Sweetened vs Unsweetened E-Liquids

One of the biggest factors influencing how your flavours taste is whether or not they contain an added sweetener.

Sucralose is the most common e-liquid sweetener, and it has a flavour that you can detect instantly. It tastes like a sugar-free sweet or fizzy drink. It coats your entire mouth with sweetness, and it makes e-liquids with sweet and dessert flavour profiles really jump out at you. Like so many other things in life that taste great, though, sucralose also comes with a major drawback.

In this article, we’re going to explain exactly what you should consider when comparing sweetened vs. unsweetened e-liquids.

Why do we need sweetened e-liquids?

If the e-liquids that you’ve tried up to now have all been unsweetened — and you’ve enjoyed your vaping experiences to date — you might be wondering why sweetened e-liquids exist at all.

In short, they exist because people love sweet flavours, and some flavour profiles simply don’t taste right unless they stimulate your palate’s sweet receptors.

Have you ever tasted one of the flavoured unsweetened fizzy drinks that have been so popular in the supermarkets over the past few years? Those drinks use the same flavouring compounds that you’ll find in sweetened fizzy drinks. Despite that fact, the sweetened drink tastes bold, while the unsweetened one barely tastes different from plain water.

If an e-liquid replicates the flavour of a sweet food or beverage, it’s likely that the e-liquid will taste even better with an added sweetener. An e-liquid capturing the flavour of fruit, sweets, fizzy drink, ice cream or cake will taste much truer to life if it’s sweetened.

For many people, sweetened vape juice is the thing that makes the switch from smoking to vaping possible. A cigarette can’t taste like a blueberry doughnut with frosting, but an e-liquid can. When people discover that fact, cigarettes lose their appeal very quickly.

What is the most commonly used e-liquid sweetener?

By far, the most common e-liquid sweetener is sucralose. If you’ve ever tried an e-liquid that coated your mouth with sweetness — that was almost indistinguishable from real sweets — you’ve vaped sucralose. You can find it sold in stores under the brand name Splenda. Pure sucralose is about 600 times sweeter than sugar.

Sucralose is also found in some diet drinks. Unlike many artificial sweeteners, sucralose doesn’t have an unpleasant. aftertaste.

For e-liquid producers, sucralose also offers the advantage of being readily available in a liquid form that’s ready for adding to vape juice. Bottled liquid sucralose contains nothing but sucralose, propylene glycol and water. Simply add a bit to any e-liquid, and you’ve got a sweetened flavour that’s ready to vape.

What is the drawback of e-liquid sweetened with sucralose?

When e-liquid makers want to create vape juices with big, bold flavour profiles that really explode on the palate, they reach for sucralose. If you see an e-liquid with a bright label, a plastic bottle and a name like “Blue Raspberry Slushie,” you can bet that it’s a sucralose-sweetened vape juice.

Now, let's discuss the major drawback of sucralose in e-liquid.

Sucralose Causes Coil Gunk

If you’ve  vaped your way through more than a bottle or two of sweetened e-liquid, you already know what we’re going to talk about: coil gunk.

The problem with sucralose is that it doesn’t vaporize well when heated. This means that some of the sucralose will inevitably stick to your device’s coil and eventually, it will burn. As you continue using the e-liquid, the layer of burned sucralose on the atomizer coil becomes thicker and eventually turns the entire coil black. At that point, the burnt taste will be highly unpleasant and you will need to replace your coil.

The more e-liquid you use, the faster coil gunk forms. With a powerful sub-ohm vaping setup, you’ll consume e-liquid very quickly. If you use a sweetened e-liquid with high-end vaping hardware, you may only get a few hours of high-quality vaping before the burned sugar taste begins to creep in. If you want your coils to last, sucralose is bad news.

Sucralose Muddles Complex Flavour Profiles

Taste is subjective, so the second problem with sucralose is something that you might not actually see as a problem at all. A strong sweetener like sucralose, however, will tend to overpower the individual flavour notes in an e-liquid. Do you enjoy e-liquids with complex flavour profiles? Does the idea of an e-liquid with notes of dark chocolate, coffee, star anise and citrus appeal to you? You might find the individual flavour notes in some complex vape juices are difficult to taste when sucralose is present.

Do gunk-free e-liquid sweeteners exist?

If you like sweet flavours but don’t want to replace your vape coil every day, this article probably feels like pretty bad news to you so far. Now, it’s time for some good news: An e-liquid can taste sweet without sucralose. There are several e-liquid sweeteners that won’t destroy your coils, and we’re going to discuss a few of them.

Vegetable Glycerine

Vegetable glycerine — an ingredient found in virtually every e-liquid — has a slightly sweet flavour. It’s actually used as a sweetener in some foods. VG has far less impact on the formation of coil gunk, and it can make any e-liquid taste a little sweeter. 

Ethyl Maltol

Ethyl maltol is a flavouring agent that captures the taste of caramelized sugar. Most people liken the flavour to that of cotton candy — so if you’ve ever tried a cotton candy e-liquid, you’ve definitely tasted ethyl maltol. Used advisedly, ethyl maltol will sweeten any flavour profile without adding significant flavour of its own.

Erythritol

Erythritol is a sugar alcohol extracted from fermented corn. Its sweetness is roughly the same as that of sugar, and it is almost completely calorie-free. Added to an e-liquid, erythritol can also produce a very mild cooling sensation similar to what you’d experience with a small amount of menthol. At the time of writing, is not commonly used. As more people begin demanding gunk-free e-liquid that still tastes sweet, producers may turn to featuring erythritol in their flavours.