How do you begin disecting a specific juice, breaking it down to all individual flavours? I understand for example, lemon meringue pie would need a crust base, lemon curd and meringue. but with more complex premium juices how would one go about training your palette to recognise these individual flavours?
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Have a lot of flavours
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Know those flavours by smell alone
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Recognise a few of them in the mix
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Work from there.
Or take the hard route:
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Don't have many flavours
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Order all of X type flavour from all manufacturers or gamble on whether e-liquid-recipes/alltheflavours will be accurate
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Single flavour test at varying percentages
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Cry down a drain
A lot of people are able to do it from experience and with the vast amount of flavorings they have. There is usually a main flavor a profile is built around and our sense of smell is the closest linked to memory so it makes it easier to start breaking it down. It's dissecting the rest of the recipe that is difficult.
If you want a good example of how much trial and error goes into this go look at /u/captaincannibal's post on cloning Sherb.
Single flavor test all of your flavors at various percentages, for starters, so you'll have some hope of recognizing them when you taste them again in a mix.
/u/chewymidget makes a good point. I'm not sure if Cpt Cannibal's Shurb clone is a success story or a cautionary tale. I'm pretty sure the dude drove himself clinically insane.
There is NO chance that his "money saving" DIY search for cloning that juice worked! He is now on a daily dose of heavy sedatives, a mood stabilizer, and an anti-psychotic drug. I almost lost my mind just reading through his stuff and it was before I started doing DIY myself, it was just about enough to keep me from doing it. Luckily I jumped in anyway and also lucky for me I have never tasted a commercial juice that I loved enough to want it in my mouth more than once. I like the stuff that ID10-T, Wayne, Manson, Cokecan, Skiddlz, and a few others make much better. I have come up with 1-2 of my own that please me a great deal but I just don't have the time for "development" like I thought I would.
EDIT: a word
> I have never tasted a commercial juice that I loved enough to want it in my mouth more than once.
TBH I feel the same way about my own stuff and others'. 30ml is about all I care for having something made exactly the same way. I'll at least make some minor adjustment to it, just to see if it's an improvement, if I make something twice, whether it's someone else's recipe or one that I'm "finished" developing. I got a bad case of something like flavor ADHD that makes DIY essential.
To be fair I was already pretty nuts but yeah, it definitely helped to push me over the edge.
It was almost worth it..
Didja hear about our new Monthly Clone Challenge?
To be fair V2&V4 are fantastic mixes and are my favorite sherbet juices to vape by far. I had to lower the amount of FA Raspberry and FA Mandarin in V4 because they instantly were muted to me. 2% FA Raspberry and 3% FA Mandarin seem to work for me.
I'm glad you like them! I still think v2 actually turned out pretty well. I've been vaping v4 since the day I released it. I'll have to try those percentages out next time I mix some. I haven't really played with them much since I posted tbh.
Cloning is tough, no matter who you are or how well-versed in making juice you are.
At first you just familiarize yourself with the juice itself. You vape it as much as possible and try to pick out flavors. For my Shurb clone, I went ahead and also looked at various websites that sell the juice and various reviews to see what the descriptions/reviews were saying it tasted like. This helped a lot because - for example - I found quite a few people mentioning a gummy-type flavor that I hadn't thought about. This came in handy later when deciding on the lime.
After that, you need to just kind of take some shots in the dark. Maybe you recognized a flavor in the juice - maybe you 100% know you tasted TFA Vanilla Swirl. So you know you've got that. You also know you tasted raspberry and orange but you don't know what manufacturer they could be (or even if they are raspberry and orange!). So you try various iterations of different raspberries and oranges.
You should be able to decide which ones don't work pretty quickly. In my case, I was at least able to rule out most orange flavorings pretty quickly - Shurb had a very citrus-y orange. So I went ahead and avoided all the oranges that were too sharp or too sweet.
Eventually you'll end up with a skeleton of your clone. For complex juices, the difficult part is deciding what the fuck you're tasting. Is it a whole bunch of fruit flavors that you can't pick out? Or is it fucking tutti frutti? In my case it was tutti frutti, and it took me many attempts to realize that. One day I had a friend sniff a bottle of Shurb and the first thing they said was "Juicy Fruit gum". And I smelled it and realized that it absolutely did smell like Juicy Fruit gum, I'd just never noticed.
Which comes to what I say is the most important part - don't be afraid to ask for help. If you're stuck, just throw what you've got so far out there and ask if anyone has any ideas. As long as you at least have some of the work done, people will happily chime in.
tl;dr - Make educated guesses. Use the process of elimination. Ask for help if you get stuck. Be prepared to buy a lot of flavorings that you might not use.
Outside of that, what /u/chewymidget said is spot on. Trust your sense of smell!
There are some flavors that are pretty unique and after you've single tested them and mixed them a couple of times, you can instantly tell when they are in a juice. When you have the main flavor nailed down, you do the guesswork based on the description and your mixing experience from similar recipes.
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