Let’s talk about why I like FA flavors, and how I’ve moved on from just basic DIY and guessing at recipes to making my own creations.
FA flavors kick ass for a few reasons.
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They’re all pretty strong and consistent in potency, meaning you can generally get accurate ratios between ingredients without a lot of guesswork or experimentation.
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Most FA flavors are very realistic and faithful to what they’re supposed to be, and they interact together well as building blocks for a recipe.
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FA has nearly everything you could want for mixing recipes, so you don’t need to venture outside of their realm for much, unless you have specific preferences for other flavors (we all do).
Now that my FA advert is over, let’s talk about the meat of this subject. How to become a DIY god, and tap into the infinite reserves of recipes available on the internet (real recipes, not juice recipes). I think the best way to demonstrate what I mean here is by using an example recipe, an a pretty easy one at that.
I’ll pick something simple, that we all love: Lemon Meringue Pie - I linked to a random recipe I grabbed off AllRecipes, a glorious resource for the enlightened DIY’er. Here’s the breakdown:
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Sugar
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Flour
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Cornstarch (discard this)
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Salt (discard this)
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Eggs
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Lemon
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Butter
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Pie Crust
These are our building blocks for DIY greatness. Let’s take a look at our FA arsenal, and saw what we can do here. The best way to go about this is too look at the cooking directions (check the link) to see what ingredients are used for what purpose, and break it down like that.
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Sugar + Egg Whites = FA Meringue
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Lemon = FA Lemon Sicily
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Pie Crust = FA Apple Pie + FA Cookie (or TFA Pie Crust, if you prefer)
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Butter + Flour + Egg Yolks = FA Custard + FA Vienna Cream (or CAP Vanilla Custard, if you prefer)
Now, just like that, we’ve got an ingredients list, and now it’s up to us to use our experience and experimentation to figure out percentages. This is where the aforementioned consistency of FA ingredients comes in really handy, like I mentioned. Because (generally) you can assume equal parity between the potency of most FA ingredients, within reason, you can build up a base recipe from scratch using a bit of good judgement and logic, along with the quantities in the original food/drink and your knowledge of the flavors.
Here’s a starter Lemon Meringue Pie recipe to get you going, based off this exercise:
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FA Lemon Sicily - 4.5%
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FA Custard - 2.5%
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FA Vienna Cream - 1%
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FA Meringue - 1.5%
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FA Apple Pie - 0.75%
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FA Cookie - 0.75%
I can’t promise this initial recipe will be exactly to your taste, but the joy of mixing like this, and the pleasure of FA ingredients, is that it will almost certainly be GOOD. It will give you a solid base to build upon from there, to get exactly what you want. Need more citrus kick? Trim down the Lemon and bump up a percent of Lime Cold-Pressed to enhance it. Want more Pie Crust? Easy, add TFA Pie Crust or increase the Apple Pie/Cookie combo by 0.25% each. Not creamy enough? More Vienna Cream or add FA Cream Fresh.
It’s a brave new world! Start googling, and unchain yourself from asking for people to give you recipe templates to work off when you want a new flavor! The possibilities are endless!
That's pretty much how I mix. I start out with an idea for a liquid, and look up a recipe for the actual food/drink, and break it down into flavoring equivalent. Then I base the percentages on the strength of each flavor in the final product of the actual food/drink and the strength of the flavoring itself. It works well and ends up with really awesome results.
I just decided that it was time to write this tutorial and make it public here, because I think a lot of people don't realize the possibilities and the methodology of mixing and get so hung up on recipes that we get endless requests for recipes for this and that when everything you need to make it is right at your fingertips. If they just did this ground work, and posted a recipe base from this method, everyone would benefit and we'd be happy to help refine it and give suggestions from that point on. But expecting people to formulate a recipe for you because you're lazy/unwilling to do it yourself is just unreasonable, and I'm hoping if we can add this to the side bar (/u/InertiaCreeping?) then we can just direct all 'recipe requests' to this method in the future as well as telling them to search. You know what they say about 'teaching a man to fish'...
Same here - thinking along these lines really gives you at least a solid first version to work with. Obviously using multiple flavor companies requires a little bit of knowledge on the flavor potency, etc., but it makes mixing fun! I've had a kick ass time with mine :P
By the sum of it are you using a total of 10% flavor for your juice? Do you put those percentage/s in the calculator? I usually see 100% total for flavor only. Sorry I'm kinda new at this.
Normally I'd compute it like this with my ejuice calculator.
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FA Lemon Sicily - 45%
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FA Custard - 25%
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FA Vienna Cream - 10%
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FA Meringue - 15%
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FA Apple Pie - 2.5%
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FA Cookie - 2.5%
Am I doing it right?
No, you're not doing it right; let me try to help out. Most TFA flavor blends should come out around 20% total flavor, and most FA blends are ~5-10%. We usually tell people not to exceed those amounts. Think of it like this: Your flavors are concentrated compounds, they say right on the bottles/instructions they're intended for dilution not direct vaping. If you make a juice with 100% flavor, it'll be awful and unvapeable. I wouldn't dare to try. This juice is 11% the way I've mixed it now, but you can tweak it to your needs. Let me explain:
The percent system we use is about giving people easily scaleable ratios of flavoring, so that they can make any batch size easily. For example, to make 10mL of this, you multiple each ingredient's percentage by the desired volume: 10mL x 0.045 (which is 4.5%) is equal to 0.45mL of that flavor. Similarly, to get the amount of carrier you need, you'd subtract 11% total flavoring from 100% to get the remainder of 89% VG/PG base. You also calculate nicotine input and subtract that from your remainder before adding carrier, but the calculator does that for you. If you're using a calculator from the sidebar, just input the percentages exactly as they're given in this recipe, and input your desired batch size, desired nicotine strength, and PG/VG ratio (I mix 20/80 high VG). This will allow the calculator to do all the work for you. Does that clear things up? If you want to enter all the recipe info into a dot1mL or e-liquid-recipes page and make it public, then post the link here, I'd gladly check it over for you to make sure you're doing it right before you try a mix.
Oh no I didn't mean I use 100% percent flavor only. Sorry english is not my first language. I use 20% for my flavoring. I get confused when mixing other flavors. I'll try and put a sample of what I'm mixing.
Edit: Will try & pm you the screenshot tom. I'm on mobile(having a hard time trying to do it here). Thank you.
Please post a link or sample recipe so I can help. What's your native language? I also speak some Spanish and Japanese, so I know it can be hard to convey yourself accurately in technical discussions in secondary languages.
If you're trying to make a flavor base to use in mixing, so you're converting this recipe to total 100% flavoring to make a base, then simply divide 100% by the amount of flavoring total in the recipe. For this one, it's: 100%/11% = 9.1. Now take that number, 9.1, and multiple it by the existing percentage numbers individually. For example, 9.1 x 4.5% for Lemon Sicily = 41% of your flavor base. That method should work for converting any recipe's percentages to ratios for a flavor base, allowing you to pre-mix a recipe you'd like to keep a flavor concentrate of on hand. Is that what you're asking?
You can do that, but you then set the total percentage of flavor in the mixture to whatever you'd like. If you set that to %10 flavor total, then you would have custard representing%2.5 of the total solution.
Most of the time we refer to the percentage of flavor used as a percentage of the total solution.
returnity, what are your top five flavors from FA. I'm mostly into custards and RY4's. What do you recommend for top five? Or better what would be your top FA recipe? I'll try out the mamajuice place and buy from them at your recommendation.
It's hard to narrow down a top 5, here's a list of my favorites:
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Apple Pie - This has the purest essence of pie crust I've found.
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Bilberry - The only way to get a good strong blueberry vape consistently.
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Cola - The one true Coke flavoring.
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Cookie - Seriously, you need this. It's fabulous.
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Cream Fresh - The best cream flavoring out there.
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Fuji - I can't believe this isn't real Fuji apples. No apple comes close.
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Meringue - I can't make cereal flavors without this.
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Vanilla Bourbon (OR) Vanilla Classic - True vanilla extract flavorings.
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Vienna Cream - A richer vanilla cream than Fresh Cream.
FA is my go to brand. They stretch much further too because you can use less making them more cost effective.
Thanks for this write up. Full of good info.
Atm vaping:
- FA Custard 3%
- FA forest fruit 1%
- FA vanilla Tahiti 1%
- FA Catalan cream 1%
Didn't turn out exactly as I had hoped due to forest fruit being much more potent than I estimated but it's still a damn good vape.
Yeah I mix 6-10% for most of my FA blends, rarely do I ever need to exceed that to get plenty of flavor. That's 1/3 to 1/2 my expected TFA mixing level, so even at 3X the price per mL, it's hardly more costly, and the flavors are so much more realistic and predictable, IMO. FA love. If anyone out there is looking to get into FA, www.mamajsjuice.com has great sizes, keeps good stock, and their pricing and shipping times are second to none. I got one order shipped with tracking <3 hours after placing it, and that's only because I placed it before he even opened for business that morning lol! The owner is a VU member, and a great mixer (although he deleted most of his recipes before I was ever active on VU to see them >.<).
I think this is where being able to cook really comes in handy for me with ejuice. Was a cook at a higher end restaurant in town while going to school so I picked up a lot of knowledge with flavor combinations for food which I've been applying to my juices. Made a banana cream the other night that's possibly my favorite juice I've made, waiting to post ab it though because I want to see if I can make it better. Using all FA ofc ;)
I really think the joy of FA is that, to me at least, it seems like their methodology is based around the concept of cooking ingredients and recipes. While they make finished flavors, by and large, their flavors are building blocks purpose-made for combination and they work so well together that is becomes a joy to mix up recipes like this. I've never been a good cook, I treat cooking like I treat my labwork and so 'a pinch of this' and other recipe deviations and inaccuracies jam me up pretty badly, so I find DIY works a lot better for my skillset. I wish I was a better cook though.
Do they rebottle all of them, or is the 10ml original packaging? Not that I need anymore FA flavors....
but then again...
I might have to try something like this. Just got some forest fruit and it really is more potent than I'd expected. I had just mixed it at 2% (my normal FA test strength) and it was WAY stronger than I had anticipated. Been sort of at a loss with it since.
I accidentally double ordered it a while ago and I can't figure out what I want to do with it. It smells exactly like something I've tasted or vaped, but I can't put my finger on it. But yeah, I have 20ml and I need to find something to do with it.
Got some of the their lemon yesterday. Was pleasantly surprised by it. Can see myself using it more often.
Lemon Sicily? It's damn good. Their Lime Cold-Pressed honestly smells and tastes EXACTLY like a fresh-cut lime. It's uncanny.
That's good to know. Will be on my next list. What % do you recommend for the lime?
Stand-alone, maybe 3-5%, but I don't use it alone, I always use it in recipes like a Key Lime Pie. If you look around, I think /u/Botboy141 posted a Key Lime Pie for Drippers recipe which uses it, but I don't recall what percentages or any details.
FA is my go to if I want to create something for exactly this reason. Their flavors are with very few exceptions, (hazelnut... I now dilute this to a 10% solution and then use THAT around 1%...) very consistent potency-wise across the board. So easy to work with and the flavors are normally spot on.
Honey is another one I dilute to 10% and use at 1%. But yeah, FA is great for so many reasons. They care about vapers and test their flavors and provide info to a degree no other flavor house does, and their stuff can be used in this method with ease no other manufacturer can compare with. It's great.
What is FA? Still new, learning all the lingo.
FlavorArt, an Italian brand of vape-safe flavorings without any diketones. They're the foremost brand of vape-specific flavors, and the leaders in safety-testing their products for the vapor market. Their flavors are top-shelf stuff.
Oh dang, it sounds like I definitely need to check them out. I just haven't seen them in any stores around here.
I don't even bother trying to find flavors in stores -- it's pointless. I order all my stuff online, the best source for trying out FA stuff is www.mamajsjuice.com. Cheap pricing, sample sizes, ship in dropper bottles, great stock selection, and blazingly fast shipping. It's run by a fellow DIYer from VU.
Very nice. This is similar to the approach I take. Though I use primarily TFA; sounds like lots of FA will be in my next flavor order.
im doing the same with an apple bourbon i make... except its an extraction so hitting the percentages is like saying "a pinch of this...", figuring out the percentage of flavor that granny smith apple absorb [and take out of the bourbon] and clove/cinnamon is a total guessing game.
Really good guide here. I've been dabbling in this sort of technique - checking recipes and seeing what I can make based on the ingredients, but haven't really gone too deep. This is a great resource - thanks for putting this up!
FA has become my primary brand as well - With my recent discovery of diketone sensitivity, I'm being more selective with the liquids I'm choosing. They mix a little more predictably, and need less curing time.
+1 on the mama j's recommendation - they're great.
I like this. Now someone do Pink Starburst...
Strawberry... Modified Corn Starch... That's all I got.
No seriously. I'd love a real pink starburst recipe. This is an awesome guide. I've never thought to look at it from this perspective.
Ask, and ye shall receive:
Pink Starburst
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Strawberry (TFA) - 8%
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Sweet Cream (TFA) - 4%
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Vanilla Swirl (TFA) - 4%
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Cotton Candy (TFA) - 2%
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Sweet and Tart (TFA) - 2%
All credit to Bill's Magic Vapor @ ECF for this recipe.
Thank you. I need to purchase the Sweet cream, but I have everything else. The B&M by my home makes an amazing Pink Starburst. I've yet to perfect it.
sweet cream is a great base flavor for using w/ vanilla swirl for giving body and substance to any fruit flavor recipe. I pretty much always go 2 parts fruit, 1 part VS+SC in a basic fruit recipe.
edit: post up a thread when you make the recipe, i know there are other Starburst lovers who'd like to work on it with you, i'm sure it can be improved.
I'm not sure whats up with www.mamajsjuice.com you can't add anything to the shopping cart. Any other websites you recommend?
What's up is when stuff is out of stock, that size can only be added to the wishlist. Try the other sizes if you can't add an item to the cart in the initial size. He usually has better stock than most places. Other options are www.rtsvapes.com and www.eliquidmart.com.
returnity - I was able to order from mamajsjuice.com. I just ordered the larger size. Heres my order http://imgur.com/PHGuYMH I went to the site wanting to order five flavors and ended up buying a lot more. Check out my order and let me know what creations I can make with this stuff. Thanks for your help.