How to Make Beetroot Juice: My Step-by-Step Method (With or Without a Juicer)

Why I Started Making Beetroot Juice at Home (And Stopped Buying It)

The price problem with bottled beet shots

Daily beet shots run $30 to $50 a month depending on the brand and whether you catch a sale. Some of the “clinical dose” concentrates go higher. Meanwhile a 500 g bunch of beets at my local market costs about $2.50, and that’s two full servings of juice. So call it $0.60 to $1.20 per serving at home, versus $1.00 to $1.70 per shot commercially, and the homemade version gives you two to five times the volume.

I ran that comparison and felt slightly foolish.

What you actually control when you make it yourself

Here’s the promise of this article, up front. I’ll walk you through two methods (a juicer and a plain blender, no special equipment), the prep steps that actually protect the nitrate content instead of destroying it, five recipes I rotate through, and honest guidance on how much to drink and when.

And I want to flag the biggest misconception immediately: not all beet juice is equally potent. Nitrate content in beetroot varies several-fold depending on soil nitrogen, variety, season, and how long the beets sat in a warehouse. Two glasses that look identical can differ by a factor of three or four in the compound that does most of the work. Bottled products rarely tell you the nitrate content, which I find bizarre for a product sold on that exact mechanism.

When you make it yourself, you decide the sugar (apple or no apple), the citrus, the ginger, the serving size, and how fresh the beets were when they hit the blade. None of that is negotiable in a bottle.

Below: the mechanism, gear and shopping, the juicer method, the no-juicer method, then the recipes. Skip ahead if you already know why you’re here.

What Beetroot Juice Actually Does in Your Body

The nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide pathway, explained simply

Think of it as a three-stage factory. Dietary nitrate from the beet is the raw material. Bacteria living on the back of your tongue are the first processing plant, converting nitrate to nitrite. Then your stomach acid finishes the job, turning nitrite into nitric oxide, the signalling molecule that tells the smooth muscle in your blood vessel walls to relax.

Wider vessels, lower pressure, better oxygen delivery. That’s the whole story in one sentence.

What surprised me when I first read into this is how much of the work happens in your mouth. Which brings us to a detail almost nobody mentions.

Blood pressure: where the evidence is strongest

The landmark trial came from Webb and colleagues, published in Hypertension in 2008. They gave healthy volunteers 500 mL of beetroot juice and watched systolic blood pressure fall by roughly 10 mmHg, with the peak effect arriving around 2.5 to 3 hours after drinking. Plasma nitrite tracked the pressure drop almost perfectly, which is the kind of dose-response coherence that turns a skeptic’s head.

Kapil and colleagues extended it in Hypertension (2015), this time over four weeks in 68 people with hypertension. A daily 250 mL dose lowered clinic blood pressure by about 8/4 mmHg, and the effect held across the whole month rather than fading.

Pooled data is more modest, as pooled data usually is. Siervo et al. in the Journal of Nutrition (2013) combined 16 trials of inorganic nitrate and beetroot juice and landed on an average systolic reduction of roughly 4.4 mmHg. So the honest number is somewhere in the 3 to 5 mmHg range for a typical person, and larger if you start out hypertensive. If your blood pressure is already 108/68, don’t expect much. The people who benefit most are the people highest on the scale.

Exercise performance and oxygen efficiency

Bailey et al., writing in the Journal of Applied Physiology in 2009, gave men 500 mL of beetroot juice daily for six days and measured a roughly 19% reduction in the oxygen cost of submaximal cycling, plus a 16% extension in time to exhaustion. Reducing the oxygen cost of exercise was considered close to impossible before that paper. Training doesn’t even do it reliably.

Let me temper expectations, though. In already-elite athletes, the effect shrinks or disappears, probably because their nitric oxide machinery is already running hot. Recreational and moderately trained people get the biggest returns. I’ve noticed it most on hilly runs, and I’d call that observation suggestive rather than proof.

Betalains, the pigment doing the other half of the work

That aggressive magenta comes from betalains: betanin (red-violet) and vulgaxanthin (yellow). They’re genuine antioxidants with anti-inflammatory activity in cell and animal work, and they’re a completely separate story from nitrate.

Which is why nitrate-depleted beetroot juice makes such an elegant placebo. Lansley and colleagues used exactly that in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise (2011): identical juice, identical colour, nitrate stripped out. The performance benefit vanished. So if you’re eyeing a beet powder that’s been processed within an inch of its life, understand that the pretty colour tells you nothing about whether the vascular effect survived.

The mouthwash problem

Govoni et al. reported in Nitric Oxide (2008) that rinsing with a chlorhexidine antibacterial mouthwash almost completely blocked the rise in plasma nitrite after a nitrate load. You killed the factory. Don’t use antibacterial mouthwash within a couple of hours either side of your beet juice, and don’t scrub your tongue right before drinking it.

What You Need: Beets, Gear, and the Add-Ins Worth Bothering With

Choosing beets: size, freshness, and variety

Firm, heavy for their size, smooth skin, no soft spots or shrivelled shoulders. Greens still attached is the best freshness signal you’ll get in a supermarket, because the leaves wilt fast and can’t be faked.

Go for medium beets, roughly 2 to 3 inches across. The giant ones are woody, fibrous, and less sweet. And skip the assumption that organic means more nitrate. Conventional nitrogen fertiliser tends to raise nitrate content, so organic beets are often lower. Buy on freshness, not on the label.

Those greens? Keep them. Beet leaves are as nitrate-dense as spinach and they go straight into the juicer.

Juicer vs blender vs food processor

Gear	Yield from 500 g beets	Notes
Masticating (slow) juicer	250 to 300 mL	Highest yield, least foam and oxidation, slowest to clean
Centrifugal juicer	180 to 230 mL	Fast, foamier, run the pulp twice for another 15 to 20%
Blender + nut milk bag	150 to 200 mL	Cheapest route that genuinely works
Food processor + cheesecloth	130 to 180 mL	Workable, messy, lots of wringing

The add-ins I always use and the ones I skip

Ranked, based on how much they actually earn their place:

1. Lemon or lime. Non-negotiable for me. Acid stabilises the betalain pigment and creates a friendlier environment for nitrite chemistry in the stomach, plus the vitamin C helps that conversion along.
2. Ginger. An inch of it turns “dirt water” into something you look forward to.
3. Apple or carrot. Sweetness and volume. Costs you sugar.
4. Celery. More nitrate for free, and it barely changes the taste.

Skip added sugar entirely. And I’d avoid slamming a big dairy-heavy meal or a high-dose antioxidant supplement at the same moment, since both can interfere with the pathway you’re paying for.

Method 1: How to Make Beetroot Juice in a Juicer (My Default)

Prep time: 10 minutes | Total time: 15 minutes | Yield: about 500 mL, 2 servings

Ingredients - 3 medium beets (about 500 g), scrubbed - 1 lemon, peeled - 1 inch fresh ginger - 2 apples, or 3 medium carrots - Optional: a handful of beet greens

Step 1: Wash and trim (why I don’t peel)

Stiff vegetable brush, cold running water, thirty seconds per beet. The skin holds a concentrated layer of pigment and minerals, and peeling costs you yield for no benefit. I peel exactly one thing here: the lemon, because the pith is bitter and the oils in the zest overwhelm everything.

Trim the taproot (that scraggly tail) and slice off the top crown where the greens attach.

Step 2: Chop to fit the chute

Cut into wedges that clear your feed tube with room to spare. Jamming an oversized chunk is how you stall a motor, and beet is dense enough to do it. Quarters for most machines, sixths for the narrow-chute models.

Step 3: Alternate soft and hard produce

Feed order matters more than people think. Alternate soft items (apple, lemon, greens) with hard beet wedges. The soft pulp acts like a plunger, pushing residue through the screen and pulling more liquid out of what’s already in there. Greens especially need something firm right behind them or they’ll wrap around the auger and sit there.

If you’re on a centrifugal machine, save the pulp and run it through a second time. You’ll pick up another 15 to 20%, which is not trivial when a beet costs you money.

Step 4: Strain, or don’t

I push mine through a fine mesh sieve. The foam on top is oxidised juice, it tastes flat and slightly metallic, and it’s the first thing to go. If you don’t mind it, skip this. Nothing nutritionally important is lost either way.

Step 5: Rest, then drink

Cover the jug and let it stand 5 to 10 minutes. Sediment drops, the flavour settles down and rounds out, and the harsh mineral edge fades. Stir and drink.

Then rinse the juicer. Immediately. Beet pigment sets into plastic within minutes, and I have a permanently pink pulp bin as a monument to my own laziness.

Method 2: How to Make Beetroot Juice Without a Juicer

You don’t need a juicer. I made beet juice in a $40 blender for two years before I owned one.

The blender-and-strain method, step by step

1. Chop 2 to 3 beets into 1-inch cubes. Smaller than you think.
2. Add 120 to 180 mL of cold water per 2 beets.
3. Blend on high for 60 to 90 seconds, until there’s no grit left and the mixture is uniformly smooth.
4. Pour into a nut milk bag set over a bowl.
5. Squeeze firmly, twisting from the top down. Keep going past the point where you think it’s done.
6. Add lemon juice and ginger to the strained liquid, stir, drink.

How much water to add (and why it matters)

Too little water and the blade cavitates, spinning in an air pocket while the beet cubes sit above it doing nothing. Too much and you dilute the nitrate per glass, which matters if you’re aiming at a target dose (say 6 mmol) rather than just enjoying a drink. I use 150 mL for two medium beets and adjust from there.

Straining: nut milk bag vs cheesecloth vs sieve

The nut milk bag wins, no contest. Fine nylon mesh, high surface area, and it survives serious squeezing. Cheesecloth is second and tears if you get aggressive (double it up). A fine sieve gives you a thicker, higher-fibre drink that’s closer to a thin smoothie than a juice.

Expect to lose 30 to 40% of your volume to pulp compared with a masticating juicer. That’s the honest trade for saving $200 on equipment.

The grater method for when you have neither

No blender either? Grate raw beet on the fine side of a box grater, pile the shreds into doubled cheesecloth, and wring it out over a bowl. It works. It’s genuinely tedious, your hands will be pink for a day, and I’ve only done it in an Airbnb kitchen out of desperation. But it works.

Whichever route you take: use cold water and move quickly. Heat and prolonged air exposure degrade betalains and chip away at the compounds you’re after.

What to do with the leftover pulp

Most people bin it, and that annoys me. Beet pulp is mostly fibre plus a decent slug of residual pigment. Fold it into burger patties, brownies (it works, trust me), hummus, or bread dough. Or spread it thin, dehydrate it at low heat, and blitz it into homemade beet powder for smoothies.

Honest verdict: blender or juicer?

Blender juice keeps the fibre, which slows sugar absorption and is a real advantage if glucose is your concern. But it’s thick, and drinking 500 mL of it (the volume most trials used) is a chore. Juicer output goes down easy and hits faster. I use the juicer when I’m chasing a specific dose and the blender when I just want the drink.

Five Beetroot Juice Recipes I Actually Rotate Through

Quick note on the “beets taste like dirt” complaint, because it’s the number one reason people quit. The culprit is geosmin, an earthy-smelling compound produced by soil microbes and concentrated in the root. It’s the same molecule responsible for the smell of rain on dry pavement. Acid breaks down your perception of it, which is why lemon and lime do so much heavy lifting here, and heat concentrates it, which is why raw prep tastes cleaner than boiled.

1. The Classic (beet, apple, lemon)

3 medium beets, 2 apples, 1 peeled lemon. Roughly 500 mL, around 6 to 7 mmol nitrate, about 190 calories and 34 g sugar across two servings.

My baseline. If a recipe can’t beat this one, it doesn’t get made twice.

2. The Pre-Workout (beet, tart cherry, ginger)

3 medium beets, 150 mL unsweetened tart cherry juice, 1.5 inches ginger, half a lime. About 6 mmol nitrate, 210 calories.

Drink it 2 to 3 hours before training. That timing isn’t arbitrary: plasma nitrite peaks around the 2 to 3 hour mark, which is exactly when Webb’s blood pressure curve bottomed out. Drinking it fifteen minutes before you warm up is a waste of good beets.

3. The Blood Pressure Blend (beet, celery, spinach, lime)

3 medium beets, 4 celery stalks, 2 large handfuls spinach, 1 whole lime. Roughly 9 to 11 mmol nitrate, about 120 calories, 14 g sugar.

This one stacks the four highest-nitrate vegetables available (beet, celery, spinach, arugula, and swap in the arugula if you like a peppery bite). Highest dose, lowest sugar, worst flavour of the five. The lime is doing a lot of work.

4. The Digestive One (beet, carrot, ginger, orange)

2 medium beets, 4 carrots, 1.5 inches ginger, 1 peeled orange. About 4 to 5 mmol nitrate, 175 calories.

Lower nitrate, more vitamin C, and the gentlest on an empty stomach. What I drink on days my gut is unhappy with me.

5. The Earthy-Free Version

2 medium beets, 1 pink grapefruit (peeled), 1 apple, half a cucumber, 2 inches ginger, pinch of sea salt. Around 4 mmol nitrate, 160 calories.

Grapefruit acid plus the salt plus that much ginger and the geosmin basically disappears. This is the recipe I hand to people who swear they hate beets, and I’ve converted more than a few with it.

One last mechanistic note worth carrying into every recipe: the citrus isn’t just flavour. Vitamin C helps drive the nitrite-to-nitric-oxide conversion in the acidic environment of your stomach. Adding lemon is the cheapest upgrade on this entire list.

How to Make Beetroot Juice Without Wrecking the Nitrate: 5 Prep Mistakes

You can do everything right at the juicer and still end up drinking a glass of expensive pink water. Most of the nitrate losses I see happen before or after the juicing, not during it.

Cooking beets before juicing

Nitrate is water-soluble. Boil a beet and a large share of it walks straight into the cooking water, which most people pour down the sink. Clifford and colleagues reviewed beetroot processing in Nutrients (2015) and the pattern is consistent: boiling is the worst offender, steaming is better, roasting sits somewhere in the middle because nothing leaches out, and raw is the gold standard.

Fix it: juice raw. If you must cook (some people genuinely can’t tolerate raw beet), roast whole in foil and use the juices that collect in the foil.

Mouthwash: the silent killer of beet juice benefits

This one still surprises people, and it’s my favourite piece of trivia in the entire nitrate literature. Your body can’t reduce nitrate to nitrite on its own. It outsources the job to anaerobic bacteria living on the back of your tongue. Kill those bacteria and the whole pathway collapses.

Govoni et al. demonstrated exactly that in Nitric Oxide (2008): antibacterial mouthwash before a nitrate load largely abolished the rise in plasma nitrite. Later work found chlorhexidine rinsing actually raised resting blood pressure in healthy people. Your mouthwash is undoing your beets.

Fix it: no antibacterial rinse within about three hours either side of your juice. I’ve just stopped using it entirely on juice days.

Swallowing it too fast

Related point. Saliva pooling and contact time with the tongue matter, so knocking the glass back like a tequila slammer skips a step. Swish it for a couple of seconds before you swallow.

Fix it: sip over two or three minutes. Nothing dramatic, just don’t chug.

Letting juice sit out

Air oxidises betalains fast. That vivid magenta drifting toward brown isn’t just cosmetic, it’s pigment degradation, and room temperature also gives nitrate-reducing bacteria a warm invitation.

Fix it: airtight glass, filled to the brim so there’s no headspace, straight into the fridge. Two hours on the counter is my hard limit.

Over-diluting and under-dosing

The biggest one. People make 150 mL of juice, water it down with a cup of coconut water, and then wonder why their blood pressure hasn’t moved. The trials that produced the headline results used roughly five to eight times that dose of nitrate.

Fix it: measure your output once. If you’re making less than 250 mL of undiluted beet-forward juice, add beets.

Peeling away the good stuff

The skin and the layer immediately beneath it carry a concentrated hit of betalains and phenolics. Peeling is purely cosmetic.

Fix it: scrub hard with a stiff brush, trim the gnarly top, leave the skin on.

How Much Beetroot Juice Should You Drink, and When?

The dose used in research (and how to hit it at home)

The effective range in human trials clusters at 5 to 8 mmol of nitrate (roughly 310 to 500 mg). Concentrated shots deliver that in 70 mL. Regular juice needs 250 to 500 mL.

Raw beets are frustratingly variable. Soil nitrogen, cultivar, and season all move the number, so a medium beet might give you anywhere from 0.5 to 1.5 mmol. That variability is real and nobody selling you beets will tell you where theirs falls. My working assumption: 3 to 5 medium beets per day gets most people into the research range. If your beets came from a supermarket in winter, lean toward five.

Timing for blood pressure

Plasma nitrite climbs for two to three hours, and Webb’s 2008 Hypertension data showed the blood pressure trough tracking right along with it. But for hypertension, timing is the small variable. Consistency is the big one.

Timing for exercise performance

Two to three hours before your session. Not fifteen minutes before the warm-up, which is what half the gym does. Lansley and colleagues (2011) used a 2.5-hour lead time and found roughly a 2.8% improvement in 4 km and 16.1 km time-trial performance in trained cyclists. That’s meaningful at the pointy end of a race.

Acute vs chronic dosing: does the effect fade?

Fair question, and the honest answer is that it doesn’t appear to. Unlike caffeine, where tolerance is well documented within days, nitrate seems to hold. Vanhatalo et al. dosed for 15 days and the blood pressure and oxygen-cost effects were still there at the end. Kapil’s 2015 trial ran four weeks in hypertensive adults with 250 mL daily (about 6.4 mmol) and reported sustained reductions of roughly 8/4 mmHg alongside improved endothelial function. No fade.

There is a ceiling, though. Wylie’s dose-response work compared 4.2, 8.4, and 16.8 mmol. Doubling from 8.4 to 16.8 bought essentially nothing extra for exercise performance. More beets past that point just means more sugar and more time in the bathroom.

A realistic starter protocol

• Week 1: half a serving daily (roughly 125 mL, 2 beets). You’re testing your gut, not chasing results.
• Week 2: full serving (250 mL, 3 to 4 beets). Expect beeturia if you’re one of the 10 to 14%.
• Week 3 onward: hold at full dose. Measure blood pressure twice a week, same time, seated, after five minutes of quiet.
• Race or hard session days: shift the dose to 2.5 hours pre-effort.

So how long does it take to work? Two answers. Vascular effects show up within 2 to 3 hours of the first glass. A blood pressure change you’d actually call reliable takes 2 to 4 weeks of daily dosing.

Storage, Shelf Life, and Freezing Without Losing Potency

How long fresh beetroot juice lasts in the fridge

Masticating (slow) juicer output: 48 to 72 hours. Centrifugal juicer output: 24 to 48 hours. The gap isn’t arbitrary. High-speed centrifugal juicers whip air into the juice and generate heat, so oxidation starts before the liquid hits the glass.

The airtight container rule

Glass jar, filled to the very top, lid sealed, back of the fridge. Not the door. The door swings through a 5°C temperature range every time someone wants milk.

I fill mine so the juice domes slightly above the rim before I screw the lid down. Looks fussy. Works.

Freezing in ice cube trays

Freezing preserves nitrate almost completely (it’s a stable inorganic ion, it doesn’t care about cold). Betalains degrade slowly at freezer temperatures, so you’ll lose some colour over a couple of months but not the compound you actually came for.

I freeze in silicone ice cube trays, pop the cubes into a zip bag, and drop four or five into a smoothie. Three months is comfortable.

Signs your juice has gone off

• Fizzing or pressure when you open the jar (fermentation)
• Sour, yeasty smell rather than earthy-sweet
• Dull brown instead of deep magenta
• Separation that won’t re-stir into a uniform liquid

Any of those, bin it.

Batch strategy: I juice twice a week, Sunday and Wednesday, into single-serving jars. Daily juicing is how people quit in month two. The cleanup is the killer, not the juicing.

Side Effects, Beeturia, and Who Should Be Careful

Red urine and red stool (beeturia)

Roughly 10 to 14% of people excrete betalains intact and produce startlingly pink urine. It’s harmless. It’s also the single most common panicked email I get.

One nuance worth knowing: beeturia has been linked to low iron status, because iron affects how betalains are handled in the gut. It’s a soft signal, not a diagnosis. If you’re also fatigued and pale, get ferritin checked rather than guessing.

Digestive effects and gas

Bloating and loose stools are the usual complaints, and they almost always come from people who went from zero to 500 mL overnight. Beets bring fructans and a hefty fibre load (if you’re blending rather than juicing). Ramp up over two weeks and most of this disappears.

Oxalates and kidney stones

Beetroot is moderately high in oxalate, around 150 mg per 100 g, and beet greens are much higher. If you’ve had calcium oxalate stones, that matters. The mitigation is straightforward: drink your juice with a calcium source (yoghurt, milk, a calcium-fortified alternative) so the oxalate binds in the gut rather than in your kidneys. Also, hydrate properly. Concentrated urine is the bigger risk factor.

Blood pressure medications and low-BP risk

If you’re on antihypertensives, the effects can stack. That’s not automatically good. I’ve seen people get lightheaded standing up after adding 500 mL of beet juice to an existing ACE inhibitor. Track your numbers instead of assuming more reduction is always better.

Blood sugar considerations

A medium beet carries about 9 to 13 g of sugar, and juicing strips the fibre that would otherwise slow absorption. Three to four beets puts you at 30 to 45 g. Not trivial. The blended whole-beet version blunts the glycaemic response noticeably, which is why I recommend it over juice for anyone managing insulin resistance.

The nitrosamine question

You’ve probably seen nitrates painted as carcinogenic because of processed meat. Different context entirely. Nitrosamine formation requires nitrite plus amines plus the absence of inhibitors, and vegetables arrive packaged with vitamin C and polyphenols that block that reaction. Cured meat delivers nitrite alongside heme iron and protein amines with none of that protection. The vegetable matrix is the whole story.

Pregnancy, chronic kidney disease, and constitutionally low blood pressure are the three contexts where I’d want someone monitoring rather than freelancing.

Fresh Juice vs Powder vs Shots vs Just Eating the Beet

Option	Nitrate per serving	Cost/serving	Convenience	Shelf stability
Fresh homemade juice	4 to 10 mmol (variable)	$1.50 to $2.50	Low	2 to 3 days
Concentrated shot (70 mL)	6 to 6.5 mmol (stated)	$2.50 to $3.50	Excellent	Months
Beetroot powder	0 to 4 mmol (often unstated)	$0.80 to $1.20	Excellent	Year+
Beetroot capsules	Usually <1 mmol	$0.60 to $1.00	Excellent	Year+
Whole roasted beets	~1 mmol per medium beet	$0.60 each	Moderate	5 days cooked

The powder warning

Here’s my honest position: most beetroot powders are close to useless for nitrate. Many are heat-dried, and some are deliberately nitrate-depleted for regulatory reasons. If the label doesn’t state nitrate content in mg or mmol, assume it’s low. That’s not cynicism, it’s pattern recognition after reading a lot of labels.

The exceptions exist. A handful of brands standardise to a stated nitrate dose, and those are worth the money.

Whole beets

Fibre, satiety, potassium, folate, all genuinely good. But hitting 6 mmol means eating six medium beets, and I’ve never met anyone who does that twice.

Rough monthly cost

Fresh juice runs me about $50 to $70 a month at 3 to 4 beets a day. Shots: $75 to $105. Powder: $25 to $35 (with the caveat above). Whole beets: $35 to $45, though you won’t reach the research dose.

My position: fresh juice at home for daily use, a shot for travel and race mornings. That’s it. I don’t buy powder.

My Exact Weekly Beetroot Juice Routine

Sunday, about 25 minutes. I scrub and juice 12 medium beets with 6 lemons and a thumb of ginger, then portion into six 250 mL jars. Three go in the fridge, three go in the freezer. Wednesday evening I move the frozen ones down to thaw.

What I track. Morning blood pressure twice weekly (Tuesday and Saturday, seated, after five minutes still). Not daily. Daily readings generate so much noise that you’ll convince yourself of trends that don’t exist. Two readings a week over two months gives me a line I can actually trust.

What I skip. Mouthwash. Entirely. I brush and floss and leave the antibacterial rinse in the cupboard.

The method matters far less than people think. Masticating versus centrifugal versus blender-and-strain: the difference is maybe 10 to 15% yield and a bit of oxidation. Dose and consistency account for essentially all of the result.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does beetroot juice actually do in the body? Beetroot juice delivers dietary nitrate, which oral bacteria convert to nitrite and your body then reduces to nitric oxide. Nitric oxide relaxes blood vessel walls, lowers blood pressure, improves blood flow, and reduces the oxygen cost of exercise by roughly 3 to 5%.

Q: How does beetroot juice work to lower blood pressure? Through the nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide pathway. Bacteria on your tongue reduce nitrate to nitrite, stomach acid and enzymes convert nitrite to nitric oxide, and nitric oxide signals smooth muscle in artery walls to relax. Webb et al. (2008) recorded drops of about 10 mmHg systolic within three hours of a single dose.

Q: Is homemade beetroot juice safe to drink every day? For most healthy adults, yes. Daily dosing for four weeks was well tolerated in Kapil’s 2015 hypertension trial. Watch the sugar load, ramp up gradually to avoid GI upset, and monitor your numbers if you take blood pressure medication or have a history of kidney stones.

Q: What is the best dose of beetroot juice, and how many beets do I need? Aim for 5 to 8 mmol of nitrate daily, which is roughly 250 to 500 mL of undiluted beet juice or one 70 mL concentrated shot. In practice that’s 3 to 5 medium raw beets. Going above 8 to 10 mmol doesn’t add much benefit.

Q: How long does beetroot juice take to work? Two timelines. Blood vessel effects and plasma nitrite peak 2 to 3 hours after drinking. A sustained, meaningful blood pressure reduction takes 2 to 4 weeks of daily consistency.

Q: Can I make beetroot juice without a juicer? Yes. Chop raw beets, blend with about 250 mL of water until smooth, then strain through a nut milk bag or fine sieve, squeezing hard. Yield is slightly lower than a juicer but the nitrate content is comparable. You can also skip straining and drink it as a fibre-rich blend.

Q: Should I boil or cook beets before juicing them? No. Boiling leaches a large share of the nitrate into the water. Juice beets raw whenever possible. If you need them cooked, roast them whole in foil and use the liquid that collects.

Q: How long does fresh beetroot juice last in the fridge? 48 to 72 hours from a masticating juicer, 24 to 48 hours from a centrifugal one. Store in a sealed glass jar filled to the brim, at the back of the fridge.

Q: Why is my urine pink after drinking beetroot juice? That’s beeturia, and it affects about 10 to 14% of people. It’s the betalain pigment passing through unchanged, and it’s completely harmless. In some cases it correlates with low iron status, so persistent beeturia plus fatigue is worth a ferritin test.

Q: Do I need to peel beets before juicing? No. The skin and the layer beneath it hold concentrated betalains and phenolics. Scrub thoroughly with a stiff brush, trim the top and any damaged spots, and juice with the skin on.

Q: Is it better to drink beetroot juice in the morning or before a workout? For blood pressure, whenever you’ll actually remember it (consistency wins). For performance, drink it 2 to 3 hours before your session so plasma nitrite peaks during the effort.

Q: Can you freeze beetroot juice without losing the nitrates? Yes. Nitrate is stable at freezer temperatures. Freeze in ice cube trays, transfer to a sealed bag, and use within three months. You’ll lose some colour over time but not the active compound.

The One Thing I'd Do First

If you’re learning how to make beetroot juice and you only take one thing from this piece, make it this: measure your dose once.

Not forever. Once. Juice your usual amount, pour it into a measuring jug, and look at the number. If you’re staring at 150 mL of heavily diluted pink liquid, that’s your answer for why nothing has changed. Almost every disappointed beet juice story I’ve heard traces back to a dose problem, not a juicer problem, not a recipe problem, and not a “beets don’t work for me” problem.

I came into this literature genuinely sceptical. Vegetable juice lowering blood pressure as much as some pharmaceuticals sounded like exactly the kind of claim that falls apart on inspection. It didn’t. The nitrate pathway is one of the better-characterised mechanisms in nutrition science, with a plausible biological story, consistent randomised trial data, and a clear dose-response curve.

Scrub four beets. Add a lemon. Drink 250 mL. Skip the mouthwash. Do it for three weeks and check your numbers.

That’s the whole thing.

Frequently Asked Questions