone should be seeing anymore. (I should add that many, many bottles were tested and the mold wasn't a harmful mold. Many skeptical customers even arranged their own testing.)

Cool. Reminds me of this mystery fungus from a while ago: http://www.wired.com/2011/05/ff_angelsshare/

Wow. Interesting and makes plenty of sense. Thank you.

To be specific, I was trying to describe the "tree looking" like thing inside the bottle.

I only ever buy cloudy apple juice. Or is there something else going on in Martinelli?

Martinelli's uses a very fine filter for their juice - some juicers don't filter their juice (often because they want it to help define their brand - as unfiltered and natural.) Having heard a lot of stories about food production in general - you should try to choose a manufacturer that you trust. (For any food product, not just apple juice.) There are an incredible number of things which must be monitored and which can (and do) go wrong.

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