Awesome! As someone who used to drink a lot of Diet Dr. Pepper (DDP) I could easily tell how close a given can (or bottle) was to its "use by" date. This makes for a great party trick [1] but otherwise has limited utility.
It also made for some socially awkward situations where, when visiting friends, they would want to have drinks on hand that their guests like and would go out of their way to get some DDP for me, not checking the date, and then serve out of date soda which tasted horrible.
Not surprising the rate of hydrolysis is temperature dependent so if you keep things refrigerated they last longer, but if you leave them out on the back porch in the summer where they get warm they go 'non-sweet' relatively quickly.
I switched to water (or tea if I want caffeine) with diet sweetener in packets (which doesn't go bad because no pesky water to 'unzip' it). I wrote to the Dr. Pepper company once and suggested they design their beverage so that the sweetener was dry and only released when you opened it (I got the idea from the way the Guinness folks started selling Guinness in cans with a gizmo to put a head on it when opened. Alas, nobody at the company was interested in "fixing" a non-problem, they responded (nicely) that I should just be sure to check the date and included a coupon for a free six pack. Of course at that time (and is still true around Reno) the bottler doesn't use an easily readable date code so it isn't much of a solution.
[1] And by "great" I mean the nerds all are fascinated by it and the non-nerds were nominally repulsed that someone could have such familiarity with the hydrolysis profile as to call it out by taste.
Your note about the sweetener packets makes me curious if diet soda syrup lasts longer. This has been a reason for me to hold off on putting together my own carbonation setup as, in spite of how much soda I drink, I still don’t think I could move through the requisite 2.5 gallons of syrup before the expiration date hit. I wonder if the aspartame suffers the same hydrolysis in syrup.
It does! (less water, so less hydrolysis) "name brand" syrup however isn't particularly economical at retail however[1]. Not too surprisingly there has been a rash of restaurant bankruptcies during the pandemic and so buying "used" soda fountain gear is actually pretty easy (at least in the western US) these days. I actually have an Elkay "water machine" which does carbonation (as well as chilled and not chilled still water) although its carbonation chamber is too small to give a good fizz like the commercial units do. (more Perrier like, less fountain soda like). That said there are also relatively few powder mixes that take into account carbonated water. There was an AWESOME Grape Crush one (that was sugar free) but since it tasted poorly when mixed with still water it was discontinued (having a soda water tap is not the normal situation).
One of the more interesting ideas (and also impractical) are the "mini-syrups" that are used in the multi-beverage dispensers with the touch screen at places like Movie Theaters. Good luck getting hold of those. I briefly had a line on getting them from a local AMC because I knew the manager who wasn't averse to re-selling them to me at cost but she changed jobs when the pandemic made theaters non-viable. The existing Coke branded dispensers are so loaded up with various DRM/telemetry that even if you can get one at auction (which you normally can't since they are leased, not sold) it would be quite the reverse engineering process to get it to work "disconnected" from the Coke network.
[1] Funny story about how I spent four months trying to buy Diet Dr. Pepper syrup at the "restaurant" rate (which was about 1/4th the "retail" rate) elided.
Note also that most soda fountain syrups also use saccharine instead of aspartame. This is probably so the syrup doesn't go bad as quickly. The transition to aspartame was driven by a study that showed that saccharine caused cancer in rats. That study had issues, but it had enough of an impact that consumers looked for alternatives. For soda machines, there usually isn't an ingredient list visible to the consumer, so that pressure to switch to aspartame didn't exist. There was a class-action lawsuit a few years ago claiming harm from the fountain formulation of diet sodas being different from the same brand sold at retail, but I believe it was thrown out.
Try https://sodastream.com . The soda can be sweetened with syrups they sell, or sweeten with anything you like, like Mangrove Honey which is salty and rich in itself. Add Scotch for a new drink called a "Southern Bee Sting". Squirt of lemon optional.
Honestly, I made my own using this[0] setup and I've never been happier. I had Sodastream before and the cost of refills and inconvenience of restocking them meant that I didn't actually use it that much. I bought some fruit extracts on Amazon, put a few mL in a 2L of water, and have delicious seltzer water without vendor lock-in. Now we need to refill our 10lb tank every few months, unless there's some leak/gasket problem (which has happened once or twice when the cats play near it).
You can make it more automated if you'd like with some sort of automatic agitation to dissolve the CO2, but it hasn't been too big of a bother for me to manually shake it yet.
Depends on the powder. The "Wyler's Lemondade mix" powders do fine with the carbonated water from my Elkay machine (not that they taste as good in carbonated water but they do work). I know there were powders that added fizz to still water to make them more soda like and those would be a problem on water that was already carbonated.
You can get unsweetened carbonated soda water that's "Dr." flavored. I've never tried adding a nutrasweet packet to one, but I wonder how close it would come to a "Dr." soda of the same brand.
When the old DDP expires, you buy more. If it lasted longer, you would not buy more. Though it sure causes destress on their best customers. Quite the dilemma.
I once explained to a coworker that I brought in some soda that day because the diet soda at work was expired. They were skeptical and we proceeded to go down to the cafe to setup a blind taste test. I passed with flying colors and we had an interesting conversation about it. It was a fun 20 minutes of not working.
You weren't goofing off, you were applying the scientific method while at the same time engaging in team building.
I'm not even kidding. That incidental silliness is valuable. A year later, you run across a problem where a customer explains a problem you don't understand, and then you have a flashback to that time when you did a blind taste test. You look at your colleague and whisper "Hey, remember that blind taste test we did that time?" and their eyes light up.
Off topic, but the headline made me realize that something “tasting off” is sort of an unpaired expression. We don’t say that normal drinks “taste on.”
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not.
Not sure if it's only the UK but we also use "up" and "down" as synonyms in some sitations. e.g. "I'm up for going to the pub" and "I'm down for going to the pub" mean the same thing
> aspartame has a half-life of about 300 days in solution at about pH 4, about the pH of soft drinks, but half life means that half if it as gone by that time. And if the cans are exposed to a hot storeroom or stored in a warm summer garage, they may deteriorate faster.
And they deteriorate a lot slower at cold temperatures. Hydrolysis practically stops if you freeze it.
I wonder what the genetic factor is for stevia, because oh boy does that taste awful. Aspartame is unpleasant, but stevia is something else entirely.
About the only diet sweeteners that taste sweet to me are xylitol and saccharin, and they're hard to find outside their niches (gum/mints and coffee sweetener). Kinda sucks tbh.
I'm one of those and have difficulties with most bitter drinks as well so the problem compounds as I have to have more sugar than most to drink coffee or nonherbal teas. I found that the sugar free off brand winco red bull doesn't trigger the same sour/bitter for me which is great. I still stick with water, milk, barley tea, and hot cocoa (I make my own mix) for the most part.
I know lots of people claim that Coke Zero tastes "basically" the same as normal Coke, but to me it was literally the most disgusting soda I have ever tastes. Far worse than even Coke light for some reason.
Some time ago I could tell something was really off about the taste of my diet soda even though it was way before it's expiry date. I was able to find out some storage irregularities with the shop I was buying from and call CC on them. Turns out they were also doing a lot of stupid things like taking meat freezers out of socket overnight to reduce energy consumption.
I noticed a similar thing with regular Coca Cola years ago. Some PET 2 l bottles went stale and tasted terribly, like mold. Other people thought that it wasn't so bad, but did detect the bad taste after being told about it.
I suspected it was an effect of sunlight on sugar, but had no way to know for sure. Nobody would admit that the bottles were transported or stored in inadequate conditions either.
Then I quit regular coke and later diet coke too, so no idea if it's still a problem.
Here in Norway I think "Pepsi Max" was the gold standard for years while diet Coca Cola mostly sold because of the brand name.
Then something happened: Coca Cola launched Zero and after a few iterations it tasted good! Meanwhile Pepsi Max always yaste stale now since the start of the pandemic or something.
I don't really know what happened and it could just be my taste changing but I don't think so.
I don't think its related to OP, but maybe to your experience.
I have a friend that pointed out to me that Regular Coca Cola in both cans and bottles taste different between the product labeled as "Made in GB" to those that are not labeled as such, even with full UK labeling and identical ingredients. Once you pick up on it, you can tell straight away. I suspect UK cans without "Made in GB" are produced elsewhere in Europe, and has a slightly different recipe.
I've seen the same in France. Coca Cola sold in heavily discounted stores used to taste quite a bit worse than regular « Made in France » Coca Cola. I suspected it was made on the cheap somewhere and imported, like a lot of products there. I don't think I could find it anymore, as those stores have mostly disappeared (and those that still exist like Lidl and Aldi had to go up-market and significantly improve their quality and image). As it happens it's a retail model that's much less popular here than in Germany.
Random story - I met the chemist who worked at Searle and whose job it was to come up with a way to purify aspartame on an industrial scale.
Normally purifying things like pharmaceuticals can be challenging, but as long as impurities are under 0.5%, generally they are acceptable (some have lower limits).
But with aspartame it had to be much cleaner since small impurities would ruin the taste. So it had nothing to do with safety but more quality of the final product.
He banged his head against the wall until they came up with a process that consistently have high quality product as measured by taste.
Readit News
It also made for some socially awkward situations where, when visiting friends, they would want to have drinks on hand that their guests like and would go out of their way to get some DDP for me, not checking the date, and then serve out of date soda which tasted horrible.
Not surprising the rate of hydrolysis is temperature dependent so if you keep things refrigerated they last longer, but if you leave them out on the back porch in the summer where they get warm they go 'non-sweet' relatively quickly.
I switched to water (or tea if I want caffeine) with diet sweetener in packets (which doesn't go bad because no pesky water to 'unzip' it). I wrote to the Dr. Pepper company once and suggested they design their beverage so that the sweetener was dry and only released when you opened it (I got the idea from the way the Guinness folks started selling Guinness in cans with a gizmo to put a head on it when opened. Alas, nobody at the company was interested in "fixing" a non-problem, they responded (nicely) that I should just be sure to check the date and included a coupon for a free six pack. Of course at that time (and is still true around Reno) the bottler doesn't use an easily readable date code so it isn't much of a solution.
[1] And by "great" I mean the nerds all are fascinated by it and the non-nerds were nominally repulsed that someone could have such familiarity with the hydrolysis profile as to call it out by taste.
One of the more interesting ideas (and also impractical) are the "mini-syrups" that are used in the multi-beverage dispensers with the touch screen at places like Movie Theaters. Good luck getting hold of those. I briefly had a line on getting them from a local AMC because I knew the manager who wasn't averse to re-selling them to me at cost but she changed jobs when the pandemic made theaters non-viable. The existing Coke branded dispensers are so loaded up with various DRM/telemetry that even if you can get one at auction (which you normally can't since they are leased, not sold) it would be quite the reverse engineering process to get it to work "disconnected" from the Coke network.
[1] Funny story about how I spent four months trying to buy Diet Dr. Pepper syrup at the "restaurant" rate (which was about 1/4th the "retail" rate) elided.
You can make it more automated if you'd like with some sort of automatic agitation to dissolve the CO2, but it hasn't been too big of a bother for me to manually shake it yet.
[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/pros-cons-diy-carbonation-rig
https://www.grohe.us/kitchen/design-trends/chilled-sparkling...
I'm not even kidding. That incidental silliness is valuable. A year later, you run across a problem where a customer explains a problem you don't understand, and then you have a flashback to that time when you did a blind taste test. You look at your colleague and whisper "Hey, remember that blind taste test we did that time?" and their eyes light up.
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unpaired_word
Another case where off is unpaired: "off-kilter".
To me (BrE), 'gone off' is like 'has developed off-flavours', which is like off-course & on-course but also off-side & near-side.
"Off" can also mean "away", though. If you "go off", you can "come back."
Have heard people from Great Britain say things like "x is on" before with roughly the opposite meaning as how we use "y is off".
And they deteriorate a lot slower at cold temperatures. Hydrolysis practically stops if you freeze it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39135
About the only diet sweeteners that taste sweet to me are xylitol and saccharin, and they're hard to find outside their niches (gum/mints and coffee sweetener). Kinda sucks tbh.
I suspected it was an effect of sunlight on sugar, but had no way to know for sure. Nobody would admit that the bottles were transported or stored in inadequate conditions either.
Then I quit regular coke and later diet coke too, so no idea if it's still a problem.
Then something happened: Coca Cola launched Zero and after a few iterations it tasted good! Meanwhile Pepsi Max always yaste stale now since the start of the pandemic or something.
I don't really know what happened and it could just be my taste changing but I don't think so.
Normally purifying things like pharmaceuticals can be challenging, but as long as impurities are under 0.5%, generally they are acceptable (some have lower limits).
But with aspartame it had to be much cleaner since small impurities would ruin the taste. So it had nothing to do with safety but more quality of the final product.
He banged his head against the wall until they came up with a process that consistently have high quality product as measured by taste.