The other night, I had a peach lemonade from Marie Callendar's and immediately wanted to go home and replicate it in vape form. I don't have many flavorings for lemonade or peach but I did with what I had.
LA Lemonade - 5%
FA White Peach - 4%
FA Lemon Sicily - 2%
TFA Dragonfruit - 2%
TFA Sour - 1.5%
TFA Juicy Peach - 1%
TFA Sweetener - 1%
Mixed at 70VG/30PG at 3.5mg nic.
This was amazing as a shake and vape. Sweet, smooth, nice and tart, and I got nice juicy, realistic peach flavor on the top of the lemonade. It seemed pretty nicely balanced and I vaped a good 20ml in the first 48 hours after I made it.
It's been about 5 days since I made it, and the juice has become almost too dry and harsh to vape continuously. I'm looking to see if any of you might have some tips to tweak my recipe and help minimize the dryness as much as possible.
I used LA Lemonade as it has gotten so much praise here on this sub. It is definitely a very good lemonade flavor, but I have noticed it can get a bit harsh above 6-7+%, so I tried to keep it a little lower to get a nice strong lemonade flavor without making it unvapable. This is also my first and only lemonade flavoring as of right now, so I have nothing to compare it to. I've heard good things about FLV's Lemonade, though.
I remember seeing a lemonade recipe thread that used a little bit of FA Lemon Sicily, so I went for that. I recall the recipe having only 0.75%, so maybe I added a bit much, but in my experience with Lemon Sicily it doesn't really cause dryness or harshness. I typically use it at 3-4% with dessert juices with great results.
FA White Peach because it's fucking delicious in everything. No explanation needed, really. I know that TFA Juicy Peach is notorious for insane harshness and chest tightness though, but it does have a good flavor, so I wanted to keep it low. It definitely adds to the White Peach and makes it more juicy and realistic to me. But it also could be the drying/harsh factor in the recipe. Dunno.
I added a bit of TFA Dragonfruit because I've heard countless times that it will definitely help with more wetness/juiciness and provide a bit better mouthfeel for fruity recipes. I haven't played with it very much though. It didn't seem to help much, or at least didn't help for very long.
TFA Sour because... it's lemonade. I don't have any other sour flavorings either, but I've used this numerous times without any harshness or dryness so I don't think it could be this. I've vaped this at like 10% and it was great.
I usually make my juices at 3mg/ml but I added a bit more so I could take this juice to work. The vape breaks I get are usually really short, so I wanted to get enough of a buzz in 5-6 long drags. I switched over to 100% PG 100mg/ml from Carolina Extracts and the shit is amazing. I highly doubt the harshness is from the nic.
So yeah. Long shitpost. Sorry guys. I know there's tons of threads on lemonades, dryness, etc but I'm kind of hitting a roadblock here. Not really sure what else to try from here. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Too much White Peach. It def takes over and dries out after a few days. I would lower it to around 1%. You may not taste it strong fresh, but it will come on after a few days. My two cents.....
Interesting to hear about White Peach being the possible cause. I don't remember having a dryness issue with it before, and I do usually use it at 4-6% in some mixes. Is it possibly because it's being used in conjunction with the Juicy Peach?
I'll give it a try though. Thanks!
Taking all the other suggestions in mind and also looking at the recipe, I think it's just too acidic. The combo of the lemonade, lemon Sicily, and Sour is probably the cause if I had to speculate.
Personally I would drop the white peach a little (maybe 1-1.5%), drop the sour completely (I generally don't have much luck with Sour doing what I want it to) or at least down a little to 0.75-1%, and swapping FA Lemon Sicily for CAP Italian Lemon Sicily (it's a lot less citric and more of a sweet candied lemon).
You could also try swapping out the TFA sweetener for 0.5-1% TFA EM. I find that while sucralose does dull the harshness quite a bit, EM feels like it just naturally rounds out harshness better.
Then again it's probably just the fact that you have a fair amount of peach and citric acid. So it'll be harsh almost no matter what you do.
cut the lemon Sicily and white peach in half. lower your sour to 1% and add marshmallow or vanilla bean ice cream at 1%. it helped with my lemonade mixes a lot
I'll definitely try this out. Thank you for the suggestion.
I don't have Marshmallow yet, but I'll try the VBIC and maybe another cream for now.
CAP/TFA Marshmallow at 0.5-1% would take those top notes down quite a bit. Most other creams would do the trick as well. You could even try some Ethyl Maltol/Cotton Candy.
I'd also maybe try cutting all of your percentages in half and see what you think of the mix.
I forgot about marshmallow. I'll have to pick some up. I know many people use INW Cactus for wetness as well, which I'll probably also order soon.
But for now, I do have a few creams I can try in my next mix as well. Thanks for the tips.
Just trying to rule out a couple of possible causes since nothing is really jumping out as just so horribly amiss to be obviously causing that kind of dryness and harshness: Are you trying it on a fresh wick? And have you been vaping other things since this dryness/harshness started, things that tasted fine?
Yep, it was on a fresh wick when I first did a shake and vape and it was great. And yeah, I've been vaping a couple other juices in rotation, not on the same rda though.
But are you using a fresh wick with it now? The reason I'm asking is that TFA Sour will eat up your cotton over time and make your juice taste harsh long before you get that usual dirty cotton taste or dirty cotton appearance.
Oh okay, no my cotton is probably 3-4 days old now. When I get home later I'll change it and see if it improves at all.
I didn't know that about the Sour though, I'll have to remember that. Does it break down cotton at pretty much any percentage?
I actually started out with that lemonade recipe you mentioned with the 0.75% Lemon Sicily, and modified it into my ADV. I never understood why they used less than 1 percent.. I actually use more Sicily than I do LorAnn Lemonade since I prefer sour instead of LA's sweetness.
Currently I'm at 5-7% Lemon Sicily with no harshness (2% LA lemonade), so I doubt that the 2% LS you used is the culprit, though as someone else mentioned, the combination of multiple sour flavours = a bunch of citric acid etc which may be a factor.
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