I think as whole this sub is getting way too weird with how many flavors we're adding to mixes. Pick the 3 or 4 best concentrates that go together, and knock off the ones you don't need. In a few cases, layering works well, but only a few. You should be maximizing flavor with the volatiles you selected for the profile and be able to do it in less than 5 flavors. Anything more than that and shit is starting to taste weird. People don't give enough credit to the concentrates themselves and don't use enough flavoring as is. "I used Cinnamon Danish Swirl at .5% and Cinnamon Roll at .5% to boost the Cinnamon Danish." Maybe if you used Cinnamon Roll at 4% and found the correct cream for it, you wouldn't need to add the extra cinnamon flavor. It's like when people use 8 different cookie concentrates to make a cookie base. At what point are things getting muddled? I'm finding things are turning out much better after a steep IN MOST cases, when keeping the recipes simpler and less complicated. The flavors I always come back to are the ones that are just light enough, but not too light, to have you keep vaping it and wanting more of that flavor. You don't achieve that ADV by having 16 different concentrates in your recipe. Some profiles are hard, like Rhodonite or Holy Cannoli, and require thinking outside the box. But very rarely are the best selling ejuices more than 4 or 5 concentrates (not talking about bullshit "my man" juices.)
"Doing too much" as I like to call it, applies to most areas of life, including mixing. It's nice to have a grand idea of how amazing it would taste if you did equal parts graham cracker, cookie, and biscuit, but let the concentrates and steeping do some actual work. I blame some of the more popular guys in part, for the way we approach mixing in this sub. Some good has come from this, but its making things convoluted and complicated for new guys and old guys alike. Take a step back and mix something simple and easy. Narrow your flavors down to a minimum. Learn them, and know what will work together. Let the concentrates you paid hard earned money for, do the flavor work.
I'm cool with this as long as 2 of the flavors are obscure enough to not be available through normal means of purchase.
I think people are afraid to post anything with less than eight or ten flavors as a recipe thread because it's difficult to go into much depth on the notes on a recipe like that. Even though it may be great a recipe might not get much recognition being posted in the monthly thread. And that's where you'll find the kind of mixes you're looking for. I have a few that I think are pretty solid but articulating some bullshit notes to appease the mods isn't really something I want to do. I feel like it would come across a little too pretentious. The sub definitely takes itself a little bit too seriously for me sometimes and we probably miss out on some great mixes as a result.
Notes aren't too bad, they give the reader a little insight into the profile of your recipe or the profile of a single concentrate - because you can just describe each individual concentrate rather than going all in-depth as to why you used it in the recipe. I also get a little bit of a giggle when I see the whole "a soft, succulent creaminess on the inhale with a smooth, juicy berry on the exhale" crap, but you don't have to be that guy.
Right. But it's still like describing the flavors of scotch to people who enjoy scotch. Just pour the fucking scotch.
Totally agree and it's the reason I don't post recipes here. I think notes are nothing more than bullshit. I've read a zillion times that "taste is subjective". That would apply to flavor notes also I'd assume. One persons notes might be different than another persons notes. I play around with flavors a lot. Mixing together what I feel would work. If it tastes good I vape it. Pass it on to friends to see what they think. They couldn't care less why I mixed what I mixed as long as it tastes good. If it sucks, I'll make adjustments or start from scratch. Fuck notes...
> I also get a little bit of a giggle when I see the whole "a soft, succulent creaminess on the inhale with a smooth, juicy berry on the exhale" crap
Agreed....it's never like the descriptions. There's nothing "juicy" about anything I've ever vaped.
> The sub definitely takes itself a little bit too seriously for me sometimes and we probably miss out on some great mixes as a result.
Agreed. I stumbled across a recipe called '23' in a monthly recipe thread by a relatively unknown poster. Four ingredients, less than 6% total flavouring. It had no upvotes and one comment. It's one of the best recipes I've mixed to date.
I get the feeling too many people here are hung up trying to be creative and come up with their own recipes. I understand the creativity side is a massive part of DIY but you'll struggle to learn to paint if you've never seen a painting.
Notes are the important part.
My most popular recipe is pink lemonade. It used 4 ingredients.
Then there is fizzmustards Mustard Milk. 2 ingredients
I've yet to find a great pink lemonade. I actually started DIY attempting to clone Element's Pink Lemonade for my brother and I, a year later and I still can't get there (and am now dropping the recipe). The best attempts were at least vapable, but the worst tasted like straight up floor cleaner. Unfortunately I soon realised after attempting the clone that Element's was just absolutely loaded with sweetener.
I find that most lemons just outright suck. I like LA, FW and FLV Lemonade but only really... like them. They're not anything special.
> they're not anything special
And that's exactly why my pink lemonade uses LA Lemonade AND FA lemon Sicily. LA lemonade by itself is really good and still the best one I've found, but it's still lacking something. FA lemon Sicily provides that extra sour and bright lemon note.
I find myself not reading notes unless they're on a flavor I don't have. Even then I take them with a grain of salt. Maybe if the rule was to provide at least some additional reading instead of flavor notes it would feel a little less like some kind of homework assignment.
I recently whipped up a bottle of Pink Lemonade but subbed LA Lemonade for FLV Lemonade at .5% and its solid. I might bump the FLV Lemonade a bit more but the Pink is spot on. I never realized the Pink was TFA Raspberry Sweet and TFA Strawberry Ripe but it is spot on in taste and smell. On the topic of layering I used to always do a 1:1 of TFA Raspberry and TFA Raspberry Sweet but recently I've just dropped TFA Raspberry all together because TFA Raspberry Sweet does everything I want it to.
This is a great post.
> People don't give enough credit to the concentrates themselves and don't use enough flavoring as is
My favorite part. Most flavorings if used with 1 or 2 other flavorings will really change in terms of flavor, and that's all that's really needed. I think a lot of newer mixers think that "building" profiles by using "a little this and a little that" will result in nice layered and prominent ingredient. But that's not usually the case. What usually ends up is a muddled and confusing flavor. These concentrates are already pretty complex in themselves and only need a little help boosting certain aspects. I also think a lot of people get hung up on "layering" and think it's some crazy technique needed to give your juice a "premium" taste. Layering is just an understanding of where certain flavor profiles work best and how best to utilize that. Great read man.
Thanks man. I know it comes off aggressive somewhat, but it has been a reoccurring thought when reading alot of recipes lately. K.I.S.S.
I mean I see some recipes on here that use over 10 ingredients with just a brief explanation of why. No one is going to mix that. That's another reason why these overly complicated recipes don't really catch on. Smaller more concise and FOCUSED recipes, where there's an understanding of why those simple flavors reach the main profile, are ALWAYS more popular. Mainly because the people who've tried those flavorings can understand how that recipe will taste before even mixing it. There's always room for super intricate and complex recipes. It's just they usually come from inexperienced mixers just picking and choosing which flavorings they think would go great in them.
I've actually been experimenting with dropping ingredients from my mixes, mostly with success. Last week I knock two flavors out of my VBIC and pistachio mix and it still tastes great (and honestly, about the same as it did before!) I also decided that future mixes will have no more than 5 flavorings tops (including EM), just so I'm not tempted to kitchen-sink it and just make things unnecessarily complicated.
While I agree that simplicity can be delicious, I don't want to come to a sub that only lauds 2-ingredient recipes any more than one that only upvotes 16-ingredient recipes.
I want ALL the recipes, so that I can decide what I want to mix.
Good post. It's worth doing some thinking about this. I've spent quite a long time deliberating this topic. Up front, I make and sell juices full time.
My simplest recipe has 3 ingredients (excluding citric acid). My most painful one is at 12. Sometimes it's what's called for in a recipe. Sometimes you can get to your target with only 3 ingredients, other times you'll need more.
I think a better approach would be to not try add complexity through multiple flavours unnecessarily. I've been working on a coconut cream cake for the last 8 months or so (the fucker which has 12 ingredients now). Every now and then I'll mix it up without an ingredient which I start to doubt and then A/B vape it to make sure I'm not just adding shit for the sake of it. I've eliminated a few ingredients by doing so as it has evolved over the months.
A complex recipe isn't necessarily a good one, nor is a simple recipe a bad one.
Eh, the little flavor notes are what make a great juice to me.
If every recipe had to be 4 to 5 flavors I would have a lot of mediocre recipes. They are decent, but you don't get "grape" by mixing grape and sweetner, nor do you get a vanilla custard by mixing vanilla and custard.
I... have to agree. Keeping things simple is one thing, but simplifying things for simplicity's sake is another thing completely... When it comes to DIY (and life in general I suppose), imo, you can go too far but you can also not go far enough. It's all a balancing act.
agreed. as a beginner who's starting out using one flavor for batches of juice (fuckmeright.jpg), it's a little daunting seeing recipes with a dozen or more flavorings in the recipe, just to get "grape". I think it would be great to have a beginner recipe thread (read: beginners don't have to buy $30 in flavorings to make a 10mL) monthly. maybe there is one and I didn't use the search bar. if so, my apologies.
but for a guy like me that wanted to buy a gallon of VG and a few flavors to save money on ejuice, the amount of materials that go into some flavors is ridiculous. however, I do recognize and appreciate the people that make simple recipes with just a few flavors. just my 2¢.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Every time there's a new front-page recipe thread and it has something like 9-10 flavors, I don't even read it. There's something unattractive about it.
I remember when I was guilty of this; When I was trying to clone looper I think my recipe had upwards of 8-10 flavors. Revisiting it after a year or so, I was happy with a mix with 3 or 4 flavors and that was 20 times more accurate than before.
Nowadays it is very rare that I move past a 3rd or 4th flavor tops. It is a lot more difficult than people think to properly layer that many flavors and would take an insane amount of iterations and long periods of time to see how the mixes behave after different steep times.
I keep it simple now, I add flavors one by one, starting with only a single flavor and finding it's perfect concentration, then adding a complimentary flavor and finding their perfect concentration together, so on and so forth.
Got a link\recipe by any chance for the 3-4 flavor Looper clone you speak of?
Never posted it, was simply a self-fullfilling exploration I did a while ago. Was over Looper at that point, which is why I didn't perfect it nor post it.
Here's what you want to play with though and maybe some general percentages:
Main notes:
FW Captain Crunch Berries (6-8%)
TFA Fruit Circles (3-6%)
FA Meringue (2-3%) *Higher than most would recommend, but that's premium juice for you
CAP Vanilla Custard (2-4%)
Possible other notes I remember detecting:
TFA Bavarian Cream (1-2%)
TFA Whipped Cream (1-2%)
That should get you in the ballpark pretty easily. Don't worry about sweetener, the FW takes care of that with the fructose. Take out the custard if you want Cereal Trip by Bad Drip. The secret is the FW Crunch Berries. Took me a while to figure that out. It works 10x better than TFA Berry Crunch, which got me closest in the beginning of cloning it.
Although I agree with some aspects of your argument (such as muddling after a certain point, difficult for new/veteran mixers, let concentrates speak for themselves) I'm going to disagree with a lot of the points.
I don't think it is really limited to this sub, but is the way that DIY is turning. People are realizing they can really hit the notes that they want to hit and make mixes that really sing to their palate. A problem with a lot of the flavorings we have on the market is they hit certain notes while missing others, this is why there are so many variations on certain flavors.
Take Mango for example, this is one that appears to be extremely hard to nail, but different flavorings offer different aspects. With INW Mango, I get a nice bright mango flavor, but can't take it above .5% without detecting an undesired floral note. TFA Philippine Mango offers a nice sort of Mango Nectar flavor, but is missing the brightness of a mango and the ripe pulpiness of a mango. CAP Sweet Mango Has got the dark, ripe, pulpiness to it that really speaks mango, but is a little too dark to be enjoyable by itself. Each one on their own is very meh, but if you combine them at the right percentages, you've got yourself a great mango on your hands.
One thing this helps you do is keep the total % down, which is great from a cost saving standpoint, as well as the throat or other irritations. For me, I tend to get too much of a throat from recipes containing higher % overall flavoring.
I do think there's a sort of threshold as to when it becomes too much and things get a little muddled. When blueprinting a recipe I will typically find myself either dropping off flavors, or looking for a flavoring that will sort of encapsulate multiple aspects. I think a big part of it too is we want to make these flavor profiles, but with a limited stash and knowledge. we need to make it work with the flavorings we do have and that we do know.
I will say I've been trying to simplify things a little bit myself, and have some great recipes that are 2 or 3 flavors strong. The trouble I find is they sometimes come across a bit too linear and I'm searching for different things I'd like to taste in that profile, and that's when we start looking at different ingredients at small %s to provide the accent we're looking for.
The number of flavors doesn't bother me directly. Occasionally I do feel a bit like I'm a spectator at a mixing stunt show or recipe complexity d*cksize war.
I encourage folks to post their DIY recipes and let the readers make what they want.
So that's why the Unicorn Milk clone tastes like shit
That's just the fact that unicorn milk tastes like shit
I've tried it today for the first time along with Sugar Drizzle, Mega Melons and Boss Reserve. Oh my God, they're all awful! It's unbelievable, I wouldn't vape this even if they payed me. I can't imagine how anyone would enjoy these juices. Uh. Jesus.
Honestly, when I first saw the title of this post, I was like, "here we go, some fuckstick coming here and complaining about some bullshit and being a dick."
Then I actually read what you had to say and do agree with you whole-heartedly. This post actually has me rethinking a lot about my own recipes. I will admit that I tend to overthink my mixes, because I'm impatient and hate waiting for a steep. So I do exactly what may muddy up my recipes when the steep actually happens.
My only mix that I feel is justified to have a lot going on is Drunken Pears, but other than that, you're 100% right. Time to look back on some of my other mixes and see what I can do to simplify them.
Cheers.
No doubt man. Thanks for reading. I just know there are really great juices out there we taste and we overcomplicate them so much. I look at guys like gremlin and fizz who have simple mixing philosophies and ive come to respect that. Bombies made hundreds of peoples all day vapes on fairly simple recipes but they also have complex ones too that are amazing also. I do see both sides of the coin but you see that bombies puts in hundreds of iterations of recipes before releasing juices for sale. New amsterdam is another diy guy that makes amazing simple recipes. Pick the best flavors and let the flavors do the work in the right ratios.
Exactly. I think part of the issue is like, just the sheer volume of different flavours we have available to us. And I think that people, myself included, think that layering 3 different types of one flavour profile will immediately create a better note. Mixing multiple different strawberries isn't necessarily going to give you a BETTER strawberry. Really, I've only seen mango as the flavour that really needs multiple iterations of it to become something tasty. Everything else is already complex on it's own and will work on it's own.
Again, the more I look at this post, the more it inspires me to really dial back on the "little of this, little of that" mentality and just hone in on my knowledge of each flavour on it's own.
Good job, nice write up.
Now, I ask genuinely...
Do you not realize that a lot of the people posting these complex recipes generally post less complex ones too? Fizzmustard's Mustard Milk, SkiddlzNinja's Cliché. Modest Monday started off as nothing but a collection of simple recipes for people who don't want to buy a lot of stuff.
These are generally also the same people trying every single flavor under the sun so that you can have your perfect 1 flavor ingredient. There are lots of people in here who are trying to help new and simple mixers as well.
i see that, thats why i said in most cases, etc.. But granted, most of the guys that post successful complex recipes have some type of clout here. i haven't really seen a lengthy complex recipe from fizz but most of his stuff is pretty frickin good. i think alot of guys see that right off the bat and think automatically they can make their own recipes like that and its a mess. and i think veteran guys forget to keep it simple sometimes also. im not stating anything new here that we don't already know, just walk before you run. and don't forget to walk when you get dizzy from running as well.
I've been thinking about this post a bit, and admittedly, it did take me off guard. Overall, I have to mostly agree with you. I think so many people get too focused on trying to create these complex recipes to make something that is uniquely their own.
You've encouraged me to go back to actively think about the basics again with my own recipe building, and I think I will likely do a Modest Monday post highlighting this topic a bit more in depth.
Thanks again.
No problem man! I just got to thinking and I realized how much some of gremlin's and fizz's posts rang true with what i've been finding in my mixes lately. Granted, gremlin uses higher flavoring percentage but the same concept can be applied to how much flavor you like to use personally. Check out some of their posts! I think he has a few in here that mention their approach to mixing
I have come to this conclusion as well. Much like I have always done with playing instruments, I prefer to write my own music over learning other peoples' songs. With that, I started working on my own recipes from day one. All of my ADVs (except Wayne's Funfetti... ahh that shit is good) are my own creation, and they range from 3-6 flavors. They all have a vanilla custard base, some plain, some caramel, some butterscotch, etc. When I try to work on other recipes that don't have that custard base, I end up with 8+ ingredients.
Say I am working on a berries and cream. I can't just use blueberry wild. I need that candy note from blueberry extra, and that dark, real note from FA Bilberry. Then I want strawberry. TFA strawberry and straw ripe together are essential. If I'm using them, I better add 0.5% TFA Dragonfruit.... And I haven't even gotten to the cream base, and accent notes, which will easily outnumber the berry top notes. This is how I have always approached it.
I have started making a conscious effort to keep it as simple as possible. Hopefully, a change of pace like this will help me develop some tasty stuff worth sharing.
I agree and disagree.
As someone else put, sometimes it's the smaller, more subtle notes that really make a mix special, so the number of ingredients start to add up when you want this as a result, so this is where I disagree.
Where I agree with you comes to cloning. I've been working on a clone of one juice for several months now and after 7 versions I decided that I'm not getting any closer. My most recent batch I cut it down to its core components which happens to be 4 ingredients. Letting it steep currently, I'm hoping that going back to the basics of the flavor profile will help me expand it further without muddling everything together like I have been. This is why failure is important, learning from mistakes is what makes DIY so rewarding when you get something right.
I agree with this to a degree but I think a lot of people need to realize that 10+ ingredients doesn't mean a good mix. What people confused that for is a thing Wayne mentions a lot called flavor-bending. For example, we don't have a muffin flavor (plain muffin) or at least to my knowledge we don't.
So I have this for a blueberry muffin recipe:
Blueberry Base
Blueberry Extra (TFA)/Bilberry (FA)
...then this for a muffin
Muffin Base
Sugar Cookie (CAP)/Biscuit (INW)/Torrone (FA)/Joy (FA) or Brown Sugar (TFA)
next I do some research because I get a muffin and then a blueberry... so what do I need? I choose Dragionfruit by TFA because they share some components in their mixtures with Sugar Cookie by Capella and probably the berries for the blueberry. (This may all be in my head but it works similar to how Cinapple Fritter got it's mixture perfected)
How many flavors is this? 7, still small but it's needed to do this and it's not perfect because of the blueberry but the roll base is staying.
It's all how you like to mix, I also do fruit mixes that are 3 flavors. It's just using what you have and not showing off like the guy said about the dick contest or people showing off their flavorings.
It's like saying an artist can only paint with four colors, we have all these flavors so why not use them? Now, using them correctly is a different beast.
I enjoy the challenge of making a recipe with a lot of flavors without it turning into a muddled mess, but I tend not to share those unless someone specifically asks. Cheesecake is really the only 'base' flavor that actually needs a fistful of ingredients to really turn out right, so anything I make with cheesecake already has six ingredients plus whatever else I put into it, and that's as complex as I've gotten.
I think that six-ingredient cheesecake base could arguably be considered one 'flavor', since I could theoretically just make a big batch of it and use that instead of the individual concentrates that go into it. The more I think about doing that, the more I like the idea, because I'm lazy.
Six concentrates is kind of the magic number for me, overall. It gives me enough flexibility to mix two or three concentrates of the same flavor for the main portion of the profile, a couple of accents, and a base.
Most of my ADVs have less than 5 ingredients-I think people are trying too hard...try not reading a label of a juice you're trying ...see what you taste...one I tried recently was just wrong- It claimed 'Santa Barbara coconut husk and Chula Vista sugar cane' It's actually berry, musk and sweetner...nice mix but don't go by that label...
Why do you care? Let ppl share wtvr they want, its not like they arnt respecting the sub rules. I actually quite enjoy the descriptions because I'm unfamiliar with some flavours and would like to learn why ppl use them. Some ppl might be full of shit and some ppl might be completely on point, but sharing freely on this sub is the reason I like it so much. You can post your own opinions on a particular flavor someone made and posted and that's that. I'd probably take your opinion seriously too if it was constructive. As far as the small percentages of flavours, its all about experimentation and the best thing you can do for those who are maybe misguided with a flavour or who maybe can use it differently in a recipe is just give them an honest opinion. I do think this was a bit harsh and could have been brought to the community in a more approachable way.
I disagree. I used to go too crazy with flavors and lately I've cutting down to about 7-12, but a LOT of the times you need at least 3 different cream flavors for it to taste good etc. I make bases for everything, and it works great. To each their own though. I'm not going to make a post saying people aren't using enough flavors in this sub, so I don't think you should do the opposite.
Down to 12? What's the most you've used?