Hello all,
This is one of your two newest members of the mod team, /u/wh1skeyk1ng. I begged and pleaded with /u/Vurve to let me contribute to a Modest Monday post. After some haggling, I promised him my first born child (whom hasn’t yet been conceived), a date with my mother (she doesn’t know yet), and my top secret November recipe 2 days before the thread got posted. Somehow, /u/skiddlzninja may have ended up with another hand job in there too somehow, but enough about the small details.
I’m here to talk about something rather eccentric that I do from time to time to break the monotony of just mixing a pre-determined recipe and calling it good. I call it dual stage mixing, and I want to share the potential benefits, and what it can do for your recipes that seem to be missing something. Now, before we get started, there are really only a couple reasons you would be doing this.
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You just want to “freshen up” a mix. This typically requires minimal effort. Say you are mixing a complex cream/bakery base with fruits. The fruit flavorings have a much higher volatility, more readily evaporating from your e-juice, leaving behind the creams and cake. As a result, your creams and cakes tend to take over a mix after a steep while sometimes over-powering your delicate little fruity flavorings, leaving you with a thick or creamy vape that only carries subtle notes of whatever fruit(s) you put in.
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You made something you really aren’t quite satisfied with, or you want to try a couple tweaks on top of a base without re-mixing the entire batch and starting from scratch. Most of the time, these mixes have the potential to shine given the correct additions.
With scenario #1, this can be as simple as mixing your recipe and waiting for it to steep, or forgetting about it in the back of your cupboard. I’m going to shamelessly use my Jelly Filled Donut recipe as an example.
- TFA Frosted Donut 5%
- CAP Glazed Donut 2%
- FA Meringue 1%
- INW Raspberry 0.8%
- FA Red Touch (Strawberry) 2%
- INW Shisha Strawberry 2%
After a few weeks, the jelly tends to fade. Adding a drop of INW Raspberry and or 3-4 drops of each strawberry and giving it a quick shake brings the jelly filling back to life. You now have a fresh tasting mix with a nicely steeped base.
Now for Scenario #2. This method works well if you have your base nailed down and want to tweak your mid and top notes without starting over every time. This also comes in handy if you’ve made something that’s just kind of OK, but you’re wanting something more from it.
I’m going to use one of my own examples here for representation as well. I thought I would make 240mL of a Cinnamon French Vanilla Custard using the following recipe in a 70VG blend:
- CAP Vanilla Custard (v2) 5%
- CAP French Vanilla (v2) 5%
- CAP Cinnamon Danish Swirl (v2) 2%
So, while this was decent, I feel like it never really came around to being all too amazing flavor wise, even after a 2-3 month steep. (Probably due to using v2 flavorings) I made way more than I should have and just couldn’t get into it. After contemplating dumping it out due to a lack of performance, I decided to try something desperate in order to save it. I knew I was at 12% total flavoring already, so adding much of anything might end up being counter-productive and destroy my coils. I contemplated some tweaks/additions that I thought would spruce it up a bit, and came up with some 15mL recipes with around 5% flavoring to blend half and half with my lame ass custard and punched them into my mixing calculator. Here are a few 15mL additions that turned out very well:
- FA Joy 4% and FA Cinnamon Ceylon 1%
- FA Cookie 4.5%
- FLV Lemonade 2% and FA Lemon Sicily 0.5%
- TFA Apple Pie 3%, and FA Fuji 2%
- FA Blackcurrant 4%, INW Raspberry 1%, and INW Cactus 0.5%
I then made these recipes in 30mL bottles, and topped the second half off with the original custard mix. Most of my results clocked in around 9% total flavoring after blending. You could use a similar process if you’re trying to figure out mid and top notes to blend into a predetermined base. If you come up with something extraordinary, it might require some dissection and calculation to bring it all together into one recipe. However, if you’re like me, you might get tired of it by the time it’s gone and move onto another tasty recipe you’ve got in your head.
I’ve also done something similar before, here was my borderline shit post about it from a while back. While the final result was truly amazing, I never went back to it because I’ve got over 100 other flavors to play with. On a side note, I’ve reviewed quite a few flavors, and some of them get rather boring before they’re gone, so I end up dumping random ones together just to change it up. I'm also going to take a second to shamelessly request you all to check out the Flavor Reviews in the sidebar, and if you have time, submit 1 or 2 individual reviews to the sub. :)
Happy Mixing and thanks for reading!
Vurve's Shameless Plug Be sure to catch the Beginner Blending podcast tonight on www.mixlr.com/inthemix-podcast at around ~~8:15~~ 9:15 est. Tonight, the first annual Beginner Blending mixing contest will be announced.
EDIT: time change for podcast
Nice post about salvaging your mistakes. Personally, I force myself to vape them as punishment for making those mistakes to begin with. We can't all be self-flagellating masochists, though.
I have a cherry cobbler recipe that's really good that I wanted to try splitting up into two halfs and try steeping separately then adding together for the final mix.
somethinglike
French Vanilla Rice Crispy Cereal
then
Cherries Sweet Cream
Do two 15 mls, then add them together after 2 weeks. Make a 30 ml. See how it compares to the original.
I also had more advanced ideas like heating separate mixes to burn off high end flavors, like burn off the sweetness off a certain flavor that you don't want in a mix.
Or possibly use the too much mutes the flavor to an advantage, use Strawberry Cream, add a ton of sweet cream to overdrive the cream and get a weird strawberry without the cream flavor. Let it steep then add it in to a certain mix that needs that specific weird flavoring.
Things like that. I dunno.
I've been waiting to see these more intricate mixing techniques like you do in coil building, techniques that stack on top of each other.
Nice ModestMonday post! I wondered if something like this would work and am glad to hear it does - messing with the eliquid after its initial mixing, that is. Sounds like a way to fix the Monster Melon's clone I like but that the cantaloupe fades after a few weeks (just add a drop or two of TPA Cantaloupe to bring it back to where I like it).
Similar to these tips and being far too impatient to let things steep for weeks, I like to mix a larger cream base with PG and VG, no nic ofc, and let that sit. Then I can just put a bit of it in a small bottle and add some fruits or berries and nic, shake it up, and have fresh juicy flavors with a nice developed cream. Only thing to keep in mind is that this new mix will change quite a bit over the next couple of days if you don't finish it off, for better or worse.
Example #1 is definitely a technique I utilize, though I don't see much talk about it
For example, when I make my vanilla wafer banana pudding, I often find the banana lacking at about the 1 week point. I'll add about 0.5% of LA banana cream to kick the banana to the forefront of the recipe again.
This is one of the beauties of making your own juice. Getting to make it however you like, and adjust on the fly if necessary.
Good job brother, are you going to be on the show to talk about your post?
So example number 2 is a technique I use all the time to come up with variations and already great base. Recently I have made a toffee recipe, and lemon cookies and cream, which by the way are both it's amazing, and personally feel like better than the original.
I've done this before. It works.
I don't follow the 50/50 guidelines though.
I had a honeydew recipe turn into something amazing after a couple weeks but it had lost that punch that honeydew gives..so I added a couple drops of honeydew to the 20ish ml I had left and bam honeydew is back. It's exactly like a flavor shot to steeped juice! Awesome sauce!!