Like, making new flavors? Trying stuff out? I know when I am making a new flavor I need to x-nay the nicotine, and add and adjust later, but say I wanna just make some new flavor...
Like my local shop just made a salted caramel and pretzel flavor. Or a good friend I know has a brown sugar inhale with three types of bourbon and a caramel and almond exhale...
I know it's all complex, but how could something like that be explained, if only to plant the seed for my experimentation later when I'm much better at it?
TL;DR: you're all wizards. How does I wizardry.
I've let people try stuff without saying what it was and gotten a lot of guesses that were way off the mark.
Other times I espouse the subtleties of a mix and gotten feedback that agreed with everything I claimed.
It's a subjective mess. But I'm no wizard so I just rely on my palate and some creativity to guide a lot of experimentation.
Let my friend try the unicorn milk clone leak. No description, didn't even tell him the name, basically shoved my mod at him and told him to try. "Tastes like flowers," is what he said.
I was in the kitchen the other day and was in the mood for some spaghetti. Didn't have any store bought sauce so I grabbed a bowl and a mixer, threw in a half dozen tomatoes and blended them together. The trouble is, they just tasted like tomatoes. So I grabbed some oregano, some cilantro, cumin, the usual. It was better, but need a bit more garlic, and as an afterthought, adding some onion to this would be really good. Don't be afraid to improvise (and be ready to make a lot of really bad stuff the first few times! hehe)
It helps to know what all the individual ingredients taste like on their own, but after some time, and knowing what you like, you can start making your own flavors and it will be the best stuff you've ever tasted. :)
If you could have any one food for the rest of your life, what would it be and why is it spaghetti?
Sugar, it cuts the acidity of the tomatoes, giving a sauce a more rich, robust flavor.
Aside from oregano, that's salsa, lmao.
:) It was the first thing that came to mind to relate mixing to cooking. And if a blender WERE involved in this, it would be more of a picante rather than a salsa. hehe
>Or a good friend I know has a brown sugar inhale with three types of bourbon and a caramel and almond exhale...
Your friend should start an overpriced premium juice line with that kind of bullshit description. Oh I'm sure you can taste "three types of bourbon" in a vape...
As for your question, experiment, try other people's recipes, most importantly get to know your concentrates. After a while you will start to know what you're doing and it'll get easier. When searching for ideas draw inspiration from food, diy forums or vendor juice for example.
Flavor pairing is where I'm starting..
I'm horribly unbalanced and odd. I can't match and pair clothing. I think pairing tastes is gonna be a huge hurdle for me.
I'm not super into making my own recipes yet, but I did whip something up last week when I was out of a couple flavors. I used the cream base from a different recipe with the meringue of another recipe and strawberries and cream at like 5% I think and it was pretty good. I think I'm gonna try to find some bases I like, then mess around with combining them with main notes, and finally work on fine tuning bases to main notes together
We are not wizards, even though some of us like to use wizard ;p
So here is my perspective in my journey to where I am at now making my own flavor combinations.
When I frist started my journey into DIY, it SUCKED. I was using flavorings that where not very good and I ended up just buying pre made juice. Then the great study journey started.
I learned that there are a lot more flavoring companies and I should keep in mind what is in what and come from what sources.
However that does not always mean a good mix.
I also figured out that some flavors are way more powerful than others. Example, CAP Sweet Strawberry at 1.5% is weaker flavor than INW Cactus at 0.5%. So balancing flavors for what you want is a big deal. Also nicotine (if you are still using it) plays a factor in flavor.
Some flavors are just better mixed with other and some really help push the flavor of some. Sticking with strawberry, adding in kiwi will push it more prominent. Some flavors just won't be good mixed in the same batch. Some flavors are more noticeable on the inhale and exhale (how you get some of the more complex flavor mixes). Then there is additives like sweet, sour, joy, wizard, ect ect.
It is a lot when you are frist starting, and with out study you are doomed to take a long time in wasting money and time until you figure out some of these things. I wish some of these things where told to me when I started.
Want to make a new flavor combo, or recreate sometime? Mix single flavors and do smell tests to know your flavors and then balance out the mix.
Also... and I can't stress this enough...
TAKE NOTES ON EVERYTHING
Not sure where to start, then look at recipes with good reviews and results, and look at the mix ratios of the flavors. Once you get a feel for it, mix it up and do something similar or different. ;p
One last thing. I have found out that you need to think outside the box. I am now playing with tea and champagne flavorings with cakes and brambles. It's different and interesting.
I'm not good at it yet, but how I started branching out into my own recipes, and figuring out how to do it is to take a recipe that I got here and was really enjoying. It was good, but something was missing. I wanted to get a different taste from it. So I started playing around with increasing one flavor, decreasing another, add a touch of this, maybe a skosh of that... Mmmmm That tastes like what I want. I learned a lot about what flavors pair and which ones just don't. Then I did that with another recipe, and another...
Finally I got to the point where I could pinpoint pretty close what was missing to make it what I wanted, and could get it there in a couple of tries. That's when I started working on my first recipe from scratch and it took about a month to dial it in.
The biggest thing is time, and practice.
I look up specific flavors on http://e-liquid-recipes.com/ and sort by highest rating just to get ideas, and wing it with my own preference/flavor inventory from there. I've only made maybe a half dozen batches, but they've all been really impressive to the point my vape friends pay me for it.
What I see being repeated here over and over is work with the old adage, "standing on the shoulders of giants." Very few things are out of the blue novel. Most good inovations rely on others, and sometimes your own, findings and flow from that. Find 3-4 personal ADV's that are someone elses recipe that work for you. Perferably they'll span a few categories of flavor types. For me Fruits & Custards. Dial those in and then start adding one additional flavor to one of each of those personal ADV's. My progression went like this: Initially started with single fruit flavors and single custards flavors. I then started to add flavor notes to each catagory like I wanted my fruits to "pop" a little more found so started to add Lemon and I wanted my custard to have a deeper note so I added a cream. That proccess kept going until I those two classes start to mingle and meet in the middle. Now I have distinctions between my what I call a "fruit" a "fruit drink" and what I call a "Fruit Cream" and a "custard" and even a "Custard Cream". All of those have very distinctive atributes that ultimately come from new ingredients, that took me establishing a foundation to the build on. Hope that helps.
For your juices do you speed steep? I heard about some people using those little candle warmer things and a beaker of water and throwing some juice bottles in there
Sometimes, if I'm low on juice I'll put it in my crock pot set at "warmer" setting wich equates to 130deg F. Let it sit for 1-2hrs, then rest in my closet for 2-3days. I can't taste a difference from this method and a traditional "slow" aging for 2w, with no heat. There is some talk that the heat does degrade some flavor compounds, especially if they're alcohol base and possible degradation into nasties, so I perfer to just give them time if not pressed.
it's taken me over a year to get like 8 or 9 go to good mix's. there have been a lot of failures to even get to that small number lol. but when i'm in the mood i experiment.
it's kinda like cooking tbh. how would this flavor taste with this one and should one over power the other?
just do it
Seconded. I spent a lot of time trying to make sure I had all the details straight in my head before I first started mixing. I actually sat and stared at my flavors for a couple of weeks, getting increasingly intimidated. In retrospect, I wish I'd just spent 20 bucks (instead of 200) on supplies and made a few found recipes that looked good to me, while maybe doing some single and double flavor experiments. However you start, though, you'll start learning tons immediately.
I'm not sure you understand that when your friend makes three types of bourbon flavor, what he does is use 3 existing bourbon flavors. To make someone go "hmm, I'm sensing a third bourbon in there"? Yeah, I don't think that's possible. So for the most part, it's just start at low percentages, mix and vape.