Happy Memorial Day everyone!
Hopefully, this post isn't lost on everyone out drinking and barbecuing today, but nonetheless, I reserve the right to still get a little bit of work done today.
Today's post is about flavor additives. They can be quite useful in modifying your juices to achieve the exact flavor you are looking for. However, I highly encourage these not be used by people just starting or beginners
Hold on to your seats ladies and gentlemen. This is going to be an especially long post today since I have all the time in the world to type it all out.
TFA Koolada 10%
Used to impart a cooling sensation to your juice when vaped. I find that this particular additive tends to work best in fruit vapes. The off-flavor of koolada somehow just isn't as noticeable than when used in cremes and dessert vapes. The off-flavor is typically described as chemical, somewhat like band-aids, PG, and alcohol all mixed together. For cream flavors, I use it between 0.125-0.5%. For fruits, 0.5-5%.
Menthol
Minty and cooling. The mint flavor is rather artificial in nature though. Anyone who's ever tried a menthol cigarette or mixed with it before knows exactly what I'm talking about. The flavoring is unmistakable. Best used in fruit and tobacco profiles. It is a bit of an acquired taste to appreciate menthol. Though the flavor can be really strong, the artificial mint taste quickly dissipates the more you vape it. I've only used CAP Menthol, which is best used right about 5%.
Ethyl Maltol 10%
It increases the inherent sweetness a juice. Used mostly with fruit recipes, it makes the fruits being perceived as more sweet. It does have a tendency to mute the more delicate fruit flavors as well though, so be very careful when using it. Rather neutral taste. No real off-flavors. I typically use it around 0.5-2%.
TFA Sweetener
A dilution of sucralose and maltol at 5% each. Sucralose, in particular, is solely responsible for the sugar lips feeling you get from "premium" e-juice. It's the equivalent of dumping a bunch of sugar into your juice. It also has a tendency to mute delicate fruits, but not as severely as EM. Better for dessert flavors since they tend to have that pure sugar flavor. Though it's generally frowned upon to use, I do not completely discredit this flavor. Sometimes you just need some of that sweetness for a bakery dessert to really make it work. Use 1-5% based on how much sweetness you are looking for.
CAP Super Sweet
Dilution containing 20% sucralose. Also contains Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate, Potassium Sorbate, Sodium Benzoate.
TFA Acetyl Pyrazine 5%
It's almost more of flavoring honestly. It provides a nutty and bready-grain flavor profile. The flavor is quite versatile. You can use it in creams, desserts, and tobaccos to add complexity and richness. The flavoring is very potent though, quickly overpowering most other flavor profiles. If you add too much, you'll start to get a corn chip type of off-flavor. Use it around 0.5-1.0%. If you want the corn chip flavor, use around 1.5-2%.
TFA Smooth
Used to smooth out overpowering top note flavors and help push the background flavors forward. It's kind of the equivalent of mushing everything together. This is something I try not to include in a recipe to start off, but rather to make a bad juice vapeable after I've already made it. If you have it included in your base recipe, you probably want to reconsider balancing your recipe. I've tried using to make harsh flavorings like TFA Juicy Peach more manageable, but I have not had much success. Certainly not enough to make it worth using anyways. At higher percentages, it adds a subtle pineapple flavor. Not much taste below 2%. Use around 1-3% as prescribed.
MTS Vape Wizard
Sort of a weird flavor additive, and certainly the most complex. I highly encourage you to go read the product description over at Bull City Vapor, as the description does it more justice than I can do it, but I'm still going to try.
Overall, it's very similar to TFA Smooth in how it affects the juice. It mellows out high notes and brings background notes more forward. It is a very dark additive, eventually turning your juice black after a few months. The flavor is rather savory and smokey. Reminds me of Liquid Smoke in some aspects, though it's not very forward. Used best in tobacco and savory dessert juices.
FW Flavor Toner/Enhancer
Pretty damn similar to TFA Smooth. Smooths out top notes and brings out background notes. It provides a bit of a lemony citrus and zesty fresh note. Just about the only difference. Use around 1-3% as prescribed.
Vanillin 10%
Vanilla. Not too much else to say really. The vanilla note is very one dimensional and flat though. It's good for if you have already made a recipe that needs more vanilla and you can't find any other vanilla flavors that fit the profile of what you are aiming for. Aside from that, I rarely use it. Use between 0.5-2%
TFA Sour
It's a 20% malic acid solution. Though it's hard to perfectly replicate that sour punch to your palette, this adds a nice citrus tang to your mix. It does have a tendency to ruin your coils and cotton though, so use sparingly. Most citrus flavors already have a enough of this to achieve that sour taste, so I rarely, if ever, use this additive. When I do use it, it's generally between 0.5-1%. Just enough to kick a citrus flavor up a notch or two.
FA Joy
Another one that more of a flavor. The flavor is very unique and is one of the few on this list I would advise as being ok for beginners to use, though it can be quite finicky. The flavor reminds me of fried pastry, similar to funnel cake. It's also yeasty. This flavor is pretty much used exclusively for dessert pastries. Use around 0.5-2%
#CONCLUSION
There are a lot more flavor additives out there that I don't have experience with yet but are on my list to try. I will occasionally update this post as I get them. I can't stress enough though, these really shouldn't be used by beginners as they can become a crutch for mixing. A lot of different flavors already contain just enough of some of these enhancers and additives to achieve the profile you're probably looking for. Instead, they should be used as a last resort, "I've used everything else and nothing is working" type of application.
As always, don't forget to check out Beginner Blending tonight on Mixlr. We'll be live at approximately 9pm EST. Tonight's special guest will be the one and only /u/TheCatHimself.
TFA Sweetener is NOT just sucralose. It's PG, water, sucralose and maltol.
I believe CAP Double Sweet has 400% more sucralose than TFA Sweetener.
i thought CAP Super Sweet had sodium benzoate which is an inhalation nono?
CAP Super Sweet is Water, Sucralose, Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate, Potassium Sorbate, Sodium Benzoate. /u/tranceinate
I can't tell if any of those are harmful for inhalation at the small quantities we're talking about.
I can't tell either, which is why I just say to avoid it altogether.
Where did the sodium citrate come from though? I only remember Benzoate & Sorbate being in there with the Citric as preservatives from the msds report I read.
Very interesting! How have I not seen your website before now. Very good stuff there.
And thank you. I have edited my post to better reflect the information you provided!
I came here to say pretty much what dada said, but he beat me to it. TFA sweetener is 5% sucralose, 5% maltol, the rest is varying levels of PG & Distilled water. CAP super sweet is 20% sucralose.
I don't use TFA sour higher than .1%, & I aim for .05% - I need to dilute it. 10% malic acid solutions tend to mute when used higher than .1-.15% IME.
Thank you so much,that is pretty much the off-taste I am experiencing for koolada, and I seem to taste it quite prominent in my mixes. :(
Yeah, it tasted pretty awful. I put some directly on my tongue so I could get a better idea of how to describe it.
haha, I did the same, boy oh boy did I regret that. I need to find some time to start single flavor testing, notetaking and train my senses to pick up on all the shit going on in my mouth soon. But sigh, that's such an big task now that i have close to 100 flavors.
You might want to add FA Joy in there...for posterity 😉 Another great post though that will help a lot of people.
I barely know what joy does but it makes my sweet mixes a lot better, I thought it kinda rounds out sweetness but idk. (also is CAP Golden Butter a flavor enhancer? or would that be considered it's own)
A lower percentages Joy can be used in bakery juices, like a Churros type vape, to impart a fried aspect. It can also be used at the higher end as a funnel cake flavor, this is how FA markets it and how it would be used, as Vurve says above, as a flavor rather than an additive. You'll most often see it used as an additive though to create the fried dough aspect. It does have some sweetness to it, like a powdered sugar coated funnel cake and a yeasty dough flavor. It's not typically used like MTS or Smooth to round off sharp notes, I've never seen or heard of it used that way but DIY is funny like that...you never know until you try it.
Golden Butter is just that, a butter flavor.
Really interesting! Not sure why it's working for me the way it does, but thinking about it I might have made a fried sherbet type of vape looking back on it hah.
I thought so about golden butter, but isn't butter v2 just a compound? Sorry for the time waste haha but I find this stuff interesting
Great write up! I haven't used CAP Menthol; I have TFA Menthol, and have found it best used from 0.25-0.5%. I tried 1% once, and it was very very menthol. Just punch you in the face with it. If that's your bag, great, but it was over the top for me.
Thank you for an excellent post. I have a question. I tried various menthol ejuices, but I was always sorely disappointed. I enjoy the cooling sensation in your throat menthol cigarettes(most noticeable in Dunhill switch) but I never found it. I'm considering going the diy route since that post about diy ejuice on the ecig sub. What would mostly resemble the cooling feeling you get in your throat from something like Dunhill switch? Menthol? TFA koolada? A mix?
Which menthol are you using and at what percentage?
i have 0 supplies at the moment. i'm still saving up and researching.
so whatever you'd reccomend is what i probably would buy eventually, because i really mis the sensation
I have also used small amounts of citrus acid to brighten fruits.
My favorite flavor enhancer is saline solution. You have to make sure it's the inhalable stuff (I know that's not spelled right). It takes a long time to really mix into the juice, but it's worth the wait. It really brings all the flavors out (highlights and undertones). Definitely something you look into.
Does this add a salty flavor? I have read that somewhere.and hiw do you make sher it's inhalable?
The saltiness brightens the other flavors by creating a contrast of flavor. There is no salt taste, at least how I've used it (about 1%).
You can get saline to clean open wounds, don't use that stuff. Saline solution is also used with oxygen tanks, the pull behind one you see people with sometimes. That's the kind you want.
If you go to a medical supply store and ask for inhalable saline solution they'll point to the right one. It's cheap too.
*Also keep in mind that it will thin you juice a bot as well.
I use Citric Acid (10% Dilution) in some mixes. I asked WizardLabs if they had any for sell in one of my order comment sections, and they just gave me a 8 mL bottle of Citric Acid crystals. From this, I take 13.5g PG and 1.5g of the Citric Acid Crystals and mix to form a 10% dilution). Typical use is 1 drop per 15 mL. Used to give certain fruit flavors a "pop" that they normally have (sharpen may be a better term?). Overuse of Citric Acid can cause varied results in my experience, but the general consensus here seems to be that it'll eventually (after a month or two) dull the flavor in the mix.
I do the same mixing technique for all of my crystal/powder dilutions (13.5g PG, 1.5g <ingredient>) to bring it to 10%. Menthol, Sucralose, Citric Acid, Malic Acid.
You might also add Distilled Water to the list. Can be used to thin out some mixes when used in moderate amounts.
Other flavor enhancers/add-ons I use are:
Inawera DNB - Wet Ashes. 2 drops / 5 mL. Slight hint of tobacco nuance, but mostly just tastes like you put a drop of water in an ashtray and then licked it. (Sounds appealing, right!?)
Inawera Little Space Drop (LSD) - 2 drops / 5 mL. Used to add a Tobacco flavor without using an actual tobacco flavor. Overuse of this makes the mix taste awful IMO. Anything above 2% is absolutely unvapable IMO.
FA Bitter Wizard - I use this between 0.25-3% to dull "Sweetness" in a juice. If you have flavor concentrates that have EM, Maltol, or Sucralose already in the concentrates, and they're overpowering the other flavors that you want to bring out, use a bit of this. A little bit goes a long ways, so I almost never use more than 1% of this, but if you DO go above 1%, it won't totally ruin the vape in my experience, but it starts to dull too much of the flavor after a certain point. Also, after a long steep, this can take over if you don't have enough other concentrates to power through its "dulling" effect.
Nice list. We\you should definitely keep adding to it. I've got some good info sitting around in my mailbox somewhere that once I dig it up I could throw it in here as well; it has to do with a few more sweeteners that are less common.
Also, not to confuse anyone... TFA has more than one sweetener. They also sell a Ethyl Maltol solution that's 10% EM and 90% PG.
Sucralose is the same thing as Splenda. Just thought I would put that out there for those of you who are sensitive/allergic to Splenda like me. Probably explains why I can't stand premium juices like Cutwood for any longer than a day, but I can also tell if a dessert is made with Splenda the instant it passes my throat. Just out of curiosity, has there been any studies or anything that show any side effects from inhaling Sucralose? The medical community finally came out and said that Splenda really wasn't all that good for you, so I would be interested in knowing if inhaling it causes any "issues".
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