I almost always use Splenda to sweeten my coffee and tea, and I can’t taste any difference between it and sugar for that purpose, besides the fact that it takes slightly less sucralose than sucrose to make the drink sweet enough. However, the diet drinks flavored with Splenda that I’ve tried taste horrible—nothing like the original drink. Why is this? Is it some other ingredient in the diet drink that separates it from the regular kind? Something to do with saturation points? Have you noticed this yourself (or can you tell the difference between Splenda-sweetened coffee/tea and sucrose-sweetened)?
I’ve noticed this too with coffee. Sugarless gum as well. It seems the one thing I intake all the time (pop), artificial sweetener doesn’t work with. Gah!
Huh. I prefer diet sodas made with Splenda/sucralose. For one thing, they’re a hell of a lot more stable. Old aspartame ( i.e. in diet sodas past or even near their “best used by” date ) tastes like dirt to me. But I prefer the splenda taste slightly as well.
So sorry, no idea :). My best speculation is that you are used to older sweeteners and their particular aftertastes, such that the new one tastes “off” to you. My mother still prefers saccharine and Tab, God help her.
Oh, I dislike all diet soft drinks (although Tab isn’t so bad as most people say it is), and I hardly ever drink them. I just don’t understand why sucralose tastes bad in them, when it tastes good in coffee and tea (as opposed to saccharine and aspartame, which are always inferior to sucrose).
Just a WAG…maybe the physical temp of the coffee or tea has a slight anesthetic effect on the tastebuds, causing the variation in flavor.
Another WAG…the concentration of sucralose in sodas is higher than what you sweeten your hot beverage with.
Third try…most sucralose sweetened beverages also contain aspartame as well. Perhaps the combination (which you’d likely not use in your morning cup-o-Joe) causes the perception of oversweetening.
Are you asking why Splenda-sweetened diet drinks taste different from regular diet drinks? (Diet Coke is available in Splenda and the “regular” non-Splenda versions, for instance). Or, are you asking why Splenda-sweetened diet drinks taste different from regular full-sugar/corn syrup drinks?
If the latter, something that hasn’t been mentioned is that diet soft drinks can have different flavor bases than their non-diet counterparts. Diet Coke is not Coke flavored, so even if Splenda tasted exactly like sugar, Diet Coke with Splenda would still have a “Diet Coke” taste instead of “Coke.”
I did try diet Coke and diet Pepsi with sucralose, but the diet soda I think has the best taste is Diet Dr. Pepper (but their extinct Raspberries and Cream flavor was even better, sigh). I thought all along it was sweetened with sucralose, but after checking the bottle it has only aspartame. I’m surprised that I like it, because I used to detect a metallic aftertaste from aspartame.
Splenda powder is mostly maltodextrin with a relatively small amount of sucralose because it’s 600 times sweeter than sugar. Wiki says maltodextrin may be slightly sweet or flavorless Maltodextrin - Wikipedia. I guess it could have an affect on the taste. Wiki also says Pepsi One is sweetened with sucralose AND acesulfame potassium Pepsi One - Wikipedia. Maybe that’s the off-taste you detect.
The latter, and that is a good point, but that just leads to the question: why don’t they make a diet drink that *is *the same flavor (sans sucrose) as the original drink?
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: And why would they go with part aspartame and part sucralose? Cost?
A few newer drinks do now try to mimic the flavor of the original (Coke Zero for Coca-Cola Classic instead of Diet Coke, Diet RC for RC instead of Diet Rite Cola. The Dr Pepper and various root beer lines also seem to keep regular/diet formulations very close. Not sure where Pepsi/Diet Pepsi/Pepsi One fall in this.), but even then the formulas are still slightly different. The flavor profile of a drink changes with the sweetener used, and drink manufacturers will usually alter the base flavors to complement the sweetener, rather than just replacing sugar with artificial sweetener in the original formula.
Diet Coke is a special case, since Coca-Cola was really loath to potentially damage the brand image of the original by sticking saccharine (originally) into Coke’s base flavors; in fact, Coca-Cola was so afraid of sullying the name that Tab was the only diet brand from Coke until the 1980s, while Pepsi had happily slapped their name on Diet Pepsi in 1960s. Diet Coke was formulated to be very similar to Pepsi and completely unlike Coca-Cola. The flavor was such a hit that “New Coke”/Coke II was based on it, rather than vice versa.
As for blends of sweeteners, I think it’s to average out the benefits and pitfalls of the individual sweeteners (including possibly cost). Some sweeteners are more heat stable, some are more sweet, they have different off-tastes and aftertastes. It’s been common for years-- cyclamate/saccharine blends were used in the 1960s. In the recently defunct Coke C2 and Pepsi Edge brands, we even had sucrose/sucralose blends…
I’m not a coffee drinker but for those of you who are, and use sugar - do you expect your coffee to be SWEET or just sweetened?
I would suspect that when you put a dab of sugar in your coffee you’re expecting it to have a bit of a sweet taste, which Splenda can do too. So you’ve got this mondo cup of coffee with the essence of sugar.
On the other hand, sodas are (for the most part) supposed to taste like sugar with the essence of cola or “li-mon” or whatever. Backwards of what you expect your coffee to be. For most people, this just doesn’t cut it.
But yes, I would say that it has both an unpleasant aftertaste and a generally unsatisfying taste.