Coca cola with cane sugar - different taste than with corn syrup?

I can’t stand regular Coke but for a long time my honey brought me a “good” coke when he’d stop for fresh tortillas at the Mexican store. Unfortunately after a while they started trying to trick us. Same bottle, but with HFCS added. It’s a thick syrupy mess.

I stick with Coke Zero these days.

I buy Coke with sugar from Mexico. It’s available in bottles in several places around San Diego, and of course Tijuana is right across the border.

I got used to the taste while living in Asia, and when I came back, I thought somebody had slipped me a Diet Coke. The aftertaste of corn syrup is similar to the melange of chemicals they use to sweeten diet drinks.

I think it’s actually the reverse. HFCS was developed, and became popular among food and beverage manufacturers, because the cost of cane sugar in the U.S. is kept artificially high, in order to support sugarcane farmers. (And, my understanding is that there’s tariff on importing non-U.S. sugar, for the same reason.)

I’ve had trouble finding any of these sugar colas and so haven’t been able to compare yet…

Mmmmm… yum… cane sugar. I think I need to buy some when I go shopping today.

To do a true side by side test, make sure you are eating something neutral, like an unsalted cracker or plain rice between drinks. So it should be taste, eat cracker, swish with water then drink the other.

+1

Coke with sugar tastes crisp and fresher and lighter, and not syrupy. Coke with sugar quenches thirst better also, with no after-taste.

It is time that we end the embargo on Cuba , and bring back Coke with sugar

False meme. Coke has sugar in it. The sugar that happens to come from a plant called “sugar cane” is no more “real” than the sugar that comes from corn, or beets for that matter. It’s marketing.

I tried the American & Mexican Cokes back-to-back in glass bottles, blindly. Though I was trying my damnedest, I could detect only the faintest difference between the two - and crucially, I could not tell which was supposed to taste better. If I hadn’t have been focusing intently I never would have detected any difference. Therefore, as much as I want to believe that HFCS is the scourge of our time (and maybe it does have something to do with the fat kid epidemic) for me it’s not a matter of taste, either better or worse. I suspect what is going on here has a strong component of psychological delusion, though I am open-minded to the possibility that people who drink this stuff all the time might be more astute than me at noticing a difference. For the time being, I endorse what Cisco says.

They’re different kinds of sugar, though. Cane sugar is sucrose; high-fructose corn syrup used in soda is 55% fructose and 45% glucose, so cane sugar and HFCS have a slightly different taste and mouthfeel.

And usually, when people say “sugar” in casual conversation, they mean sucrose.

And glass is almost always rated better by those who can taste a difference. Note that cane sugar soda is nigh always in a glass bottle.

Thus, most of the dudes who claim the cane sugar tastes better are actually getting the difference from the bottle, not the sweetener.

There is also a slight mouth feel difference between HFCS and sugar.

That would be me. I very rarely drink non-diet soda, so most of my sense of how a real Coke should taste is from when I was a kid in the 60’s and 70’s. I’ve had a couple of Mexican Cokes recently and I agree that they taste lighter and crisper than what you can buy in American supermarkets.

I’m not sure having cane-sugar Coke readily available would be a good thing for me personally. I’d probably drink it more often.

Captain… you are amazing!!!..and correct.

Um…Sucrose is a disaccaride (meaning a larger sugar molecule made of two simpler sugar molecules) made from a dehydration reaction of Glucose and Fructose…once you add water to it, it splits to 50% of each…so in the end it is a 5% difference.

Also, depending on how long the Cane Sugar Coke has been sitting around, it is acidic enough to hydrolyze the saccharide bond. So there may essentially be no difference whatsoever on a molecular level.

I don’t usually drink regular Coke, but I got a case of Mexican Coke when I found it at my local supermarket. There is a discernible difference, but I don’t know that it’s objectively “better”, or that the difference is due to the sweetener.

After this case, I’m going back to Diet Pepsi.

I like the Pepsi Throwback better than regular Pepsi, like regular MD over the Throwback, and haven’t tried the sugar Coke.
Born in '82, if that really makes a difference.

They don’t taste much different to me, but I’ll always enjoy a glass-bottled beverage more than anything else.

I just picked up a bottle of the Mountain Dew Throwback and I love it! It tastes like 7-UP did before they ruined it. Its lighter both in taste and feel. Plus I get a kick out of the retro label with the Hillbilly. Ya-hooo!
Now I am curious about the Coke and Pepsi versions. I developed an aversion to all cola when I was pregnant back in the 80’s. I hate the syrupy sweet quality of it. I might like this sugar version.

This. There are a lot of heat-and-eat type things that I do not like because of the mouth-feel of HFCS.