First off: Thanks, everyone, for making this sub awesome. This is one of the few subs where everything that's posted gets upvoted, and people aren't showered in downvotes just for asking a question. Y'all make this sub a great place.
Now - I finally got my DIY vapemail today. The whole time I've been vaping I've always felt like I can never distinguish individual flavors in a vape. It's not like vaper's tongue, where it's an isolated incident. If a juice says "orange, pineapple, and strawberry" for example, I might just get a bunch of orange and nothing else.
Now that I started DIY, I can really see exactly how off my taste buds are. Here are the two juices I've made so far - all TFA flavors.
5% Pineapple 5% Mango 5% Juicy Peach 3% Koolada 1% Sour
8% Guava 4% Strawberry 4% Mango
In the first one, the only flavors I tasted were fruit and koolada. I didn't get any individual peach, pineapple, or mango notes. It just tasted like a kind of bland mixture of fruits.
The second one turned out a little better, but not much. I can taste the guava, definitely, but I don't get any of the sweetness I wanted from the strawberry, or the sharpness I wanted from the mango.
So... I guess this is a couple part question. First, is anyone else like this? Can you only taste major flavors, and none of the more complex notes? What did you do to fix it, if you did manage to fix it?
Next, what can I change in my recipes to help me taste more than just one flavor?
Thanks!
That first recipe has a lot of bold flavors with similar profiles. All three fruits have the same sweetness and sharpness thing going on, so they might battle it out and blend into something vaguely fruity. I like to mix a couple fruits with different profiles so I notice both. Pomegranate mixes well with something sweeter like blackberry. Guava mixes well with pineapple. But you want to go somewhere near double the sweet fruit compared to the sharp fruit. That makes the different flavors stand out. But yeah, maybe there is something different with your palette. I don't know what stuff tastes like for you.
Off topic: eww tfa guava? I tried that once, I literally added 2 drops to a 5 ml sample of a dragon fruit juice I made and it tasted good, but the exhale literally smelled like fresh catpiss
I found that mixing single flavors first, or putting a few drops in 5ml of water and swishing it around in my mouth, trains me to recognize that flavor better in a mix. Flavors do alter each other, however, and sometimes a mix isn't A and B, but something new. This doesn't mean a bad flavor, just not two distinct flavors.
It was recommended to me last week to practice making single flavors first. Make a good strawberry, a good banana, a good peach etc. Keep them in seperate bottles and get used to them as they are mixed and as they steep. Work up from there, doing two flavors and then 3, etc. But learn to mix single flavors well. Once mastered, you can mix your solid single flavors together to build up something more complex.