Stevia vs. sucralose as an e-liquid sweetener

For me personally, stevia wins hands down. Here are the reasons.

Stevia’s taste is more noticeable to me. This is obviously subjective. While I don’t like the taste of stevia in my food (it’s too easy to discern from real white sugar and it has a little spicy quality) I have yet to find a better tasting e-liquid sweetener.

Semi-dry hits with stevia sweetened e-juice “carmelize” on the wick and the coil. At first I considered this something to avoid and a downside of using sweeteners in general. I later found that the slightly burnt and carmelized wick adds a unique taste to all subsequent non-dry hits. It also colors the e-liquid, which can be mistaken for the aging nicotine colorization.

Compare this to sucralose’s semi-dry hit quality: firstly, it’s easier to burn sucralose, it isn’t as forgiving as stevia; secondly, when it starts burning, it produces a really synthetic-tasting fume that reminds me of burning plastic.

A couple of downsides of stevia:

• The availability. You can get sucralose from major flavor manufacturers. I haven’t seen pure stevia (either a PG solution or powdered) available from wholesale distributors. There are flavors containing stevia, like Capella’s Pear. I don’t know what purity of stevia they are using and how they are supplying it, but my guess is you can’t just get food-grade stevia powder and dissolve it in PG. Even the 99% advertised purity powders are still food-grade and I have never tried one in e-juice.

• The potential health risks. As with anything we vape, we can’t be sure how harmful it is until we get long-term epidemiology data. Anegdotally, it just feels more risky to vape something that carmelizes than an unsweetened e-juice. But that probably applies to all e-juice sweeteners in use today.