So I've been DIY for around 6 months now. I decided to treat myself and order a lot of the popular flavors from giantvapes:
http://i.imgur.com/6zMMHfY.jpg
Now don't me wrong, some of them taste pretty amazing (looking at you cannoli be one), but the usage of sweeteners is just much too pronounced now. I basically get a very feint amount of flavor mixed with a ton of sweetener from all of them. It seems like some of these producers find a really good concentrate (some of the bakery stuff tastes very true to life), pump it full of sugars and ship em out. The aftertaste of sugar becomes unbearable after a while, the flavors become interchangeable because that's all you're getting at a point.
I feel this is probably an issues a lot of DIYers face, once the they fill the gap between skill/concentrate sourcing with what the big boys do it becomes absurd to consider spending this much money on a single bottle of ejuice. I mean you're talking a price difference of $0.5-1 and $25.
Let's say your a juice company in it to make a bunch of money. You find a few concentrates that taste decent together. You add a bunch of sweetener and the first people that try your juice at a local shop are hooked. They read your description of the flavor and as long as the profile is close enough, the sweetener along with the power of suggestion will lead them to think your juice is amazing. That's step one.
Step two: develop hype on social media forums (and local communities, I guess, but the internet is way more powerful). Once people hear the same juice talked about enough and the flavor sounds good to them they will probably go out and buy it because it's "new" and unique." Brick and mortars will stock the product if people online respond positively to it and local bros spread the word. It will sell.
The few people who actually realize that the sweetener is what sells will find better companies that have integrity and truly care about the craft and support them.
Enter the members of this subreddit, who have realized all of this and decided to start brewing themselves, taking every step to appreciate the craft and create art.
There are still plenty of extremely reputable companies out there making juice, you just have to wade through the pool of garbage covered seaweed.
Welcome to the enlightened minority, my friend.
Tons of people come into the shop I work at and do this
"Hi, I'd like a bottle of OVERSWEET HYPE JUICE in 3mg please"
"Also, do you know why my coils are gunked up after a few days?"
Me: "Stop using *OVERSWEET HYPE JUICE". We carry plenty with less sweetner or none at all.
"But this just tastes good. Whatever, I need a pack of coils too"
This is depressing. We don't use alot of sweeteners and we can tell a vast difference between what our customers say about us and what vape shops say about us.
A few vape shop employees have actually said to us after trying our flavors "we prefer stuff like OHW and Mad Hatter, it's more pronounced flavor and sweeter." HUH?!?!? How do you work at a shop and not know your vaping 10% sucralose and 10% Sugar Cookie CAP?!?!
It's like when people would prefer McDonald's burgers over a homecooked one. The extra sugar and salt get people hooked and they don't want to try actual good food.
Ever since I started DIY I loved it. Now months later, like you I have the same issues with premium ejuice. If they use bad nic or too much sweetener I feel like I completely wasted my money, diy juice is custom and never ever gunks up my coils as quicks as premiums.
I just finished a road trip around the country. I thought I made enough to get me through the whole trip, but I ended up a few days short. Had to stop in and buy juice at a shop in Texas and everything sucked. I ended up paying $40 for two 30ml bottles of shitty juice. They were mixing in the back and wouldn't even sell me a bottle of unflavored, which would have been preferable.
another benefit, my wicks and coils have never looked better. Seriously, my wicks turned dark amber within 30 minutes of putting on brand new wicks, and my coils needed to be cleaned and rewicked almost everyday. Now with DIY i've yet to try additional sweetener at all since i love the flavors so much, but i checked my coils and wicks after 5 days just out of habit, and HOLY CRAP, they looked BRAND NEW....after at least 15ml through them....never going back to premium juice ever. don't think I'll ever need to change my wicks either lol.
Dude, this is a coil I made just this morning for the purpose of testing this premium juice
http://i.imgur.com/2prNRWP.jpg
I can't understand how the regular user puts up with this
I used the same cotton in Velocity for 3 weeks out of sheer laziness, they never looked that fucking gross.
Have you tried any of the cannoli recipes here? how would you compare that to cannoli be one?
I haven't, typically I'm not that much in to custard/bakery flavors but got this because of its reputation. Honestly it's the only one that I can imagine having a problem replicating, and maybe the Boyd's Bounty.
The others seem very 'meh'. 'The enterprise' is the same tobacco concentrate that I threw away a while ago because of its bitter aftertaste.
Man, a Boyd's Bounty clone would be awesome. That flavor profile is very intriguing and it's almost impossible to lock down a good oatmeal cookie base.
That's the one that got me in to DIY actually, chasing that flavor profile. Although I lost sight of it after a while, coming back to it, it's not as amazing as I remembered it. I see the canolli one as a much more subtle and genuine flavor, no wonder the creator uses that as his base for all his juices, he really stuck gold with it.
I've tried them all as cannoli be one is pretty much the only retail juice I still buy. None of them are in the same league (they're good just not close). I know the maker is a big fan of FA, and you can definitely taste a hefty amount of Vienna cream... I'm thinking 3-4%. Sweetener too. That's about as much as I can pick up.
This is my thoughts on the subject basically. Like I don't see no problem w a couple of drops of sweetener to add the flavor it needs when it's needed, but these premiums are def using sweetener in the % part of their juices. Anything that's good is good as long as it's not overdone. The best comparison to what a lot of premium juice is is like taking a bowl of Sweet cereal then just spooning sugar in until you got a thick amount of funky sugar on the bottom in the milk. I've had premiums ruin perfectly good coils in 1 full tank of usage. I dunno plenty of juice I've tried is excellent without the overloaded sweetener. Ussually the darker in color it is the more likely it's gonna trash your coil too it seems.
I feel like that and don't even diy. I want to start but have no clue how to do any of it
You can order unflavored base for a a few bucks (118 ml of 6 mg 70vg/30pg for $3). Then buy one or two flavorings. Get free oral syringes at a pharmacy. Use an old bottle you've washed out.
Keep the amount of flavoring less than 20%. Fill the rest with the base.
Cheap and easy. If you like it and want to stick with it, then look into mixing by weight and buying vg, pg, and nic separately to make it cheaper. Or if you're lazy keep buying premixed base. I got a years worth of premixed for about $30.
Hey, I was in your position a few months ago. I looked around the web and found the best ways, IMHO.
Things you'll need:
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An electronic scale
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30mL ejuice bottles
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VG
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Nicotine
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Syringes
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A good list of clones you want to try out
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Flavourings for the clones
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Box for steeping
You can go get extra stuff like PG, rubber gloves, etc. but I like Max VG since I find PG irritates my throat. And trust me on building a clones list to try before you buy the flavours. I was an idiot before I made my first DIY order and just got flavours I think would be good but it was a total mistake since they didn't mix well together and them by themselves was really boring flavours.
And mixing by weight is much much easier than by volume if you're just making the bottles for personal use.
Hell if someone wants to just dabble as I know from experience it's a daunting thing to start up, simple two flavor recipes are just fine, but I fell ya, I need to start looking st some clones. Everyone is going ape shit over donuts in ECR, I want to see what the hype is about. Mixing by weight is the only way to do it imo.
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Order any concentrate that sounds tasty, pg and vg liquid, a 30ml empty bottle and a syringe
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Using syringe put 3ml of the concentrate,, 4.8ml pg and 19.2ml of vg in the empty bottle
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Shake
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Vape
It's really that simple. After a few tries you can start putting in nicotine and some concentrate combinations
Weight based mixing is so much easier and less cleanup.
Also, the way you stated it, makes it sounds easier than it is, coming up with he right mix of concentrates and steep time is almost an art. However, following a good recipe you really have nothing to worry about.
In terms of just getting the first one out of the way it really should just be easy, if he gets something simple like an FA grape or raspberry (not to be used at 10%) it's totally fine to just shake and vape. The percentages only come with time and experience, as welll as steeping (mostly with time). If he can just follow these steps then he would get over the hump and can begin to start following recipes, experimenting etc
In regards to weight vs ml, that's preference I suppose. I'm just used to ml and can whip up my adv in minute reusing 3 syringes (1 for flavor, 1 for nicotine and 1 big one for base). Its habit plus I prefer working with % which doesn't require density knowledge
I've had the same issues with a lot of the juices a friend tries. He absolutely adores them, but when I take a hit all I get is a tongue coated in sweetener. He had one juice that he was raving about for weeks, and I couldn't even make a full draw - the sweetener was just too powerful and my tongue was damn near numb from the coating it received. The thing I don't get is I mix juice for him and he loves what I make, but keeps going back to over-sweetened $25/30 mL juices that he can't stand after a few days of vaping.
I bought a tfv8. Subsequently, I decided that DIY was the only option.
Its simple math.
I truly love it. The people in this sub are helpful, caring, and make me laugh all the time ( not easy to do considering I'm reading a very simple forum. The ability to take 2 or 3 recipes I find here and combine them into something customized to the way I want it, for relatively cheap and the ability to not feel like shit for enjoying a "cloud beast" have significantly enhanced my day to day. About a month after I started diy, one Friday after I realized that my bank account actually read the same amount as it did on Monday when I got home from the grocery store. The truth is that there are very very few times in life where you can cut the cost of anything and then derive even greater enjoyment from from the activity(at least without doing something illegal. I have a tfv8 and an rx-200. Market value $100 with tax and everything. I used to vape about 3 to 4 30 mils a week easily. I paid 20 dollars for every bottle. So lets say 70 a week JUST ON JUICE.... thats $280 month (meaning I could easily buy a dna 200 from savings every month just from DIY for my consumption). My wife also vapes about 20 ml a week so thats:
90 a week 360 a month 4320 a year
So if I vaped for 5 years, just by taking the time to do something I enjoy in DIY, the savings would be 21,000.
I know that I didnt subtract the costs for supplies, but if each bottle of DIY juice were to cost $2 to make($1920 a year), I am saving $19080 over the same. Just for fun though. If I saved the annual savings for a 2 years, and put 5000 into a ROTH IRA, and contributed 4000 a year at 5 percent interest compounded annually, from the age I would be (30) to when I retired (65), I would have $637,777 before taxes. If I would have done that when I was 18 I would have over 1.5 million before taxes.
GOD DAMN MY FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY!!!!!!
I rounded a little and I don't certify my math skills, but I'm a psych major in law school, so I wouldn't call math a strength for me...
Are you from Australia?
Yes mate
Agreed. R&D Nerdz was my absolute favorite, and I could usually get away with "watering" it down with VG and still get a powerful flavor. That is until I found my current favorite flavor that I mix myself. I've gone back and tried it once or twice, but now I just get that horrible sweetener aftertaste.
Along with what you mentioned, it wrecks my coils. I use RDA's, and I have to change my coil within a day, when they usually last me 5-10 days.
koala, give us your favorite recipe; pls :)
Honestly it's not something that would be super appreciated here, because it's not fancy at all. 15% FA Strawberry and 5% FA Peach. I call it...wait for it... Peachy Strawberry. Again, not fancy but it's really the only thing I've vaped for the last year except for when I don't get my order in soon enough.
Occasionally I'll fill a tank with with TFA Blueberry and a couple drops of INW Raspberry. I guess I have simple taste.
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