for anyone it might help - here are some stray thoughts on my first day of DIY.
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- Holy cow making your own juice is WAAAAY cheaper than buying premium. I did my research here in the DIY reddit and elsewhere. Best tips I found: review the recipes you want to try BEFORE buying your first set of flavors. The beginners guide right here on reddit is FULL of good tips. Read it. All in I spent about $85 on about 28 flavors. I mixed up 105 mls of juice (4 different juices to start) and I barely touched the bulk of my flavors. Most remain unopened. That $85 worth of flavors could easily make 2000 or more mls of juice. I'll only need more VG to keep it going. It truly is $1 or so a bottle when you make it yourself.
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Just because you take the DIY plunge doesn't mean you're done with the juice companies. I figured I would keep a good supply of "premium" juices on hand until I figure out this whole DIY thing. I love custards. This means even if I made up 1000mls today it would be a month or more before I could vape any of it. While your first batches steep you still need juice to vape so don't turn out the lights on store bought juice until you have a few "working" DIY juices.
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DIY juice is MUCH easier than I thought. I'm not saying I have juice making down yet or even mixes that I know I like, but the process itself of making a bottle of juice is super easy. I've been vaping for 18 months and for the bulk of that time I thought of juice companies as some sort of "expert" and hat juice making was beyond my skills. nothing could be further from the truth. they are guys/gals just like us who pour stuff into bottles. Between this subreddit and all the youtube videos anyone who wants to learn how to mix, can learn how to mix. took me about 15/20 minutes or so to mix up 4 different juices.
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while I have no idea if any of the recipes are good I can see that I'm bound to get several adv's by tweaking recipes to my personal tastes - that in itself was worth the cost of admission. the possibilities are nearly endless with all the flavors one can buy.
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I need more flavors already. I was economical and only purchased flavors I thought I'd actually like to vape. As I go through more recipes I see that for my flavor profile (custards and desserts) there are many more commonly used flavors. For example I didn't buy any vanilla bean ice cream among others. this means there are several recipes that I want to try that I can't try yet.
Last - if you want to DIY just to save money (as opposed to wanting to become a world renowned mixer) you can, like me, just focus in on some juices you vape daily. You can save all the "worlds best juice recipe" stuff for down the road after you get the hang of it. All in all a great day even though I have no as yet vapeable juice to show for it.
Congrats on the easy transition! One thing that helped me the most when starting to develop my own recipes is this: find a recipe you really enjoy and get familiar with it. Pick apart the recipe and take notes on what works and what you want to do differently. From there, start replacing a flavor in that recipe with a flavor you're not familiar with. Compare notes with the starting recipe until you get familiar with that mix. Keep repeating until you have a completely new recipe, and take notes on what works within that mix. If you do that with about 5-10 recipes, you'll get a really good idea of which of your flavors play nice with each other.
A good way to have a delicious custard without much steep would be to add plain vanilla flavors and pecan or praline flavors.
Would that affect it chemically? Or just cover up the flavor of the "raw" custard until it fully matures?
Much of that "rawness" is just imbalance and poor dispersion, and it's not nearly as perceptible with very similar flavours. While it may be true that mixing at 50/50 and high-ish nic gives me a bit of an advantage here, since the 50/50 mixes more easily and it can be argued that the nic wipes out all of the subtleties, I have a relatively simple, mild caramel vanilla custard that's a good overnighter. Yes, it does get better over about four days, but that's pretty much its peak. (CAP Vanilla Custard V2 @ 8%, TPA French Vanilla @ 2%, TPA Whipped Cream @ 2%, TPA Caramel Candy @ 3%, if anyone's interested. Nothing special, and not a point of pride. It was a "what do I do with this stuff that won't taste of orange" guess in the middle of another experiment that worked and was vapable surprisingly quickly. It rated as "good enough" for me, so I've kept it. Play with it. Make it better.)
I think it fills in the blanks while the hollow spots in the custard aren't there yet.
Would really be smart to do it with flavorings that fade at the same speed.
Dude.....that sounds just right. I think I accidently did that with FA Marzipan in my The Cheesecake.
I have FA Almond, would that work, or specifically more yellow nuts for the custardy type feel?
More of the strong flavor nuts. Almond has a very soft sweetness, and not much nuttiness. Praline is brutally sweet with a strong nut flavor.
I feel like Marzipan isn't what I'm looking for either and that's my only other nut, but definitely fit the concept...
Cool, that concept definitely opens up my options, and actually REALLLLLY opens up my thinking for a lot of recipe construction ideas. Thanks man, I'm gonna have to sit on it for a bit.
There is also a custard recipe called 3 Banger Custard on ELR. 3 ingredients all at 5% and very shake and vapeable. Check it out man it's a great recipe.
I actually did the same thing when I started. I bought almost the entire Capella's line. There are quite a few flavors that I haven't even used yet or used a little and realized its not something I would enjoy.
After time though I have been able to stop having to run the to shop or online to get juice because I am out. I started with mixing at 30ml and now mix at 120ml once I switched to mixing by weight. I have 7 recipes that I make on the regular and when I have 3 empty bottles I mix up to replace them. By the time I go through what I had before, the 3 new mixes have steeped. And over time I have branched out into other brands of flavoring as I find new recipes to try out.
Great writeup on your start into DIY. Like you I went through the sidebar quite a bit before jumping in and it really made my life a hell of a lot easier where I didn't have to ask "noob" questions.
thanks. that recipe looks right up my alley and I have it liked over on ELR. Unfortunately I didn't buy any butter cream of VBIC - looks like having those two would have increased my range of mixes greatly. A good portion of the flavors I did get were specifically to try a Gremlin VC clone recipe I saw right here on reddit. Gremlin VC is my adv so if I can get a close version of that it's a game changer for me. Although I did go through the side bar quite a bit I didn't catch everything. I was slightly off in my purchase of some fruit flavors (for the recipes I want to try INAWERA seems to be the go to flavor company). Still I only spent perhaps $10 on the fruit flavors I did buy - less than the average cost of a bottle of juice so no big loss there if it turns out I don't like them. I don't go for fruity vapes but think I'll try some just to get a handle on what shake and vape tastes like. I did taste the mothers milk recipe yesterday and clearly it needs to steep. I just wanted to see what any juice you make taste like.
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