Alright everybody me and my wife have been vaping for around a year now, and in the last two months have got into making our own juice. Everything we make tastes alright but nothing compared to the "premium" brands out on the market. We have all the equipment, we use a different syringe for each flavor so we don't mix flavors. I don't know what we could be doing wrong. What are they doing that we are not? Do they use special ingredients that the average consumer can't get a hold of, or are they using some kind of special process? My favorite juice is Lost Art Liquids Unicorn Puke, it's a rainbow sherbet flavor and is supposed to taste like Jimmy the Juice Mans Shurb. I just want to know what the people making these exclusive premium juices are doing. If anyone has any Information or tips on what i could do to make my juice more "premium" i would be eternally grateful.
Complexity, perfect balancing, trial and error, dozens to hundreds of variations of a particular flavor to get it just right. Combining multiple manufacturers flavors to get the right flavor is a big part of it for me at least.
Speaking of rainbow sherbet, give this a shot:
- 2.8% FA Vienna Cream
- 0.7% FA Custard
- 0.3% FA Mandarin
- 0.55% FA Lime Cold Pressed
- 0.65% INW Raspberry
- 1% FA Lemon Sicily
- 0.6% FA Orange
- 2% TFA Sweetener
- 1% Citric Acid (10% solution)
Mixed 20/80 ideally for drippers, 40/60 for tank users.
And my other variation:
- 1% FA Vienna Cream
- 1% INW Raspberry (malina)
- 1.5% BB Raspberry
- 1.5% FA Orange
- 0.5% FA Mandarin
- 1.5% TFA Orange Cream
- 0.75% INW Lime (limetka)
- 0.3% FA Lime Cold-Pressed
- 0.3% FA Tutti Frutti
- 1% FA Custard
- 0.3% TFA Koolada
- 0.6% TFA Sweetener
- 0.3% TFA Cotton Candy
- 0.3% Citric Acid (10% solution)
> 1.5% BB Raspberry
Damn, Botboy. Manufacturing your own flavour molecules now? You stepped up quick!
Haha sorry didn't copy the details from where I originally posted that. It's Brewers Best but you could sub out a standard non sweet raspberry at 0.5% instead. It's just a weak non sweet raspberry that tastes delicious, unfortunately a little too weak to be of much use.
What is your experience with Brewers best? I am a homebrewer and although I would never put their stuff in my beer, I was thinking of their stuff in e liquid. Like most flavorings found in stores, people here say they aren't as strong as the most common ones used on here. They also have spec sheets on each flavor.
I was looking at the raspberry and just by a little googling, some of the compounds are a little sketchy. No concrete facts, just the usual back and fourth.
Here is the page for all their flavors. I'm going to check them out and pick some up soon. I noticed you are somewhat close to my area. I like going to Chicago Brew Werks in Plainfield for beer related stuff, I might have to make a special trip to check out the raspberry.
As far as steeping goes what are your methods? And how long do you let your Rainbow Sherbet steep? Thank you for the recipe i'll order the flavors and give it a shot. I have had the hardest time trying to find something that i like and will vape daily. Rainbow sherbet flavors have been by far my favorite.
dark cabinet. room temperature. the more flavors in the bottle the longer it sits. a good recipe will taste great right off the bat. Wait 1-2 weeks and it will really knock your head back. hes right, complexity is key. most premium brands are made with Minimum 4 flavor concentrates. some recipes can take up to ten. also High VG. vg is much sweeter. Pg is better for tanks, VG is better for dripping. IME 70%vg is ok for a good tank but any higher and your pro tanks / starter kits will start to clog up
To jump on this, complexity isn't just adding a bunch of flavors. You need to have an understanding of each individual flavor and how it interacts with other flavors. We aren't working with extracts here, were working with chemicals. Even though you may think mixing fresh cream and scandanavian dingleberry will give you a nice creamy dingleberry flavor, theres also a possibility it will create a completely different flavor.
This shit takes time, an intimate understanding of your ingrediants, and sometimes just a little luck.
p.s. anyone have a scandanavian dingleberry recipe I can try?
/u/TexasHaze nailed it all. I do not speed steep any of my blends unless I'm just throwing together something I saw online and want to give it a quick vape just to see what it is, whether using as a launching point or just think it's an interesting combination.
My rainbow sherbet is vapable after mixing but steadily improves over a period of about 3 weeks then doesn't change much.
Higher VG blends can also be more difficult to get flavors correct. Most of the big name nationwide brands out there, the suicide bunny's, space jams, etc are usually 50-60% PG/40-50% VG. Allows for best flavor but not so great for blowing clouds.
Sometimes you have to learn to adjust the pH of your finished product to remove some of the sweetness brought to it by high VG content.
When you buy premium juice you're mostly paying for research and development. DIY takes a lot of trial and error unless you get lucky and make something good right off the bat.
I've been doing DIY for a long time and I don't think I've ever gotten anything premium quality because I don't have enough patience to mess with a single recipe for too long.
Any premium recipe is likely a closely guarded secret so you aren't going to find it floating around on the internet. It takes a LOT of R&D to come up with them unless you are the luckiest guy on Earth and happen to pull a miracle out of your ass. Most recipes you find on here are from people that put some work into it, but nothing compared to the work put into some premium juice. There are a few recipes here and there from very determined DIYers that put a lot of effort into creating it. You can tell the difference.
I've thought about trying single flavors just mixed by themselves to learn the flavor profiles that they each give, and to also learn the steeping times each one needs in order to taste the best. Is that something that you have tried, or know if i would just be wasting my time?
That is a fantastic thing to do really. It will allow you to "learn" each flavor and what percentages they are good at. Certainly not a waste of time whatsoever! That is half the battle.
Amen to what /u/chrononaught is saying here. Trying each individual flavor at varying percentages is key. I try not to vary my PG/VG ratio much when testing standalone flavors as my juices are all designed to be perfect in the 70%-80% VG range.
Once you get the individual flavors down, then it's a matter of learning how they mingle with other flavors. Some flavors tend to blend with others to create a new flavor, others when mixed together can create 2, 3, 4 or even 5 distinct flavors within a single vape of a blend. Difficult, but possible. This is what really separates the premium juice, they have that complexity of multiple flavors all of which you can taste in the juice rather than them just having been thrown in a bottle and mingling together.
Have you tried Fireside yet by grizzly vapes? I feel like anyone tasting it w/o DIY knowledge would say, wow thats a pretty good banana vape. Yet when I taste it, having extensively worked with every banana flavor available, I say god damn how did he do it? It's so perfect, so smooth. It falls perfectly in between a dessert, creamy, fruity vape. I don't think it could singularly be classified as any one of those three. The taste is so simple yet I know through my own experience that its actually an amazingly difficult to master, complex flavor.
Another flavor that I'd throw in the extremely complex but deceptabley simple category, real nightmare by bombies. That flavor blows nanacream out of the water, yet it gets no love.
That is absolutely the right way to do it. Most people don't have the time and patience to do it, but it needs to be done if you want to make good juice.
I usually try a new flavor at 3% and see what it tastes like. Then I will increase to about 6% and try again. Keep increasing until the flavor starts to taste worse than your previous attempt. When you get to that point, you have past the "sweet spot" and need to go back to a lower percentage. The whole time you should take notes about the flavor like "this could be a good base for XXX juice" or "this would blend well with XXX flavor."
I think it's just in how they blend the flavors. A lot of recipes have an unexpected flavor in them to enhance the overall taste of the liquid. Have you made some of the recipes that are already posted in this sub? There are quite a few good ones. When you do that, you get to see that often there are quite a few flavors that are added in super small percentages that add to the overall flavor of the liquid.