Good morning everyone!
I will try to keep it short, but I felt like this is important to address for any new mixers seeing all the talks about layers in recipes to really create something special. I did a quick search for "base" in the searchbar, and came up with a few threads, but for new DIYers, I know I would have been intimidated by the wealth of information in those posts.
To put it simply, I wish I would have known more about layering my recipes when I first started mixing. I assume most mixers have a similar experience, but when I got my very first flavour order, I was so hyped to mix that I just dove right in. No real research, no basis to work off of, just what I thought would have worked. How wrong I was.
Jumping in and throwing what you think will work, while you'll definitely get lucky and create some decent flavours that are actually vapeable, you're going to make significantly MORE shitty mixes that will just be defeating and discouraging. Because of this, I all but gave up on mixing after nearly 2 months of garbage mixes.
Don't give up. While layering is a more "advanced mixing" concept, the idea of having a good base is something everyone can learn and succeed with. Once you nail this, you'll notice an immediate improvement in your recipes, for the most part.
My man /u/Vurve posted this thread that breaks down everything that goes into a "layered" flavour profile and it is an excellent resource to learning how this works. But to focus on the base, this is the primary flavour profile of your entire recipe. Now, this may be a little confusing. Because say, in a strawberry and cream recipe, you'll most likely taste the strawberry notes more prominently than the creams, but more than likely, the cream is the base in the recipe. It's what all of the other flavours sit on or meld into. Now, with that being said, you can create a base for ALMOST anything. You want a fruit base, it can happen. You're essentially trying to create the "mouthfeel" elements with your base. The part of the recipe that, while you don't get slapped in the face with it, you taste it throughout. That's the key to a good base, that flavour being noticed throughout the entire vape. Sure, your inhale will be heavy on your accent notes, but you want to still know that the base is there.
Let's focus on the base I'm talking about today, and one that I believe is incredibly versatile.
CCB - full bodied and sweet cookie crust
- CAP Sugar Cookie at 3%
- TFA Vanilla Bean Ice Cream at 1.75%
- FW Hazelnut at 0.75%
- FA Cookie at 1%
- FA Meringue at 1%
- FA Vienna Cream at 1.25%
- OPTIONAL - Acetyl Pyrazine5% at 0.25%
So let's dive into why this works, what it creates for the overall recipe, and what you can omit and why.
CAP Sugar Cookie - this, for lack of a better word, is the base of this base. Base-ception. But CAP Sugar Cookie, as I've said before, is an incredibly diverse flavour. It provides a great fluffy, cakey sweetness to a recipe without imparting and particular flavour. With this, you can get the benefits of something like EM without the other flavours being muted. CAP SC is a beautiful vessel for all of the other flavours in any mix. It uses it's sweetness to bolster some of the less intense or subtle flavours, while it mellows the more intense flavours by giving them something thick to bind to.
FW Hazelnut - at the low percentage, this allows a nice little boost to the bakery elements. The nuttiness and sweetness of hazelnut is not going to shine, but it's going to help blend the gap between the cookie elements and the creamy elements.
FA Cookie - here's where you're going to get your real bakery graininess that you want in any sort of crust. FA Cookie is one of the best cookie/bakery flavours you can possess. Simple crunchy cookie flavour, but not any specific flavour that's going to stand out. FA Cookie is going to give you the crusty, crunchy, bakery mouthfeel you want in this kind of base.
TFA VBIC/FA Meringue/FA Vienna Cream - here's my creamy element for this base. This is where the "base" almost drifts into the realm of being a "recipe." However, this combination is subtle enough to still work with the rest of the flavours to keep everything as a base. VBIC and Vienna Cream imparts a nice thick creamy mouth feel that melds with the crust to thicken up the body of the cookie. FA Meringue sits there to give a little bit more of a sweet milky flavour. Again, you can have two different base elements mixed together to create one base, but you want to make sure those flavours all blend together nicely without fighting for any sort of flavour "spotlight." Keep it simple, keep it subtle.
OPTIONAL Acetyl Pyrazine 5% - this is a flavour enhancer, and while it can really help bring something to the next level, it can also completely ruin a mix. Acetyl Pyrazine gives you a grainy, flakey, gluten filled bread flavour and mouthfeel. But here's the key, to get my 0.25% in my 10ml mix, all I needed was 2-3 drops, and it really changed the profile with just that little bit. I would never go over 0.75% with this in any mix. But when you find how it works for you, it's so fucking great. Without it, the base still has great flavour and depth, but this adds just a nice little extra boost.
Okay, I guess I didn't keep it short, but I hope this was helpful to anyone that took the time to read it. I honestly have been vaping on this base standalone for a bit because it's smooth and subtle and tasty on it's own. But you can alter the percentages to get a different base. Want more custard notes? Add CAP Vanilla Custard V1 instead of TFA VBIC. Want more cookie? Remove TFA VBIC and FA Vienna Cream, add in some INW Biscuit at 0.75 - 1% , and you suddenly have a nice cookie base. Want less cookie, more cream? Try upping TFA VBIC, adding something like CAP Sweet Cream and/or FA Fresh Cream while removing the FA Cookie. That's what I love about bases, they're versatile, they can be tailored to your own taste. Listen to your palette. Push a flavour up a little bit, drop it down, change things up to get what you personally want.
With accents to this base, it will work with so many things. Throw some fruit in there to get yourself a nice fruit tart type recipe. Add some chocolate to change it to a chocolate cookie vape. Hell, play with some more potent cream, custard, and ice cream notes to create anything from an ice cream cookie to a cake.
Mix this up, let me know what you think, and let me know what you do with it. I'm trying to delve more into the informative posting side of DIY, especially for new mixers. Some exciting things on the horizon, be sure to check out Wayne's In The Mix Podcast tonight at 930pm EST to hear about some of the exciting things, I'll be in the text chat getting weird with y'all.
Cheers!
Way to steal my next Modest Monday post jerk
I honestly think I just have a shitty pallette... I read these things about certain flavors really accenting the other flavor and I don't notice shit. I really wish I could experience things like the description but I don't notice shit... I have made so many different cream bases and honestly they all, more or less, taste the same.
I know what you mean. I've been mixing for a few years now and I still don't think I've nailed a cream/custard yet. It seems that my mixes smell great in the bottle and even taste great when freshly dropped on the tongue... but when vaped, they don't resemble the smell/liquid taste at all. I have a feeling that the heat from vaping drastically changes creams and custards... I do not have this problem at all with fruit mixes. :/
Same for me. Fruits are just fine.
If you haven't seen this thread, it's been recently created. Might have some useful tips in there.
Have you tested all of your flavors out at varying percentages? It takes time, but it really helps you develop your palate. Cooking helps as well, especially if you taste everything in the stages of cooking to see how they blend together. If you really like fruits, then go to the store, pick up a bunch of different raw fruit and eat it super slowly. Compare the different fruits with each other. How is watermelon different from honeydew or cantaloupe? Blackberries from raspberries from strawberries?
This sounds like a lot of work, but it helped me when I started, and I still do it when I'm having trouble mixing something.
Dude, you've been killing it in this sub lately! Nice write up.
Great post! I agree, that FA Cookie/Meringue/Vienna Cream combo is just delicious. I used it in a recipe I posted in the monthly thread this month, so I'll have to mix up and play around with your base here in it's entirety. Looks good, thanks!
I bet this would taste pretty damn close to a Belgium cookie wafer if you added a drop INW biscuit and flavor of your choice, ie. Vanilla, strawberry, chocolate
The ones that come in a blue tin that you get around the holidays? If you mean those... My brother has a recipe, that he posted here a few months back, and I remember it tasting very close to the actual cookies. It had INW Biscuit in it as well. I only tried it a few times when he was over, and have been meaning to find the time to mix up the recipe myself.
Interesting post. I was surprised to see you start talking about the concept of an essential base foundation but then discuss a seven-ingredient recipe. That's way more complicated than I expected! I guess that's just how bakery-type recipes go? Bakery/cream/custard vapes are really not my thing, so I wouldn't know. If these seven ingredients lock in together, then awesome.
Outside of the bakery context, I would think that the "base" concept would more often be in the range of solid 2-4 flavor combos. Or even a single flavor base composed of different manufacturer's versions, like one of my favorite examples, "The Mango!". In the realm of strong & sharp fruit flavors, which is where I prefer to dabble, using too many often results in a muddle.
When I think of a "base," I immediately think of the LA Banana Cream / TFA Strawberry base of all 'Nana clones . That's an extremely solid flavor base. Those two flavors really lock together and create a foundation with great mouthfeel that's easily built upon with background or accent flavors. The same goes for the TFA Pear / TFA Honeysuckle combo you see in Placid clone attempts. Both combos give you something that's more than the sum of the parts.
Thinking about "bases" is a conceptual framework that might help some people. But I would add, don't get discouraged if the concept doesn't help you, or doesn't seem to work in some flavor-genre contexts. Whatever works for you, works.
Certainly, most base flavour compositions are going to be in the 2-5 flavour range. A few reasons why I went kinda crazy with flavours to build this base:
First, like you said, bakery recipes are rather complex by nature. You get, and need, quite a bit of flavours to really build something that isn't just a simple fruit+cream vape. Not that those are bad, by any means, Mustard Milk is still one of my favourite vapes to date.
Secondly, I was sort of, unintentionally, combining two base profiles into one. The cookie crust element and the creamy element. The crust flavours can easily be their own base, same with the creams. I should have probably reiterated that a little better. Either way, for the actual recipe I'm trying to put together, I knew that I needed both of those elements as a base element, because I didn't either of them pushing more than the other.
Finally, I kinda just wanted to see how "deep" I could go with it. I feel as those all of these flavours, on their own, have some very distinct qualities. But when mixed together, you get 6 flavours all sort of round each other out, and I ended up with something that really has some complexity to it's subtlety, if that makes sense.
And of course, this is just something I've found that really upped my game. Learning to structure a base is what brought my recipes from the "meh, this is good, but I still kinda want to buy better juice from the b&m" to "this is better than the shit I used to vape." But naturally, this isn't meant to seem like the end all post that you NEED to build a base to have a good juice, more just a jumping off point for newer mixers.
Absolutely. I try to find good flavors that allow me to have a 2 or 3 flavor base. Sometimes it still ends up being 6 or 7 once I'm at version 40 or 50 of a certain profile though. It's taken me over a year to realize that, for me, FA Meringue and Fresh Cream aren't helping. AT ALL. 1% CAP VCv2, 0.75% FA Marshmallow and 0.75% FA Apple Pie (or 2% TFA CGCC) has great feel/complexity and is retardedly versatile. Cereals, Fruit/Creams, Tobaccos, Bakery etc. I don't see those flavors used in bases as often as flavors like Meringue, Fresh Cream, Biscuit, Cookie, VBIC etc but they work better for me.
I never post here but had to tell you and Verve that these threads are SO. DAMN. Educational. I've learned so much. Even though I don't taste half of what you guys talk about...I hope someday I can. And I know that even though I don't think it taste it, it's adding to the flavour even though I can't differentiate. You guys are awesome.
Keep mixing, keep fucking up, and keep taking notes. You'll only continue to improve. The best thing you can do that will help your palette pick up on the nuances of each flavour is to do individual flavour tests. For simplicity's sake, take a flavour like TFA Banana Cream and mix up three little 5ml standalone samples of it at something like 1%, 2.5%, and 4%. Then vape them and take notes on it at each percentage. Then you'll know how that flavour works at each percentage, and it helps get the flavour notes that you want when it's time to mix a recipe. You get a feel for how different flavours play with each other, and even more so, how to use that to your advantage. Like I said, just find what works for you, and keep working at it.
I'm still lost... I've read this 5 times now and I just can't seem to understand. May be my mild inability to comprehend what I read.
What don't you understand about it? I'll try my best to explain it differently or just more in depth on anything you may be confused on.
I'm new to all of this. Started vaping in Sept 2015, and then diy at the beginning of March. I guess I'm looking for a guide to help me with my current recipes that, for the life of me, won't come out correctly. I've got a dragon fruit, strawberries and cream juice, but the cream takes SO long to come out, and still isn't even very prominent, that I get tired of waiting, so I chalk it up to a botched recipe. Same with my greentea ice cream... I don't have all the flavors I need, I'm sure, and that could be my issue, but when I view some of the recipes on elr the ingredients list is about four flavors long and the juice is raved over. I'm discouraged and need to be reinvigorated.
I've been seeing (and using) AP at a pretty high percentage, am I fucking up?
Thanks so much for this post. I ordered the flavor a I needed and made a small batch to start playing with - how long does it need to steep? I am going to try using this for some tobacco flavors btw.
Honestly, the cream base would need a few days to round out with anything you put in with it. The cookie base is good to go straight away, and the Acetyl Pyrazine kinda just "breads" up the recipe in time. But you don't need the AP unless you want more bread graininess. The two bases combined are delicious right away, and if you added some tobaccos to it, you might get something interesting out of it. Not entirely sure, just recently picked up some Soho in my last order to play with tobacco notes a bit.
Let me know what you find with your mixes!
hey all,
wondering if you could give me some base advise on bettering one of my ADV's. its a caramel apple sucker, i call it karma apple FA fuji 7.5% FA caramel 5.5% MF (lotus) vanilla 0.5% - because of this flavor steep is around 2 weeks
*i do NOT inhale directly into the lungs and am using a kanger subtank mini. so adjust accordingly
FA fuji is the top note. it is primary on the inhale and at the beginning of the exhale. though it may be a bit too sour it fits the green apple sucker flavor perfectly. may drop it to 7.3% next time
FA caramel was supposed to be the mid-note but actually sits a little higher than i thought it would. it adds sweetness and a pleasant burned sugar tase but lacks the heavy/buttery depth of caramel. the caramel also adds a delicious top note on the very end of the exhale. together with the lingering sour apple and dark caramel end, this is a super easy and fun recipie.
MF (lotus) vanilla needs to be increased but is noticable throughout the entire vape. this is what i am using as a standalone base. likely i will go 0.8% next round-its just the steep time that kills with medicine flower stuff, even though i love them!
i am reaching out to the community for help with the caramel and have put it in this sub because it is lacking in the base flavors. surely someone has thought "what can i do to make the caramel more thick and decadent" i have tried FA marshmallow (which muted the sour apple and added too much smooth vanilla flavor at 1.5%), and also TFA bavarian cream (which completely took over the recipie at 2%, though it did give me some of the flavor i was looking for l, i would have had to up the apple to an extream level to compensate. will try it at 0.5% in another trial.
was thinking of trying LA caramel? anybody second that?
anyway you guys are all amazing, and i would appreciate any suggestions :)