As most know, Captivape makes two strawberry flavors in their "premium" line, Strawberry Cereal and Strawberry Milk. Both equally delicious. One utilizes strawberry ripe and one utilizes sweet strawberry, Strawb. Cereal and Strawb. milk, respectively. Ever since I tried them I wanted to clone them. Months pass and I eventually posted a clone of the strawberry milk, but the cereal was ever elusive.

Until one day I saw that /u/crosstown_rebel was looking into cloning it. What better opportunity than that to offer a possible colaberation of efforts on the subject. I already had a working set of creams that I used I. Cloning their Strawberry Milk as well as the knowledge that they used strawberry ripe as the main note in their Strawberry Cereal.

The wonderfully presented top notes in their strawberry cereal were hard to replicate but after a month or so of back and forth a with crosstown, we were able to narrow in on the flavors that made this juice so great. I'm going to present the recipe and then break down each component, present some optional changes and additions, and crosstown should be presenting some of his notes in the comment section:

Crosstown_Rebel and Shrine399's Strawberry Cereal Clone incredibly long name, I know, but I don't like renaming clones

• (TFA) Strawberry (ripe) - 6%

• (TFA) Berry Crunch - 4%

• (TFA) Hazelnut - 1%

• (TFA) Marshmallow - 1%

• (TFA) Bavarian Cream - 0.5%

• (TFA) Cheesecake (Graham Crust) (optional) - 1%

• (FA) Meringue - 0.5%-1.0%

• (CAP) Super Sweet - 0.5% or (TFA/any sucralose 10%) Sweetener - 2%

70VG/30PG

Steep time: 4-7 days

Let's start with the TFA creams.

Hazelnut, Marshmallow, and Bavarian Cream

This seemed only fitting from the start after finding it as their cream base for their Strawberry Milk.

The hazelnut adds a wonderfully dense and slightly nutty cream note. It's pretty sweet and really doesn't taste like hazelnut. It's more, like I described, a sweet cream with nutty undertones. This, paired with the marshmallow and Bavarian cream, goes from dense cream to a fluffy and sweet milk. It isn't overpowering and mostly lends to the overall mouthfeel.

The hazelnut was the easiest part to figure out by simply smelling my hazelnut bottle after taking a pull of Strawberry Cereal, and simply going "yup". I find that to be the easiest way to pick out flavors. Narrow in on a flavor you're tasting, ignore the strawberry, ignore the grain, and I pick up nutty sweet cream, and marshmallow notes.

That's where the marshmallow came in, but it just wasn't enough flavor. It definitely fluffed up and sweetened the mouthfeel but the marshmallow note wasn't strong enough.

Bavarian cream is known to be a very strong flavor and its justice is done in this situation. It brings forth the sweetness in the cream as well as the nuttiness in the hazelnut and the grain aspect in the cereal notes. It does that by adding a slight maple note, but more prominently a strong marshmallow note. This keeps the cream feeling sweet and "fluffy".

Cheesecake GC The cheesecake is optional because I don't believe it is in the actual recipe, but it works very well if you want more of a milk flavor over cereal. The actual recipe is pretty light on the cream and more centered around the cereal and strawberry notes.

It slightly takes away from the sharp cereal and strawberry notes, but brings forth the cream side of the mix, as well as returning it to more of a dense cream.

Strawberry Ripe

This section will be pretty straight forward.

It was easily decided on as the strawberry used and no other strawberry notes were picked up. Even berry crunch has strawberry ripe notes. There wasn't any second guessing here and the final percentage was just found through trial and error. Any lower, and t wasn't prominent enough, any higher and it mutes the rest of the notes.

Berry Crunch and Meringue

These were the two "Aha!" moments in the cloning attempts between crosstown and I. It started with the Berry crunch. We just couldn't figure out what was that sharp cereal note. Crosstown kept suggesting AP and I remembered Berry Crunch having a pretty strong AP note as well as sharing a lot of the strawberry ripe notes.

I waked over to my flavor cabinet, pulled out my Berry Crunch bottle, took a whiff, and raced back to my computer to finish a message to crosstown urging him to try it. It completed so many of the cereal notes in the mix, but even after we settled on a percentage, there was still something missing.

It wasn't "sharp enough". There was a certain dryness to the juice that really made it feel like you had a mouthfeel of grainy cereal. Crosstown repeatedly suggested meringue as giving sharpness without muting or altering the flavors but my expectations of meringue and my stubbornness kept me from trying it. I had tried it prior and had thrown the option out the door early on.

Eventually, I bit the bullet and dropped ~0.5% into an already made 30ml of what we were working with. It instantly clicked that it was the missing ingredient. It added so much sharpness to the cereal note and sweetness on the inhale that really made the cereal crunch.

meringue percentage

The reason there is such a big gap in percentage for meringue is because I believe the original to have up to 1% meringue but I personally enjoy it more with 0.5%. It's just a little smoother and more balanced at 0.5%.

If you feel it lacks that extra sharp crunch the original has, feel free to go up to 1% meringue and you will find it to be even more akin to the original.

Sweetener

I'm fairly certain they use cap's super sweet because it really is forward lay sugary and definitely lingers on your tongue. If you want the same kind of sweetness, use CAP Super Sweet.

Personally I try to avoid the super sweet because of all the additives and it gunks faster than any other sweetener I've used. I find the equivalent level of sweetness to be, counter to what you would think based on concentration of sucralose, a 4:1 ratio, hence the 2%/.5% difference.

Feel free to play with the sweetness level as desired, but the noted amounts are most like the original juice. I am currently working on tweaking the overal recipe to create a version using no sweetener without altering the flavor too much. It hasn't proved to be an easy task, and I expect it to be a pain. The sweetness really works here, and is one of the only premium juices where it's overbearing sweetness is welcomed and enjoyed.

I think that's it for now; I did this whole thing on my phone so hopefully it doesn't look like crap. Let me know if I'm forgetting anything or have any questions I'll be mostly on stand-by to answer questions or any concerns.

Happy vaping (:

Shrine

I am adding the notes here from /u/crosstown_rebel , let me know if it gets too wall-of-texty and I'll take it off. My only fear is that it will get lost in the comment section.

"Hey yall. Shrines partner in crime here. This one was a doozy but a true journey in vaping experience and one that I recommend you all endure simply for the learning experience.

My first try of this I genuinely thought was cookie, then shrine mentioned hazelnut. But hazelnut wasnt giving us everything we needed. It didnt become a true collab until shrine mentioned berry crunch which I had thought of but never truly liked. Lo and behold, it was the missing link. Shrine already did most of the ground work for which I am truly grateful, so we were left figuring out the correct percentages and such. For a while there, i didnt think we were as close as we were. My original hypothesis was sweet strawberry due to their strawberry milk, and it just wasnt hitting the mark. I remembered Rhodonite having a nice sharpness from meringue combined with all the grainy and fruit notes and that also seemed to be the missing link. This was a long process as i was short on mixing time, and we would spit ideas back and forth before we could settle on percentages. Shrine will tell you, I was really starting to doubt how close we were and then he mentioned steeping. It was missing some of the sharpness of the original, and I wanted that aspect so badly. But the key here is the steeping. You absolutely need to let this steep to realize the cereal notes full potential here. The ripe pops and the crunch crunches so well on this. It might not be 100% but its a delicious consolation prize and will keep fans of the original thoroughly satisfied to save a buck. I would go far as to say I like this version better because its less sweet and a much cleaner vape on your coils.

Im rambling and, I could give you every minute detail of every note we deliberated but, I have to give my buddy shrine a huge shoutout on this because i love this flavor and working with him really zeroed me in on my final goals and making a recipe I will continue to make forever. I hope you all enjoy it, and although it will be a long process, shrine and myself will continue to post more stuff in the future once we decide where we want to go next.

Posting this on mobile just makes this all the better as nearly 99% of our conversations happened there, so its only fitting. Some times two heads truly are better than one and I hope you all enjoy the delicious end result. If not you can yell at us or add sweetener until it hits the mark (lol, vaping the original really has been so sweet these past few days im almost burnt out on it) but please, feel free to vape as much of this as you want and share with family, friends.. Thanks for reading!"