That grass and tree drying rack is so amazing.
That grass and tree drying rack is so amazing.
I'm so excited with my little setup! After mixing up my first batch I now have a couple of questions.
Question 1: I'm starting off trying to clone my ADV. Through some social engineering I got my B&M to reveal the $20 30mL bottles I was paying for are just a mix of Flavor West Guava and Coumarin Pipe.
Before I even bought any DIY supplies I tried cloning it on MBV in their Create Your Own flavor thing. This worked perfectly since MBV uses Flavor West! 6 parts Guava, 6 Parts Coumarin Pipe was just about spot on.
When I went to mix up my first batch I used 5% of each as a starting point. The Guava is crazy overpowering though! They are supposed to balance each other out so you don't actually taste the top note of either.
Searching here, it seems the popular opinion is that MBV is mixing at 20% flavor, so 6 parts of each should be 10%. Before I try that can anyone give me any insights into flavor balancing? Cranking up everything seems counter-intuitive. Would that help though?
Question 2: Also I can't find any mention of using FW Rootbeer. What's a good starting % on that?
For question 2, there is some info here. From the image I can see you are already using that site, but they do not advertise their flavor list/search in case you haven't seen that.
With regard to percentages, I personally try to work forwards, then backwards to come to a conclusion. Start with some base values (10% each in your case) and then adjust by up to 2x in either direction (5-20%) based on taste. So in the first pass I fix balance between strong and weak flavors. I am still fairly timid about breaking 40%+ overall flavor but have had some good results trying to push the overall flavor concentration up over successive revisions. If I am using a lot of flavors or want a strong flavor then I will work backwards instead - the minimum VG% I am willing to tolerate determines the max % of PG flavoring I can use. Then divide the flavors up inside that percentage using the ratio I determined when working forwards.
I am very interested in writing some software to do regression/genetic/etc analysis and simulation to do this in a more rigorous way, but that is a somewhat involved project.
Edit: fixed numbers
Hmmm, I'd be interested in seeing how regression/genetic/etc analysis and simulation can be applied to e-juice! I'm not even entirely sure what that means, but I fucking love science!
Thanks for the tip though, that does sound good!
So from the user perspective, you give the software a recipe and metadata that proves useful in refining the flavor (simple example, for each flavor you'd give it a 1-10 rating where 1 is too weak and 10 is too strong), then the algorithm does its technical magic and spits out an adjusted formula. You reevaluate that, provide new data points, and run another iteration. If the algorithm is useful it will keep adjusting the flavors based on all the historical data it has from the human doing the tasting to help the human arrive as close to 5 (i.e. perfect strength) or the average rating of all flavors.
link to the awesome drying rack?
Sure: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0032G9E0G/
And the tree is separate: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007D1SHUY/
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Boon Grass Countertop Drying Rack, 1 ea
Current $14.36 Amazon (New)
High $17.99 Drugstore.com (New)
Low $12.00 Amazon (New)
That's the scale I use for coffee! The response is a little slow, but overall I like it.
Yeah, the responsiveness is excruciatingly slow but it is sensitive to the slightest drop of PG flavor.
Out of curiosity: Why do you measure your coffee by weight?
So I can get the exact ratio of beans to water. I also have a variable temperature kettle. For example, my cup this morning was an Indonesian/Sumatran blend as a pour over in my woodneck with a ratio of 25g:360g at 198F with a medium grind. It was pretty damn good. I do that because of how the flavors extract. The desirable flavors (I.e. Sweet, savory, floral, etc.) extract first and the bad flavors (I.e. Bitter, sour, stale licorice, etc.) extract second, but there is a very fine line between the two in extraction times, which are effected by the grind, temp, method, and ratio. My goal is to get the most desirable flavors possible while getting the very least bad flavors. It's a hobby.
Start with 10 % i notice you use the create calculator, that is good. It will take time and a lot of mixing. It is fun and could be costly. But i wouldn't use flavor west because i heard that they lie about diacetyl not supposed to have it and turns out they are not removing it. I recommend TFA Capellas or even Flavor art out of Italy, i have made hundreds of flavors, most suck many were good and only a few were very good. Now i am exploring all new ways of juice making. Good luck.
Are you getting decent flavor with shake 'n vape of your DIY ADV? I feel like my FW flavors are so severely muted for being a 70/30 mix with a lot of steeping in a week (heated + stirred many times).
Well the batch I get from my B&M and my experiment with MBV were not steeped. This actually smells like cat piss if you heat steep it for too long, as another experiment with Vape Crafter revealed! So this is supposed to be a fresh juice. 70pg so it shakes up in a hurry.