So I have done DIY for a long ass time now. I used to be all over here posting cool shit about menthol and floral flavors. Even vaped a ton of MSG for science (doesn't do a thing btw). Maybe I have no clue what I'm talking about really... Ive probably dumped almost a gallon of horrible juice, but I've made several good gallons too.
Anyways, I more or less completely ignore any diy stuff I see now, for one simple reason: WAY too much flavoring. These juices taste great, absolutely BUT I think they can taste just as good with a lot less.
So I am issuing a sort of challenge to you all. Take mixes you have made. Drop them down to 3-5% Up the PG just 10% if you don't mind. There is a caveat in that you really really need to use a hot water bath. Heat is key. There is a reason we use heat in cooking, it speeds up chemical reactions. Now we can't go too hot with liquids because VG doesn't like to be heated on a stove or anything really hot, but a few hours at maybe 130-150 degrees is a great boon. Steeping is always good, but the heat is needed.
On another note If you are trying to go up a notch in your diy skill set, IMO you need to learn to BALANCE the flavorings. How much TFA strawberry ripe does it take to over power a cream or other fruit? Can a cream ever overpower a strawberry flavor? (Also learn to fucking cook lol)
Is 1% TFA strawberry ripe, .25% TFA sweet cream a superior recipe to 5% strawberry 1% sweet cream? I say yes, how about you?
Anyways, good mixing folks, experiment, and be safe!
P.S. I am speaking mostly about TFA flavorings. Generally speaking yes, TFA stuff will be a higher percentage needed than INW or NN etc.. BUT my ultimate point is that they are still much too high.
> Heat is key. There is a reason we use heat in cooking, it speeds up chemical reactions.
Absofuckinglutely not. We use heat to kill bacteria in our food so we don't get sick & DIE. Chemical/flavour/maillard/reduction reactions come secondarily.
> VG doesn't like to be heated on a stove or anything really hot, but a few hours at maybe 130-150 degrees is a great boon. Steeping is always good, but the heat is needed.
Oh hell no. You shouldn't heat VG any higher than 100F & for no longer than 20 minutes. You don't even need to heat it for 5 minutes unless you live in fucking Antarctica. I live in florida, so its always 100F, & you know how i warm up my 90-95% VG mixes? I put it in my pocket for a few minutes. Warm it up, thin out the viscosity, add your flavour, shake it, & fucking let Master Time do the rest. Anything else and you're either just evaporating the aroma VOLATILES (you should really look up the definition of volatile. Protip: it means it fucking evaporates at room temperature), or you're physically DEGRADING the compounds & cooking them into burnt constituents.
This thread is almost useless.
You don't understand cooking at all you think the sole purpose of heat in cooking is to kill germs. We know the ingredients of coca cola, but not the process, which is why generic come sucks. Cooking exists because it made food easier to digest. Humans didn't start out needing cooked meat dude.
And if you aren't supposed to heat VG above 100 degrees, well people are fucked in the summer, better stay inside forever.
then you go ahead and put juice on a few hundred degree coil and inhale it but DO NOT HEAT VG ABOVE 100 DEGREES.
And sure I guess everything I said here is completely useless to everyone because of a single point of contention you have, god forbid you maybe share how you lowered the percentage of one of your recipes and it fucking sucks and that's why I'm an idiot. Nope, just talk shit.
The real recommendation is to use an ultra sonic bath but hot water from the damn sink works just as well, and I don't expect any one to spend the money on such a specialty piece of equipment.
We use heating mostly because it loosens up the fats in our food(something not in e-juice) and allows the flavors to enter the fats, since they can't enter the majority of proteins we eat on their own. On top of that, a lot of fibers can't be eaten without being heated, breaking the cell walls, because our bodies don't readily digest most raw fiber.
Saying that we use heat while cooking because it helps reactions is extremely oversimplifying things, and is a terrible way to come to an all-encompassing conclusion about aroma volatiles.
I feel like technically we do bake ejuice. But it's over a course of weeks and its at room temperature. I mean a chemical reaction is probably happening, the flavor changes, that's just evidence though.
Anything that changes based on heat is technically cooking right. If I put my juice in the freezer it usually will stop changing, the temperature is too low, it stops steeping. So I think that's a good demonstration of how heat (room temperature heat) is technically cooking it.
I would be interested in trying to cook my juice at say 80-90degrees.....you know like tranceinate mentioned (in his pocket.) A lot of the VERY VERY top notes we don't want anyways. That's what makes a S&V juice so harsh, at least to my throat.
I think the idea is sound, it just may need tweaking and better explanation for new users who don't understand the subtleties in the process.
I think it might be important to detail the lowest useful percent of each concentrate and the highest useful percent of each concentrate.
TFA Strawberry (Ripe)
- Highest: 11%
- Lowest: 1%
- Adjusted FullStep (/12): 0.83%
- Adjusted Halfstep (/24): 0.42%
INW Raspberry
- Highest: 4%
- Lowest: 0.20%
- Adjusted FullStep (/12): 0.32%
- Adjusted Halfstep (/24): 0.16%
CAP Vanilla Custard
- Highest: 9%
- Lowest: 0.75%
- Adjusted FullStep (/12): 0.69%
- Adjusted Halfstep (/24): 0.34%
Try it by cutting it into 10 steps:
TFA Strawberry (Ripe)
- Highest: 11%
- Lowest: 1%
- Adjusted FullStep (/10): 1.00%
TFA Sweet Cream
- Highest: 4%
- Lowest: 0.50%
- Adjusted FullStep (/10): 0.35%
INW Raspberry
- Highest: 4%
- Lowest: 0.20%
- Adjusted FullStep (/10): 0.38%
CAP Vanilla Custard
- Highest: 9%
- Lowest: 0.75%
- Adjusted FullStep (/10): 0.83%
The numbers are definitely not right, but I feel like it needs a further discussion. I mean like TFA flavors usually 1% is a half step up and 2% is a full step up. And they usually start at 1%-2%.
For FA flavors .25 is a half step, .50 is a full step. And they usually start at 0.50%-75%.
>detail the lowest useful percent of each concentrate and the highest useful percent of each concentrate.
This would be cool but if posting for public reading would be great to detail how it changes the flavor or reasons why you would use it at specific %s.
I would say generally it would be ranges of percents on the concentrate based on what "flavor" you want.
-
TFA Sweet Cream for instance is cheesy 3-7%
-
TFA Sweet Cream is thick .4-3%
-
TFA Sweet Cream is creamy 2-3%
-
TFA Strawberry (Ripe) is strawberry-y x-y%
-
TFA Strawberry (Ripe) is harsh 0.01-10%
Including this in flavor reviews would be really cool. I often do my flavor reviews the very first time I taste a flavor so it's as new to my taste buds as possible and I don't miss any nuances. But in cases where the mixer has used a flavoring quite a bit, would be awesome to include the info you mentioned. I will retroactively go back and add this stuff in if I make any discoveries on something I review. Good stuff Tiptup.
Not all flavorings are created equal. Some are really really diluted. Some are really really concentrated. One concentrate I like (holy holy grail ry4) is recommended to mix at 9-10%.
The percentage of flavoring is relative once you factor this in... So don't go chastising somebody's recipe that has a high percentage of flavoring without some research on the concentrates they used.
>(Also learn to fucking cook lol)
Every good DIYer can cook a dinner worth an applause. That's facts.
I cannot. I mostly live off of water, raw celery, salad, turkey or ham sandwiches, a Sunday Funday pizza, and a lot of weed. I also have a magnificent contraption that allows me to make cheese quesadillas if I'm so brave.
Shit, that's called livin' the good life, no? Well, except for the celery and the lack of a particular grain beverage that's brewed.
Yeah, I've got that alcoholism thing they tell you about. You know, where you take a shot of whiskey and next thing you know you've had a liter of Old Crow, crashed a stolen taxi, and you're smoking crack behind an east side strip club at 6:30am with a 74 year old homeless 'nam vet, Jack, and two toothless strippers in their late 40's named Ginny and Sapphire who won't stop frantically arguing about what global warming is going to do to the bobcat population by 2050.
I agree about the over flavoring, my ADVs use 4-5% total. Still plenty of flavor and very rarely any problems with olfactory fatigue. I also agree that balancing flavors is the key to good mixing. All good points worth emphasizing :)
I disagree however that you need heat unless you're doing max VG. I have around 40% PG in my mixes so I get full flavor right after mixing.
Oh wow...I am only vaping a few months and started mixing because of that very reason. Every juice I bought was way too strong in flavour. Even at half dilution it was still too much for me.
I am still a total beginner and often buy premixed flavours from some premium stuff vendor. I use 25% of the recommended amount and sometimes it is still too much.
The tastiness improves a lot when going down in dosage on most stuff.
I remember /u/abdada writing something similar showing how far he drops his flavorings (I think it was him). There's for sure a ceiling on flavorings where anymore of it does nothing but pull away from the other flavors in the recipe. What that ceiling is, is the question. I don't necessarily disagree, overflavoring is more tricky than it seems. But I will note that not every flavoring is alike and I could point out many of TFA's flavors that taste completely different at different concentrations.
I completely agree with you. I cringe whenever I see all these recipes with ~20% flavor composition.
Maybe if I was still vaping on my v2cig with a cartomizer I would need that kind of base:flavor ratio, but not with modern atomizers and mods.
I made a post in /r/electronic_cigarette on how vendor-sold juice was way overflavored, and you should dilute it with pure vg/nic base to make it last longer for the price, and give an overall BETTER vaping experience, and it was not well-received. It turns out if you do something one way, and never try it another way, the way you do it is correct by default.
Most of my mixes are less than 1% flavoring, some of my best are in this category as well. Really preserves my taste buds
I try to use no more than 10% flavoring and 5% is generally my average. I do agree that most recipes use more flavoring than I personally prefer and I adjust accordingly. You learn how to butcher recipes to get what you want. It doesn't mean that the person who mixed it is going to have the same experience if they cut their percentages. Everyone's tastes are different and most people's equipment is different at least slightly.
Flavor strength also depends on the density and heat of vapor. If you're a super-subohm vaper who also likes it warm, you're inhaling a dense cloud of volatiles, so lowering your flavor percentage makes sense. If you are high-resistance, low-wattage (ML vaping), you might need more.
As a personal general guideline, I flavor my recipes according to 0.5ohm 25-30W vaping with moderate to wide airflow. Most of the people I mix for vape at this setup, so I cater to them, thus do all my testing there, too.
I'm still relatively new but isn't it important to know how are these low % recipes meant to be vaped ?
I'm under the impression that all fancy recipes with 7-10 ingredients and no sweetener are used by people above ohm in Nautilus thingies.
So far all the top raped recipes on ATF are kinda bland when vaped at high power... and I don't know how you guys can enjoy it without some kind of sweetener :(
> Even vaped a ton of MSG for science (doesn't do a thing btw).
:(
Sounds obcene on its own BUT
MSG is rated by the FDA GRAS.
Some juices add saline solution.
Many many juices add artificial sweeteners.
Some juices even have food colorings that are known to be really bad!
I kept the amounts miniscule as well (like.015 percent) because If it needed to be used at a higher percentage then I said the potential problems were not worth it.
I'm pretty sure we talked about it before. Like months and months ago, your name looks familiar to me. I might have mentioned the MSG and you mentioned working on sampling it.
Could always be talking about someone else.
It just sucks to hear it doesn't do anything.
Actually,
https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY_eJuice/comments/5a8339/my_searches_and_notes_about_saline_salt_and_maybe/d9eleye/
I was remembering Edoc_ , probably the underline made me think that.