In the human bloodstream, for example, the chief buffer that is employed is a carbonate buffer. In many aqueous solutions it is desired to provide one or more pH buffers. The result is the beverage has a lower-than-neutral pH - the beverage is a bit acid. Citric acid is the ideal way to make this happen. One of the goals if you are going to make a citrus beverage is that it needs to taste tart. And indeed that is the chief thickening agent employed in these two diet beverages. Because it is a citrus beverage, a very natural choice for a thickening agent is citrus pectin. What’s interesting here is that as we know, Mountain Dew is a citrus beverage, made mostly from orange juice. The usual choice is gum arabic and we see that this manufacturer indeed makes use of gum arabic. So to get the same “mouth feel”, other thickening agents must be employed. For any diet beverage there is the problem that if there had been ordinary sugar in the beverage, the sugar would have served as a thickening agent. All of this suggests to me that to the extent the beverages taste different from each other, it might not be due to differences in the artificial sweeteners relied upon. This does not tell us the exact concentrations or percentages, of course, but it does tell us that in both beverages, the percentage of sucralose is less than the percentage of acesulfame potassium, and in both beverages, the percentage of acesulfame potassium is less than the percentage of aspartame. As you can see the two beverages list the same three artificial sweeteners in the same ordinal sequence. We can see several things about the two ingredient lists. Inhibits growth of mold, yeast, and some bacteria So now we can turn to the two ingredient lists. With this as background to the discussion, we return to the commenter’s question about whether perhaps the reason that Mountain Dew Zero Sugar tastes different from Diet Mountain Dew might be due to the use of non-identical artificial sweeteners? I personally prefer the taste of the bottled beverage to that of the fountain beverage. This is one of the reasons why the fountain version of Diet Mountain Dew tastes quite different from the bottled version of Diet Mountain Dew. A typical fallback choice for fountain syrups is saccharine. The pH of the syrup is usually neutral and thus is a higher pH than that of the bottled beverage, and the stability of aspartame turns out to be less if the pH is higher.įor all of these reasons, the maker of the fountain syrup will usually choose not to rely upon aspartame as the chief artificial sweetener, but will instead rely more on other artificial sweeteners that have longer shelf lives. The syrup might go for quite some time, perhaps weeks, before it gets used up. The operator of the soda fountain might store the syrup at room temperature or even at higher temperatures. The maker of the fountain syrup is not able to make very many assumptions about the actions of the operator of the soda fountain. Which brings us to the fountain beverage version of Diet Mountain Dew. The experienced consumer of bottled diet soft drinks will likewise try to store the bottles at cool temperatures and not warm temperatures. This is why the experienced consumer of bottled diet soft drinks will avoid purchasing too many months in advance and will instead try to purchase the bottles “just in time” to drink them. The beverage won’t taste normal any more. If you put a bottle of Diet Mountain Dew in a warm place for a couple of months, the aspartame will break down and stop being sweet. But aspartame does not have a very long shelf life. The thing is that the bottled Diet Mountain Dew uses aspartame as one of three sweeteners. In my own life the area where I run into this most often is the Diet Mountain Dew that comes from a soda fountain on the one hand, or the Diet Mountain Dew that comes from a bottle on the other hand. He’s not wrong that if two nominally identical beverages taste different from each other, it is often due to the use of different artificial sweeteners. Read the rest of the label on both beverages – what is the artificial sweetener in Diet Mountain Dew and what else is in the Mountain Dew Zero Sugar? Those are the agents that affect the taste. A chief example for today being the ingredient lists for two beverages that I discussed the other day in this blog article, namely Diet Mountain Dew and Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. What a relief it is, when so many things that are happening around us clamor for our attention, that we can sometimes return to pleasant and diverting discussions of some of the more important things in life.
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