The focus is always on what is the max amount of carbs per hour that you can take and studies look at any additional Watt that can be squeezed out by adding more sugar. However for my long rides, most of the time I am not at the absolute limit and slowly I am now trending to less is more:
I used to put 120 g of table sugar in a 800 ml bottle, 2g of regular salt and 1 g of citric acid for the taste. Then I would also need a second bottle with regular water as sometimes on the bike I just want water.
This worked fine and would get me through 100k rides of moderate to high intensity. A while back I finished up the commercial sports drink mix I had laying in the cabinet. Following the dose on the package it got me only 35 g of sugar in a bottle. And I must say that I really really liked this. I could put the mix in both bottles on the bike and it was much more enjoyable to drink without having to use the second bottle with only water. Also I was using this lower dosage much more often, also for <2h rides that I could normally do without any carbs.
As I have finished the package and will now start making my own mix, I want to try and see if it is still good with 60-70 g of sugar. That way the strategy could be to do the 35 g for medium intensity and go to 60-70 g for high intensity / long rides. By putting it in both bottles I would still take with me the same amount of calories in the bottles as with the original strategy.
Now I just need to decide what to do with salt. The 2g of regular salt gives 800 mg of Na. I found out the other day that I am sweating between 750-1000 ml per hour and I can see salt crusts on skin and clothes on warm days. So I might need to aim for the higher range of Na concentration in my sweat of say 1000 - 1500 mg/l. So assuming I drink a bottle per hour that would bring me more to about 2.8 g of regular table salt in a bottle, which is a bit more than what I was doing.