Are you tired of wasting all that VG, PG, time, and possibly nicotine just to try out a new recipe? I know I am, and after seeing THIS video, I finally gave the technique a try.

For those that can't watch, its simply a way of designing a new (or trying an existing) recipe, simply by putting flavors in a bit of water, and swishing it around your mouth. Far from groundbreaking, I know plenty of diy-ers have been doing this to test flavors for years. Just sharing my thoughts on how to get a rough idea of the flavor percentage to use in a juice after the water test.

Disclaimer- this is never going to be an exact science, because you work with drops to keep things fast and simple.

Supplies: -Lots of small shot glasses (disposable candy cups worked wonderfully) -Decent size syringe (12ml and up) -1 glass filled with water -1 empty glass to spit into -Something to cleanse the pallet (bread, water, etc)

I found that 2 drops of flavor into 3ml of water gives a pretty accurate picture of the flavor. (mostly) The extremely strong ones (flavor art) and anything with alcohol will taste pretty nasty, in which case only use 1 drop. This also applies if your flavor bottles make a gigantic droplet. You may be wondering why I don't just go with 1.5ml of water and 1 drop of flavor..try putting 1.5ml of water in your mouth and see if you can even feel it. Too small a batch size.

You may now find that some of the flavors you thought would be delicious actually taste like complete ass by themselves, (CAP vanilla custard v2) and so begins the mixing. Very simply, if we can assume 3ml of water holds 2 drops of flavor, then we can use that ratio to scale up the water and drops to allow for mixing. I learned that, for me, the vanilla custard needs between 1/4 to 1/3 sweetener compared to the flavor to taste good. In-case that isn't clear, that's either 4 parts custard to 1 part sweetener, or 3 to 1. Even more clearly, 7.5ml of water, 5 drops of flavor (4 drops custard, and 1 drop sweetener) for the 4 to 1 ratio. You simply scale up the amount of water to align with how many drops of flavor you intend to put in, staying within whatever ratio of water to flavor works for you. Every drop you put in is equal to 1 'part'.

Without doing this method, I never would have found that out about vanilla custard, because I simply don't have the patience or time to make a bottle, steep it, then wash and re-wick a dripper just to try a single flavor. Sure you can take someone's word for it, but you're still mixing a flavor blind, and going through all those other steps, then hoping you're taste-buds work the same as that person.

I went at this for about half an hour, got through 25 individual flavors, and ended up with 2 original recipes to take back and mix into real e-juice. Sans recipes, just to try that many single flavors, and THEN figure out what needed to be added to them, would have easily taken me months, if not years. I DIY in my spare time, and there sure isn't a whole lot of that.

Now that you have your recipe ready to try, how do we convert this into percentages for accurate, repeatable mixing? Thinking in 'parts' is the way to do this, just like we thought in parts when mixing into water. Lets say 15-20% flavoring is a decent starting point, assuming you aren't using anything super concentrated or full of alcohol. Using a recipe I devised from the water testing as an example; 2 parts each of cinnamon roll, cin. danish swirl, and apple pie. Then 1 part each of cream cheese icing and sweetener. Created at 60% VG, and using 1.038 grams/ml for all flavors, this translates to;

• FW Cinnamon Roll- 4%
• CAP Cinnamon Danish Swirl- 4%
• CAP Apple Pie V2- 4%
• LA Cream Cheese Icing- 2%
• TFA Sweetener- 2%

This turned out to be an excellent starting point, and the mix is great as is, but as always I'm pretty sure I can make it even better.

To recap- Figure out a recipe, using 'parts' in water that you like. Take those parts, and translate them to equal 15-20% flavor in a real juice. Again, each drop of flavor in the water is 1 part, so for simplicity, lets assume 4 parts total flavor in the water, which would equate to each part becoming somewhere between 3.75% (15% flavor) to 5% (20% flavor) in a juice. (always start low and work up) This will get you as close as I believe is possible to a rock solid starting point for a great juice recipe. You'll almost always have something at least vapable, that you can then tweak reliably because you have a taste profile in your head for each flavor from trying them individually. My belief is that when vaping, it is much harder to use your taste buds to discern flavors. Now what I'm about to say, I mean this only for testing flavors; but vaping them is like being nearly blind, and using this water method is like having Tiger Woods, better than 20/20 vision.

There will plenty that you have to tweak and play with, but it will all be much easier, and happen much faster compared to making juice after juice and having to vape them to test. I've being making my own juice for over a year now, and honestly cannot believe I didn't try this sooner. I had to totally forget everything I thought I knew, and start from square one- but that's definitely a good thing.