Cloudy Liquid inside glass, problem with caustics

[mitchino]

I'm having problems getting a realistic looking cloudy liquid (lemonade) inside a clear glass bottle.

I want caustics on, as the bottle is sitting on a table, and without caustics it just doesn't look realistic, the shadows or AO under the bottle don't work.

However the caustics cause the glass to interfere with the look of the cloudy liquid and make it go dark and horrible. Without caustics the liquid looks great.

Is there a way to fix this or do I just have to do 2 renders and fix it in post?

[Beanzvision]

Care to share an example?

[Cinemike]

For caustics to look better, you may want to try another render engine than "progressive" (see screenshot), Bidir and PPM seem to be the best working with caustics.
They DO have their limitations, though, Bidir seems to ignore volumetric effects, so it's inverse biblical (wine to water) in your renderings.
You also might want to (drastically) increase your MSI value (Max. Sample Intensity in the Performance Settings).
Improvements for caustics are on the roadmap for Max, so hopefully, they will come to C4D as well soon.

[Eddoron]

Could you post a pic of the liquid?
Lemonade is usually not cloudy, except for mixes that have something like orange juice in them.
I bet we can help you better when we see it.

edit: have run some tests. The only time where my (juicy) lemonade became dark was with single-bounce in the volumetrics settings.
glass and liquid caustics on and well visible.
But I also had a light next to the hdri with some directionality and cranked up my sample and intensity settings

I think it's best when we see your material & render settings.(+pic)