In most recipes I find, or just posts I read on the forum, it seems that the general consensus is that sweetener shouldn't be used or at least be used in miniscule amounts. I've tried many recipes , and mixed with 0 sweetener and then with sweetener. The ones with the sucralose always taste the best. When I got into DIY my idea was to make commercial quality liquids from my home for a fraction of the cost. Imo without some sucralose that's impossible. When I first began I steered clear of sucralose because everywhere I read people said that it ruins recipes or that it's to cover up bad recipea. I feel like it really gives recipes that commercial pop. Cap super sweet feels like my secret weapon. Since incorporating it into my mixing routine I'm much happier with my juices and I believe a lot of newbies should be encouraged more and educated more on how to use it correctly. Maybe It was just my experience but I feel as if a lot of the information out there about mixing diy was lacking that. Or as if it was simply glossed over.
Sweeteners make your lungs fat and out of shape, and we're all very fitness oriented over here.
Well, actually, that's not true. Sweetener isn't always bad, it has its place. It's just that it gets used as a crutch/shortcut too often when better results could've been obtained by getting the rest of the recipe right first. If you know what you're doing or you're using it in a role that it was meant to be used for, it's just like any other tool in your mixing arsenal.
Ok. Here goes:
Sucralose can harm your ability to taste. Once you detox from it, you'll see many juices are damn sweet without it. Sucralose may be a health hazard...heating can split the molecule, leaving a simple sugar (which burns and forms carcinogens) and chlorine. Gaseous chlorine is harmful, according to a lot of WWI casualties. Sucralose kills coils. Commercial juice is made (often) by people with a vested interest in selling coils, so making you go through coils quickly is sen as a good thing.
Some people have a serious sweet tooth, others find overly sweetened juices cloying and nauseating.
Small amounts of sweetener added to a great recipe can make it outstanding. Adding sweetener to a recipe that is not so good can cover up flaws and result in something passable but will make it seriously challenging to fix so it's great. The time to add sweetener - if ever - is you've made a recipe as good as possible, not right from the start.
Need any more reasons?
> Sucralose can harm your ability to taste. Once you detox from it, you'll see many juices are damn sweet without it.
> Adding sweetener to a recipe that is not so good can cover up flaws and result in something passable
This. It's a lot like adding sugar to coffee: sugar will ruin a great espresso by covering up most of the flavor nuances, just as it can make a terrible cup drinkable by masking the bitterness and oxidation.
How is that a bad thing? Why do you think so many people put sugar in their coffee? It's fine to like coffee black, but why try to shame people who can't find a juice they like without sweetener under the pretense that if it's not good without sweetener then it's not worthy of putting sweetener in it? I'm sure there are recipes that taste great with sweetener and would be disgusting without it as well. It's just another ingredient and shouldn't be treated as disposable to determine the quality of a juice.
You can also make that terrible cup drinkable by adding cinnamon. Counters the bitterness and adds a nice complexity, without harming your health. Sugar is one of the worst things to put in your body.
That's the underlying problem. The food industry is training people from early childhood that sweet is good, sweeter is better and sweetest is best. They add insane amounts of sugar to softdrinks, they add it everywhere, they sell masses of sweets that consist of pure sugar (and fat) with some added flavourings. So it's no surprise that commercial juice is ultra-sweet, it just reflects the real problem.
> can also make that terrible cup drinkable
In my book, life's too short for bad coffee. I was just trying to illustrate how sweeteners affect taste.
> Sugar is one of the worst things to put in your body
Yes, and what's worse, it throws your palate off kilter.
I recently bought a commercial juice (Iced Mango Berries from coastal clouds) to try to clone for a friend, and I honestly couldn't taste anything but the sweetener. It was horrible.
Somehow I managed to clone it though.
Who cares if other people don't like to use sweeteners? You should mix what you like to vape. If you like sweet juices then go for it. I like sweet juices too! If I'm going to get cancer it's probably going to be from all those years that I smoked and not from vaping a little sucralose. And if I have to change my cotton a little more often than other people do, it's really not a big deal to me.
This is just my opinion but I think theres a purist somewhat elitist culture around sweeteners. I don't think that is where the majority of the scene is, but the ones who are in that crowd are a vocal minority. That's their right, this is just an observation not an attack. You will see a mix break down along the lines of - the mix was dull. I added 0.0.0.1% of pear and 0.0.0.1% of lemon to make it bright and pop such is the distaste to taint anything with a sweetener. In my option that's cool.. They've achieved what a sweetener could have done and saved time rewicking and fucking around with coils
Yet on the flip side of all that, sometimes you will feel pure disdain and attacks wrapped in advice, using less direct words but along the lines of you're addicted to sweetener. You use it as a crutch. Your mix is shit so you add sweetener to cover it. Maybe you're not suited to DIY if you like commercial juice.. Bla bla.
I sorta view it as a milkshake, you can grab some fresh fruit, some milk and blend your own at home, with love and freshness at its heart, or you can grab a fucking diabetes inducing chemical filled McDonald's one which tastes great, makes you obese, but you don't give a fuck and enjoy it.
Different strokes different folks.. But I think it would be cool if there wasn't such a disdain / snobbery around the use of sweeteners, some of us, like myself are not artisans or great at this, and that sweetener pushes it over from being 'ok' to mm this is alright, nice.
I agree with you on the elitist mentality around sweeteners. Which I do not understand. Why get pious over someone else’s use of sweetener? Imagine in a bakery group, people getting preachy and holier than thou over the sugar overload in apple pie, peanut butter cookies or pecan pie? Yes it’s a coil killer, yes a diet of apple pie and peanut butter cookies can lead you down the path of diabetes and obesity. But if you want to vape super sweet, who am I to judge you? If I want to vape super sweet, who are you to judge me? If I see a posted recipe with SS, it is my choice to eliminate it or double it or leave it as is. Live and let live. We are all in this together. Be kind.
Everyone is so concerned about other people. Just do you.
I use .5% of super sweet in just about everything because that is what works for me and keeps me off cigs. I really could care less what some other mixer might think, they ain't vaping my juice.
Is my recipe just bad and being covered up? Possibly? Do I care? Not one bit... because it tastes good to me and works for me.
For me personally, it is a combination of things.
I don't like nearly anything particularly sweet.
Sweetener is often used as a crutch. It rounds off a lot of notes, which can mask mistakes and make an otherwise unpalatable recipe acceptable. Much like adding sugar to coffee, it can "fix" bad coffee to a point but at the same time it can take a good cup and bring it down to a similar level.
It's really about coil life for me. The big reason I switched to making my own juice was to save money, not just in the cost of the juice itself but also the rate at which I go through coils. For example, with "premium e-juice" I used to go through like a coil a week, but now my coil on my new Nunchaku 2 tank has lasted me like 2.5 weeks and it still looks and tastes pristine. Sugar makes juice taste better, but it really gunks up coils.
If you want nothing but sugar on your lips, you're welcome to your Super Sweet. If you actually want to taste your recipe, including the subtle nuances of accent flavors, then there are a lot more additives to use. Sure, SS will boost a recipe but will also mute flavor if you go overboard. In your next mix, replace your SS with marshmallow and see what you think.
Amongst other things: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY_eJuice/wiki/sugars
For me, the main reason to DIY is reduction of cost, and sweeteners shorten coil life. Obviously not a huge problem if you’re running RDA/RTA’s, but I can run hundreds of mls though my freemax mesh coils without sweetener, and I don’t notice its absence. If you like it, go for it!
Some of them absolutely destroy coils, my record is 3 days with some Lemon Juice before it went dark dark black and gunky, currently used a cool for 3 weeks with unfavoured juice and it's still white
This is my biggest problem with sweetened juice. I am a cheap bastard. That $5 could has to last
Personally I try to avoid them cause man juices with them taste overly sweet to me, like I feel I need to brush my teeth every time. That and the amount of crap they leave on my coil that I have to clean off all the time is annoying. I haven't started mixing yet, but I plan on doing so without sweeteners. I've seen random comments mentioning you can sweeten a liquid with things like coconut at small amounts and such, I tend to try that method.
Any number of flavors have sweeteners in them. I like that CAP did a line using stevia, it's a better choice. I wish more flavors used it. And of course VG is naturally sweet. So flavors that simply don't counter that sweetness are best.
I don't think people are against sweeteners. I think people are a bit more educated on what flavors do and don't need sweetener and I think that most recipes these days dont. Generally I don't add sweetener if I know one of my flavors contains ethyl maltol like the Capella sweet and capella silverline flavor lines. Beyond that I guess based on the flavor itself, I often consider candy flavors in recipes as the sweetener, or I'll reach for them instead of sweetener for depth.
For example I might add just 1-2% bubblegum or gummy bear instead of sucralose at 1%. I make distinctions between candy fruit and fresh fruit and generally find that fresh needs it more but can stand its own if you want authenticity in favor of boldness. I don't use sweetener in general if a recipes flavor is over 12% but I think I'm a bit more conservative then most because I often go for fresh fruits to stand dominant in my recipes.
I don't use sweeteners at all, started out by using low concentration of Stevia and EM, never used Sucralose, but eventually figured out I don't need even that.
I try to use as little sugars and sweeteners in general, modern society is so dependent on sugar because food and drink manufacturers put them in large quantities in just about anything, but it doesn't have to be this way.
Sucralose in ejuice can potentially be carcinogenic.
" hydrogen chloride release from sucralose and its ability to chlorinate various food related ingredients such as glycerol to generate chloropropanols a potentially toxic class of compounds."
Regarding Chloropropanols: "The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified 3-MCPD as Group 2B, "possibly carcinogenic to humans". 3-MCPD is carcinogenic in rodents via a non-genotoxic mechanism. It is able to cross the blood-testis barrier and blood–brain barrier. The oral LD50 of 3-chloro-1,2-propanediol is 152 mg/kg bodyweight in rats.
3-MCPD also has male antifertility effects and can be used as a rat chemosterilant."
Sources: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308814609005378
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-MCPD
TL;DR: Thermal degradation of sucralose can release hydrogen chloride in temperatures well within the usual vaping range. Hydrogen chloride can react with glycerol to form chloropropanols. Chloropropanols are a class of compounds you generally don't want to be inhaling.
3-MCPD
3-MCPD (3-monochloropropane-1,2-diol or 3-chloropropane-1,2-diol) is an organic chemical compound with the formula HOCH2CH(OH)CH2Cl. It is a colorless liquid. It is a versatile multifunctional building block. The compound has attracted attention the most common member of chemical food contaminants known as chloropropanols.
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Hell mix what you like in your juice but if you wanna know why most don't use sweetener its because it kills Coil Life span! Especially in Nic Salt devices like Pod Mods and cost the user a fortune.
Many make flavors that are wonderful without sweeteners only using natural flavors and those juices are plenty sweet on their own. One of my favorite E-Juice flavors is Sour Apple and it doesn't call for loads of sweetener.
But if others want to use it for flavor go ahead that's your choice its just one tool among many.
Wow sure seems like a can of worms was opened up here eh? Lol sugary gummy worms. Yummmmm
Heh. Been mixing a few years and tried the no sweetener thing but honestly I like it. I use stevia as much as possible (one because it does great things for fruits and two to reduce potential health issues) but there’s some recipes I go full out sugar lips for. You gotta do you but of course its important to have an open mind and try new ways, sometimes the best things are learnt in the ways we objected to the most!
Everything good is sweet, ice cream, candy, cake, many fruits but in ejuice it's BAD.
Thanks for asking that question, I always wondered why DIY'ers hate sweeteners, I'm still wondering. I've followed many recipes to the T and truth be told, the good old sugary commercial juices taste way better. I think the flavor sellers must love that though, the anti-sweetener thing, and the "give it a little longer to steep" bit.
When I switched to pods I found to get my ADV (Hawk Sauce Clone) to be decent it needed a little jolt of sweetener, for whatever reason the juice I used to subohm tasted awful after a short time on my Caliburn, but put like 10 drops of sweetener in 30ml batch and it was good again, its small enough amount of sweetener that it really doesn't kill coils, I get about 60ml a coil (more but I like the clean taste of a new coil, even though I don't really notice the slide towards poorer taste as it happens) if I don't accidentally let the pod run dry too many times.
Sweeteners are coil killers. Sugar is addictive on it own.
For a smoker looking to quit there may some benefit of satisfying nicotine and glucose receptors at the same time, even putting them in overdrive just to pull away from the unknown concoction of addictive additives in cigarettes.
For a vaper there is no real benefit in inhaling sugars all day long.
Because sweeteners fuck up your coils / cotton and we also aren't sure how safe they are. People are skeptical of sweetener. But I also enjoy a tiny bit of sweetness.
That said it's also a palette thing. Most DIY people don't use sweeteners. But to then their juice tastes sweet due to the natural sweetness of VG. So when they try commercial juices it tastes like inhaling pure sugar.
Jesus Christ there are so many passive aggressive answers here.
Personally, I like a little sweetener in a few juices. But I got into DIY to get away from the commercial juices that seem to coat my mouth with it.
I pretty much only rebuild now, so I'm not worried about my coils, they are cheap.
Why you ask? That would be because I want to actually taste my juice not just a mouthful of sugar. Then there's the coil/build life. Approaching 1500ml on what I'm vaping right now. Cotton still white and fresh as day 1.