Diet soda cost confusion.

Duplicate of my post at Reddit's /r/homebrewing, but I figure someone here might have an answer.

Was planning on making diet cherry soda to give myself a break from beer (heresy, I know), but trying to find a sugar substitute that is even remotely cost efficient seems impossible.

Using [Old Fashioned Cherry Soda Extract](http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/miscellany/soda/cherry-soda-extract.html), the recipe calls for 8 cups of sugar. I know from a Food Science course I took that sugar substitutes are way, WAY sweeter than actual sugar. I figured I'd use Sucralose (i.e., Splenda) as it's rated as [600 times sweeter than sugar](http://www.powerbar.com/articles/165/how-sweet-it-is-the-truth-about-sugar--sweeteners.aspx), but when I look at [Splenda's site for cooking conversions](http://www.splenda.com/cooking-baking/conversion-charts), it tells you to measure replace Splenda cup for cup with sugar in recipes... how the hell is it 600 times sweeter if I'm doing a 1:1 replacement?! If you think about how many bags of Splenda it'd take to equal 8 cups, it'd end up costing $40-50 for 4 gallons of soda.

Am I looking at something completely wrong here?

EDIT: Sorry, the odd looking links. Works perfectly in a Reddit post, but not worth the trouble to completely reformat the post.

Sucralose on it's own is 600 times sweeter. The splenda cooking conversions are based on their product that you buy in bags next to the sugar, those are actually sucralose on a maltodextrin carrier for ease of use, cup for cup. An bag of Splenda from the store I think should be about $8-9, less if you're going with the store brand (I know Walmart has these). The bag is the equivalent of 5lbs of sugar, which would be about 10 cups.

I'm not sure where your $40-50 estimate comes in, unless you're looking at the teaspoon sized packets, which may or may not be the same stuff in the bags, I'm not sure.

Didn't see any packages that size at Cub. I just said screw using cut product and ordered pure sucralose. 50 grams for $18 with shipping. I'll need just under 3 grams for a 4 gallon batch.

Where did you find the pure sucralose? Might be useful to have around.

Amazon. Just search pure sucralose. Looks like bodybuilders are the primary clients; make their own supplement mixes.

If you have a Trader Joe's in the vicinity, you might want to experiment with their $10 highly concentrated Stevia Extract (the one in the smaller spice-jar-looking container, not the larger bottle). It comes in powder form, with a teeny-tiny scoop that gives the sweetness equivalent of 1 teaspoon of sugar. I think there are something like 900 servings per jar.

You can do the math to find out what it would take for a whole batch of soda, but I strongly encourage you to start with half as much as you've calculated you need, and add more to taste. In that level of concentrated-ness, the lines between "too little" and "enough" and "bleccccccchhhhh bad bad gross evil" are razor-thin. Ask me how I know (as the memories of a ruined labor-intensive sugar-free chocolate mousse come washing back).

Some dude on eBay is selling 1oz packets of pure crystalline neotame powder for $45 - sounds steep until you realize that it's equivalent to 450 pounds of sugar.

'course, you'll need a good .001g scale to measure out enough for a 5 gallon batch.

You can also get a quarter ounce of pure sucralose for $8 shipped, which is about enough for 10 gallons of cola.

I almost ordered neotame until I realized my scale was insufficient for measuring a dose small enough

Bonjourmate said:

I almost ordered neotame until I realized my scale was insufficient for measuring a dose small enough

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You could make a cut in a solution of water. 1 mg per liter = 1ppm. Then use the solution to sweeten your beverage.

Bonjourmate said:

I almost ordered neotame until I realized my scale was insufficient for measuring a dose small enough

Click to expand...

I bought some straight caffeine a while back and then realized i needed a milligram scale.

I ended up paying something like $16 shipped for a chinese .001g scale that works reasonably well for measuring out caffeine. My only complaint about it is that the surface to weigh things on is the size of a dime, and the little bowl it came with is only big enough for a couple grams.

A store near me sells a concentrated liquid form of Stetiva sweeter. I have been using that sweeter for my diet sodas with some honey for foam. It costs 17$ for what amounts to 20 lbs of sugar.

Out of the artifical sweeteners available, what one is going to give the most desireable taste? Seems all the commercial pop I consume uses aspartame.

No idea, sorry. I just bottled a batch of diet cherry soda using pure sucralose as the sweetener. I'll let you know how that turns out.

Newer diet sodas often tend to use blends of multiple sweeteners rather than single ones: the two will often cover up each other's weak points, and taste more natural than each individual one.

I'm currently experimenting with making diet cola from scratch, and I'm working with a blend of sucralose and acesulfame potassium. Not sure yet how it works since I literally bottled the first batch tonight, but I'll be trying different mixes as I go along.

Is there an online source of straight AceK? I don't see it on ebay, amazon, etc.

TimpanogosSlim said:

Is there an online source of straight AceK? I don't see it on ebay, amazon, etc.

Click to expand...

I found it at Amazon, but I'm not incredibly convinced it's the best sweetener and it's only available by the pound. If I was doing it over I might have just tried sucralose and aspartame (also a popular mix) since it's available in smaller quantities and its shelf life once dissolved isn't so much an issue in home uses. Still experimenting though. It works pretty well in iced tea though.