The Geek Bar disposable vape brand is well known for its wide array of well over 100 tasty flavors, and many of those flavors are quite sweet. That might lead you to ask how much sugar there is in a Geek Bar vape, and the answer is that there is none whatsoever – Geek Bars contain no sugar and are essentially calorie free.
So, why is it that Geek Bars taste as sweet as they do, and is there any reason to avoid sweet-tasting vapes? In this quick guide, we’ll explain everything you need to know.
Why Do Geek Bars Taste Sweet?
The reason why many Geek Bars taste sweet is because they contain sucralose, which is a calorie-free sweetener that’s used in many foods and drinks. Sucralose is sold in stores for home use under the brand name Splenda. It’s popular because it tastes basically the same as sugar – right down to the sweet coating that it leaves on your lips, which is probably what made you want to find out how much sugar Geek Bars contain in the first place. Sucralose is also available in liquid form, which makes it easy to add to liquid products like vape juice.
Sucralose is by far the biggest reason why Geek Bars taste sweet, but there are also other ingredients that add to the sweetness somewhat.
- Vegetable glycerin is an ingredient in most e-liquids, and it has a slightly sweet flavor. It’s actually used sometimes to contribute sweetness to lower-sugar food products.
- Ethyl maltol is a slightly sweet flavoring agent that’s sometimes added to vape juice. It tastes a bit like cooked sugar, which many people interpret as a cotton candy flavor. Strictly speaking, ethyl maltol isn’t actually a sweetener – but it can definitely enhance the sweetness of an e-liquid and is almost always added to vapes with cotton candy flavor profiles.
Are There Any Geek Bars that Don’t Taste Sweet?
Geek Vape has created a wide variety of flavors for every taste. They have well over 100 flavors on the market at the time of writing, and they’re still adding more. Most of those flavors are sweet since that’s what the public demands, but there are several options that aren’t sweetened for those who want them. Look for a plain tobacco or mint/menthol flavor if you want to buy a Geek Bar that isn’t sweet. You can also look for the flavor called “Clear,” which is essentially unflavored. Some vape brands use small amounts of menthol in their Clear vapes to add interest – but otherwise, Clear vapes contain no added flavors at all. Between the tobacco flavors, the mint/menthol flavors and the Clear option, Geek Bar has plenty of offerings for you if you prefer a vaping experience without any added sweetness.
Do Sweet Vape Flavors Have Any Drawbacks?
The use of sucralose in vape juice has one drawback in that sucralose doesn’t vaporize fully when it’s heated. Some of it does vaporize – since you obviously wouldn’t be able to taste it otherwise – but the rest of it condenses into a dark sludge that sticks to the coil and eventually produces a smoky, burnt flavor. If you’ve ever used a vape that began to taste smoky well before it was actually out of e-liquid, you were using a vape that contained sucralose.
Before disposable vapes began to appear in higher capacities, sucralose residue wasn’t a concern because by the time the residue would have altered a vape’s flavor, the device was out of e-liquid anyway. These days, though, it’s common for disposable vapes to contain as much as 15 ml of e-liquid or even more. With that amount of vape juice, it becomes very likely that you’re going to taste burnt sucralose residue by the time you’re finished with the device.
Do Geek Bars Have Any Features to Prevent Burnt Flavors?
One of the best things about Geek Bars is that all of the devices that the company has released over the last couple of years have used two heating coils rather than one. The main selling point of the dual-coil design is that it allows you to switch between two modes – using one coil or both coils simultaneously – by moving a switch or pressing a button. In the dual-coil mode, a Geek Bar produces twice as much vapor. That’s a good thing for people who enjoy huge clouds.
One of the other things that’s great about the dual-coil design, though, is the fact that a Geek Bar actually alternates from one coil to the other each time you puff on it when it’s in the single-coil mode. The sucralose in the e-liquid still causes residue to form on the coils – but because only one coil is actually active at any given time, it takes twice as long for the residue to affect the device’s flavor. Because of the dual-coil design, most people find that they can use a modern Geek Bar with absolutely no burnt flavor from the beginning to the end.
Do Any Vapes Contain Sugar?
There is no known commercially produced e-liquid or vape that contains sugar, and it’s unlikely that any vape containing sugar would offer acceptable performance. Sugar produces even more residue than sucralose when it’s heated. Sucralose also has about 600 times more sweetening power than sugar, which means that it can give an e-liquid a very sweet flavor even when only a few drops are used. Much more sugar would have to be added to vape juice in order to produce the same level of sweetness as a small amount of sucralose, and that would completely throw off the balance of the product. It would probably even gum up the device’s wicking system.
There are some members of the vaping community who enjoy making their own e-liquids, and some of those people have experimented with adding small amounts of alternative sweeteners such as honey and agave nectar. These sweeteners aren’t as sweet as sucralose, but they can work as alternatives for people who are trying to avoid synthetic sweetening agents. However, they aren’t used in any commercial vape juices.