This is in response to the thread asking what your ADV is, I saw a lot of people say their ADV was someone else's juice creation. Now I will definitely mix up others juices occasionally but 90% of what I vape is ultimately my own concoction entirely, or at least inspired by something else.
It hadn't ever really crossed my mind to wonder how many DIYers simply look at recipes and vape those vs people creating all new juices. There's definitely nothing wrong with not creating your own as most of the time you're still way ahead of the game by not buying store bought juice. Just curious.
Edit: Thanks to everyone who replied! This was exactly the feedback I was hoping to get <3
I tend to begin with someone else's recipe, then tweak it, if I feel it necessary, the next time I mix that recipe. I am in awe of the talented contributors willing to share their hard work with mixing hacks, such as myself. If it were not for those generous individuals, I would be spending almost as much money on juice as I was cigarettes. So, I thank all who share their hard-earned knowledge and wonderful recipes on here and elsewhere!
I totally agree, I would not have even started if not for all the excellent mixes posted here, on reddit specifically.
Personally I make recipes like I write code (and I'm not a coder): take a cream base from here, a known good fruit combo from there, try it out and adjust to taste. I have a fair amount of my own flavor tasting notes but I have a lot more not just saved recipes but saved snippets of recipes.
I heard it said once that stage one of this kind of knowledge is being able to read code (a recipe) and understand what it's doing. Stage 2 is cherry picking examples together and putting together something cohesive that works, and stage 3 is developing completely from scratch. I'm at a solid stage 2 :)
Now wait a sec ATX.. Mixing these other peoples recipes is a learning process. Especially if you are using your mind to tweak it, I am sure you have tried to tweak a recipe before and fucked up gloriously, right? You now know one thing NOT to do..
I think if you are doing this you aren't a hack. A hack would come in and never try to change anything. A hack would probably start selling and saying he/she made it.
All mixing is .. A big list of things Not to do, ie... Do Not use 3% TFA Honey, LOL
I think everyone should start by mixing other people's recipes. One big reason is that until you have about 100 concentrates you aren't going to be able to just mix something out of your head. Sure you can if you have say 20 of the most popular & best tasting concentrates but you wont have like 2 or 3 of each fruit flavor to figure out which of that certain fruit is best with whatever you are mixing.
Perhaps hack was too strong a word, but when I compare my abilities and knowledge to the regular contributors here, I come up woefully short. However, I am very good at following the recipes, as written, and as a result, have made a few very tasty juices, some tweaked and some not, that do a good job of sating my palate. Additionally, I take no joy in the actual act of mixing. I enjoy vaping the result. When I do find something I like, I make a couple of hundred milliliters and am done for a month or more. After it is about half gone, I start browsing around again to find more work of the talent-laden folks and the cycle continues. How did you know I have a bottle of TFA Honey sitting on my desk gathering dust?
LOL Honey, I think everyone has one. I let my wife smell it today. She smelled the outside of the bottle and says "smells good" I said open it.. I never seen her make that face... It was like a reverse O-Face.
My best bet on Recipes has been to find what concentrates I like the taste of and just not use the others. Something I would vape as a standalone if I wasn't picky. I use those flavors to make recipes.
I may deal with low percentages of concentrates that I don't care much for at a later date. Maybe once I learn a little bit more about what other flavors they might enhance or combine with to taste better. I just don't use them unless someone's recipe calls for them. Then I may not even like that recipe because of it... and sometimes I get lucky and someone has shown me a good use for a otherwise sub-par concentrate.
I feel like I'm one of those people, who has recipes that'll make for friends, but I feel like when I'm vaping my stash it's always a new variation that I'm working on
Same here. I have a few people who get juice from me and they want the same recipes every time (and stop messing with them!). Personally it's like I don't have time to just vape the the same juices all day. I'd estimate 10% of what I vape are new mixes I'm trying for the first time (original, inspired combinations/modifications, or others juices entirely) and the other 90% is tweaks and changes to the first 10%.
DIY isn't a hobby for me like others. It's a way to save money.
That being said, I basically just mix up 120 ml of juice every two weeks based on a variation of what I have been working on that's based on a fruit mix.
That's an excellent distinction you made, one I should have pointed out; the hobby vs practical aspect. For me it's a fully fledged hobby, I spend an inordinate amount of time researching recipes and taking notes, tasting, doing more research, taking more notes, and mixing again.
Most of the time I only mix up 10ml batches because before I'm done with that I've already got some tweaks in mind.
> It's a way to save money.
Yep. Got it down to $10 a month for my juice. Just made 6 x 30 ml of different flavors (about 20 minutes worth of work). Always trying something new.
I have my own line on stores and I only vape it like 1 or 2 times a month to not grow tired of my own creations. Other than that, I like to buy some vendor juices to continue supporting their activity just like people buy mine to support me. Usually on my rotation daily there's one vendor juice, one tester from my line and just like I said, once or twice a month I crack open one of my own bottles.
Oh, and usually I only make other peoples recipes when they're different/strange to see what they were trying to achieve. Hope this answers the main question.
I came up with a honey apple tobacco flavor that was my ADV for a couple months, but I decided to take a break from it. The main issue with most of my recipes is that they're good, but not great, you know? And I guess I just get lazy and return to tried and true recipes that others have shared.
RIght now in front of me are three mods. One has /u/Botboy141's Peanut Cookie loaded up, one has the mix that /u/skiddlzninja whipped up when we met, and one has my Boyz'n Blue from the Flavorah recipe thread. That's about my average - 1/3 my own creations, 2/3 what others have done. Bot and Skiddz are much better mixers than me, I'm not ashamed to admit it, and I'd rather vape the best than just vape what I've invented.
I have a few that I've got from other people. With most of them they aren't perfect for me so I usually make them my own in some way.
Sometimes I might take a clone recipe that was decent and use it as a base to make it closer to the real thing. I've been doing that for a while with the creme de la creme clone that was posted and I feel like I've definitely improved on it. At this point it's split off into more variants of itself with one having cinnamon and another being truer to the real deal. Still a very hard juice to clone, especially since I don't plan on buying another bottle of it.
I've also made a few of my own that turned out really well. Still need to tweak them though.
I do the same as you . As most recipes posted don't agree with my palate. They either weak or not good at all, Except /u/NotCharlesManson recipes as I feel we have really similar palates specially his cuttwood unicorn milk clone, been in the rotation for a long time . Thx brother .
When I first got into DIY all I vaped was fizz's nana cream clone until I eventually grew tired of it. After the first few weeks of diy'ing other shared recipes I spent the next few months creating a flavor of my own and after many revisions I finally ended up with something that I could vape 24/7 and never get sick of. Haven't vaped anything else for the last 4 months.
I frequently start with other's recipes as they are first and then play with them by making my own little tweaks. So about 20% others' original recipes, 60% other's recipes with additions, subtractions, and substitutions, 10% truly original creations, and 10% testing out new flavors one by one to get a taste for them so my extensive tweaking and minimal creating is informed.
For me, mostly other peoples recipes, probably a 20-80 split.
I started out DIY with aspirations of coming up with all these amazing juices but in reality I just don't have enough time to dedicate to learning all my concentrates and how they interact with each other.
Also, I like sweet/dessert and fruity vapes, but when it comes to food I don't eat much of either, so inspiration is a little lacking.
I don't have the best tongue, but I usually start with an existing recipe. Usually I'm missing one or more flavors to truly copy the recipes that have 5+ ingredients. I substitute quite a bit, then simplify. I've ended up with a bunch of weird combos. The best stuff I've made is simple 2-3 flavors combos that I've developed myself. While clone recipes (if there really is such a thing) can be helpful, IMO they are not accurate. I use them as guides toward flavor combos that work well together.
we vape our own. we've tried a couple shared recipes in here, and they were pretty good, but still prefer the ones we've come up with. We've basically chosen to make juices based off of what we like to eat and drink in the fruits, desserts and ice cream categories, and have tweaked them until we really enjoy them.
100% my own. If I set out to make a recipe, I'll search for people that have their own version for inspiration, but my recipe is always my own. I don't see a need to duplicate work, so if I see a bunch of PB cookie recipes using 8% PB and 2% cookie, that gives me a starting spot. But I build on that foundation myself adding my own notes on top of it. It cuts down on my recipe development time. Starting from scratch 100% on my own, it can take 5-6 tries to perfect it. Using other's experiences as a foundation reduces that to 3-4 batches until perfection.
I started with someone else's recipe, then crucially had an ordering breakdown with some very limited supplies.
Now I make my own, because I know my tastes better than you, and it's delicious. And yes I vape some things that my friends think are beyond terrible, but I really like them (banana-cinnamon cream icing flavor is my go to right now)
I vape several as ADV. My own at the moment is "The Lucky Russian"
Idea : from Brit-Co : http://www.brit.co/lucky-russians/
Recipe : http://e-liquid-recipes.com/recipe/353770/The+Lucky+Russian+-breakfast+vape+by+trecenters
Any Recipe I use from someone else is always heavily modified. Lets take Bronuts for example.. I made this, but I wanted more of a creamy vape along with the chocolate & doughnut. So I added some Dylce Le Leche, Merangue,and a touch of Bav to Cream it up. I also Lowered the CAP CGD to 2.5% ..
As for as Pre-Mixed, I buy a 120ml of Slurp by JUS from Indy E Cig. No one has came close to a clone for this just yet. It is Milk with Fruity Pebbles undertone. Nothing like Looper, Cereal Killer, Glas, Milkman, or any of them.. The closest example I can say is that it is as different from all them as Birdbrains is different from Looper.
At the moment this is what I am researching, Fruity Pebbles and similar ways people have recreated the taste in Alcohol Shots, Essential Oils, and Ejuice. So far nothing decent in the Ejuice world is written down. The shots call for some more tropical fruits that you don't see much of in the states, Waiting for Christmas to be over so I can afford the fifty dollars of concentrates I need to test with.
Probably 1/3 of my mixes are straight up copied, 1/3 more or less inspired and 1/3 entirely from scratch, however I rarely mix a recipe the same way twice. The more pleased I am with the result the smaller the changes, but I'm always hunting for that neat little twist, undertone or aftertaste. I get terribly bored vaping the same stuff for too long so I always have +10 tanks with various juices on my desk so I can just swap at will. This is one of the reasons why I'll never really finish a recipe :) There's always room for improvement!
As most DIYr's will tell you, flavors from different companies actually taste and blend differently. So even if you mix using someone else's recipe, if you deviate at all you've created your own blend. Also I've discovered that my tastes change as I vape a certain recipe. So while I may start off with a blend I like, as I vape it over time, I think "Wow, such and such would really make this pop!" or "you know this could use ________ to enhance the flavors in this." So the more you experiment and the more you tweek juices, and as your own tastes mature, it's very common to get to where you're mixing and entirely unique recipe.
Probably 90% others recipes, 10% my own. With the sheer amount of solid recipes out there, you could go 100% others recipes and never be able to vape them all. The main thing I like about this approach is that I get to try all sorts of juices. The 10% my own has been clone requests from other people or if I find a recipe that's close that just needs a little tweaking to "get there." Been DIYing since February of this year, and I've saved a ton of money from it--even with the crapload of flavors I've purchased to make all of the recipes. Currently sitting at 251 flavors, and I have another 70 or so on my wish list.