This is part of project I agreed to take on after it was pointed out that so many of the resources in sidebar and wiki are ancient. The idea is, rather than revising them myself, I'd post them here once per week to gather feedback on how to improve them. They belong to all of us, everyone should have a say in what they say.
Last week we cleaned up the Essential Equipment subsection of the DIY Beginner's Guide.
This next page won't go back as far as the others we've done, which had last been revised three years ago, and probably won't be as easy to rewrite. December 2016 was the latest update to the First Order Flavors. It seemed like it needed an update. We can preach over and over again that the best way to start this out is with recipes you think you'll like rather than with flavors that sound good, but I can guarantee you there will still be a high demand for answers to the question, "What should I order for my first 10/20/50 flavors?" A recommended first-order flavors list just gives brand-new mixers a little often-sought guidance. In December 2016, I tried to answer that question and the inevitable follow-up question, "What can I make with these flavors?" at the same time. You can see the (somewhat confusing?) way I tried to go about that here: First order Flavors & First Order recipes. Basically, I had a contest-mode enabled thread that required listing a flavor and a positively reviewed, relatively simple recipe, and all the upvotes counted as a vote for each ingredient in that recipe, as well as for the recipe itself. The idea was to make sure the flavors listed were versatile in addition to being good for beginners in other ways, and also to make sure that everyone had a strong say in which recipes were listed.
And this was the result of that attempt:
Flavoring|Votes :-:|:-: TFA STRAWBERRY RIPE|152 TFA DRAGON FRUIT|92 TFA BAVARIAN CREAM|91 TFA VANILLA SWIRL|83 TFA STRAWBERRY|70 TFA VANILLA BEAN ICE CREAM|67 CAP VANILLA CUSTARD V1|58 TFA CHEESECAKE GRAHAM CRUST|57 TFA MARSHMALLOW|52 FA FUJI|49 FA CREAM FRESH|46 TFA RASPBERRY SWEET|45 CAP SUGAR COOKIE V1|42 INW CACTUS|40 LA LEMONADE|39 FA LEMON SICILY|39 CAP SWEET STRAWBERRY|39 FA MERINGUE|38 FA FOREST FRUIT|36 LA WATERMELON (COLORLESS)|34 LA BANANA CREAM|29 CAP CINNAMON DANISH SWIRL|26 CAP NEW YORK CHEESECAKE|23 TFA JUICY PEACH|22 CAP GRAHAM CRACKER|22 TFA PEAR|21 FA WHITE PEACH|17 FA KIWI|16 TFA BANANA CREAM|15 TFA PINEAPPLE|14 CAP GOLDEN PINEAPPLE|14
##What can I make with these flavors?
Here are just a few of the recipes you can make using these suggested "first order" flavors:
Custody - FLV Coconut is not mandatory
Strawberries and Pear with Sugar on Top
#Throwback Thursday Question:
What is the best and most egalitarian way to refresh the first-order flavors recommendation and also answer the question of what could be made with those flavors? Should I just do the same thing again and update it with new results? Or is there a better way that hasn't been considered?
Links to ATF's top 100 and the posts on ELR about top flavors and the one that shows you you can make X number of recipes with X number of flavors. I can't remember the numbers but it was a large list of tested recipes that could be produced with a small amount of flavors. Those links could be helpful in the sidebar.
While it is probably too much work I think it would be better to break it up into a few separate lists. People have a lot of different preferences and could be looking for different things out of DIY. Having an all-purpose list is nice but it might not really be helpful to a lot of people.
It would be nice to have something like:
First order flavors: Fruits (list of most commonly used fruits)
First order flavors: Tobaccos
First order flavors: Creams and Custards
First order flavors: Bakery and Dessert.
Having these lists can help a lot more than just new mixers too. Say you've been mixing a while but have mostly just been doing fruits and creams and want to get into tobaccos. Boom! You're first order flavors to get into to tobaccos are right there.
It might also be nice to have it broken up so people can choose based on their budget. So something like:
Fruits - essentials (maybe $25-$50 or so)
Fruits - near essentials
Fruits - good to have
something like that.
EDIT: It would also be nice to have First Order Flavors subsections for smaller vendors like OOO, JF, RF, FLV, WF, VT, etc so people know what are the good ones and which ones to avoid.
That would be very nice. I’m not sure that it would be too much work, but how would you go about doing it in a way where there’s something like a consensus and it’s not just an opinion piece?
I'm not sure. You could just go by the most used flavorings. Alternatively a panel of "experts" from the sub (people like CBV for the tobaccos section) could come up with a decent list petty easily I think. While there are always outliers, within each group there are flavorings that are generally considered must haves by the majority of people. If you're mixing strawberry pretty much everyone is going to say you need shisha strawberry, strawberry ripe, sweet strawberry, etc. Fruits in general most would say Dragonfruit and cactus. For creams I think most who use them would agree things like Fresh Cream, Vienna Cream, TPA Bav Cream, etc would be counted as "essential" Even just looking through recipes of a certain type gives you a good idea of what is most common because you see certain things pop up in every other recipe.
This is so brilliant and will be immensely helpful for me. As someone who hasn’t liked anything dessert-y, creamy, or cereal-y I need pretty much only fruit flavors and since I need to ship internationally I’m kind of limited on what and how much I can order (some must-haves like LA Lemonade cannot be shipped by air😭).
Please add Lorann to the 'avoid' list, their flavourings are incredibly weak. I've mixed up to 20% of Lorann in a 10ml 6mg 60/40 and can't taste anything except the menthol.
I use several LO flavors, and I don't have any problem with them. LO watermelon is great at 2%, Bubble gum at 3-5%, etc. If you are using up to 20% I wonder if you aren't muting your mixes by using too much.
Eh I started out lower, around 15% total for a Mint Choc Chip Cheesecake mix as recommended by another ELR mixer in a 'Suggest a Recipe for my Flavors thread' but it paled in comparison to the Mixed Berry and Icy Lemonade Malaysian juice from VapeEmpire I'd been vaping prior. All I get is a slight high and dry aftertaste, along with a hint of the menthol I'd put in. That's why I started increasing the flavor % but it doesn't have any effect.
Well, I'm ordering other brands to mix for comparison now and will defo post updates.
LorAnn has a few gems. LA Creme de Menthe is the closest I've found to Creme de Menthe liquer, and LA Butter Rum flavor is a spot-on single ingredient clone of a butter rum LifeSavers candy. But I agree with you, they are incredibly weak. I use the Creme de Menthe at 10% even with other supporting flavors.
I think adding some tobaccos to that list would be a great idea, I'm sure we can find some solid tobacco recipes to add too that are relatively simple. Even FLV Red Burley at 4% with a little DNB is awesome. Thanks to Mr. CBV for that one.
Seeing no bacco on that list does make me feel kinda sad, and it probably breaks poor CBV's heart.
/u/T_mace did a My First Order for tobaccos a little over a year ago. I’ve thought about revisiting the idea looking at most popular or highest rated recipes on ATF that are tagged “tobacco” but then when I saw that there were a few that were tagged tobacco that only use TFA RY4 Double and I decided I would dedicate more time to working on the Battle of the Baccos thing.
I like u/isumadog's and u/juthinc's ideas. I was imagining something like this after looking at all the comments:
First Order Flavors > Cheesecake > Top Rated, Cheapest, Top Recipes, ETC. (refer to other comments for better categories)
I'm not sure if this portrayal is understandable but I just wanted to put it out there.
I think although the FOF in it's current state will give early mixers recipes to mix, it doesn't give them much freedom to choose what they want to mix early on.
For cheesecake, need to separate it... best NY style, best euro style (contradiction in terms to use 'best' to describe that, but then the same could be said for peach), best crust element, best filling element, most used (aka TFA CGC), most affordable (in price per ml of finished juice, to correct for a flavor costing twice as much when it's used at 1% instead of 8% for another that cost half as much), and maybe 'used most in top rated recipes'(as opposed to most commonly used, which would include shitty recipes like those from elr).
But yeah, I was thinking something like this: Best fruit flavors>Best Raspberry (and that would have a short blurb (including flavors that raspberry works well with) on which flavor was most realistic, best for candy, best for jam, best for beverage, and then the 'meta' categories. I'm not sure where flavors like caramel or chocolate would be grouped, maybe candy? But... top level would be: best fruit, best cream/custard, best bakery, best nuts, best spice (including mints), best florals, best tobaccos. There'd be possibly multiple levels of each (although tobacco would have best dessert tobaccos, best other tobaccos, and maybe best tobacco additives. There's not many cooling agents (basically all of them on the market are WS-3 or menthol, only WS-5 and WS-23 - and FA Polar Blast which is koolada+menthyl lactate - are in any way different. So basically there's 5 cooling agents. They could all be mentioned in a best additives>cooling page, I guess.
Yes this sounds great. You get what I was referring to as better categories. I imagine this could work really well in giving mixers the freedom to mix what they want while giving them a great amount of information about flavors.
Other than adding like FA juicy strawberry idk what else could be changed on the list. Maybe we should re-vote some time in the future?
You think it doesn't need to be updated just yet?
I mean I'd like to see the inclusion of some newer flavors (especially since JF and FLV seemed to have launched some really successful ones after the release of the list) but IMO most if not all the stuff on the list is still relevant and heavily used.
EDIT: on top of being relevant still, all of these are still incredible beginner friendly building blocks to work with.
It's a solid list, but doesn't reflect the current "meta" of mixing on this sub. A lot of the flavours and recipes listed are from more than a year ago.
I would suggest voting on a list of recipes that we consider to be the best from the past year or so, then building a list of flavours from that. We could then add any we think are essential but missing.
I think the list could do with at least one sweetner, and maybe some other additives that beginners will like to play about with like WS-23, EM etc.
Most new DIYers will have a profile in mind they want to recreate, which makes putting a list like this together hard, but like you said, this is a general list and we will definitely still get the question "which flavours are best".
Is there any way we could coordinate that as a group, like saying July is Lemonade month, so everyone participating will be trying 4 different nominated recipes and rating them? Then at the end, we could have a larger sample size rating the "best" recipes/flavors?
It would also be massively handy to have an up-to-date "use this flavor instead of that flavor" list, but that might be a bigger undertaking unless everyone already agreed and the list was somewhat smaller.
I'd be up for this. Some people already do a "mixers club" where they send each other mixes that they're working on and give feedback, so I'd be happy to participate in something similar, but where everyone just mixes their own.
This got long so let me preface this by saying I’ve been doing mad research on Reddit and the search function sucks. I’ve been meaning to start a weekly thread to up my mixing as kind of a live version of “how do you make a...” for beginners moving to intermediates. Any and all of these ideas I have I’m willing to do the work to make it and spearhead discussion and compile answers for review by the community. I love this idea because it’s an area where I as a new mixer (1 yr experience) can bridge some gaps and contribute.
My original post - Honestly I’d love to see this tiered and written so there’s lists almost like flavor packs. So...
- Most useful/versatile - Top 10/20/30 (date) flavors on atf with link to atf too 100 for updates.
- Cheapest - Top (number) on a budget ($10/25/50)
- Most specific - Top 20 by category (fruit only, creams, baccos, bakeries, floral, drinks)
- BEST by company - Top 20 by company in Top 100 list
- BEST by users - straight vote (date)
- Most esoteric - that ONE flavor which can set apart your mixing (rich cinnamon, Yakima hops, lovage root, oak barrel, which can also be listed at the end of each category list where it belongs)
- All in lists - exhaustive lists of beyond essential flavors. (I’ve done this twice now- tobaccos and just recently creams and wow. It’s amazing. I still have so many tobaccos from that thread that I haven’t even touched yet to make a STF. I’ll be busy until August!) sort of like a essential to lesser known flavors that might not even show up on recipe lists.
By recipe (all w links) 8. Top 20 (or so) Organized by top rated profiles - like a backwards version of what can I make based on the classic recipes 9. Top 20 (or so) Organized by top rated recipes - if one wants to go with (w links) 10. Top 20 or so - organized by stand alone flavors 11. Too 20 or so - organized by rec top 2 flavor recipes (with links) 12. Too 20 - org by top 3 flavor recipes (w links)
Wearing my public school teacher hat now: My thinking is that this of all pages in the sidebar should be the least amount of information per page. It’s so much information it’s overwhelming. Having less per page and having the same information organized several ways gives people a chance to make the most informed decision. Also, it lets people choose an entry (depth in one category, variety etc) or even as a reference (you know I feel like going down the back rabbit hole...)
I would love to see this happen enough to do it myself (and sort of am on my own).
Tl;dr - Jesus, that was long. I’m willing to do the work of writing up some stuff and making it easier for people to critique rather than vote and have one poor sap bear the burden.
That sounds like so much work for something that's still going to need to be updated periodically. You sure you want to take that on?
Missed this post. But yeah, ok in some ways, but best fruits needs incredible granularity so it isn't a bullshit list of strawberry. Yes, for people who have no taste and like that shit, they should be able to find most realistic/most candy/most juice-flavored strawberry, but the same info should be available for good fruit flavors like orange or lime or lemon or raspberry and not just shitty flavors like strawberry or mango/peach/nectarine/mangosteen/(any other fruit that tastes like peach that I'm forgetting).
I actually started doing some research on realistic fruit threads. I’d love to tighten it up and post up what I have for community review. I just need a few days bec family in town.
Yeah. There's problems tho... what's a realistic coconut taste like? Coconut flakes, sweetened/unsweetened and/or toasted? Overripe coconut where the coconut milk solidified? Green coconut (where it's practically water)? Citrus... juice or zest? Or slice of, or lemonade style?
After reading all the comments and trying to digest it all - I have a possible solution . . .
What if "the group" came up with the recipes for several bases (custard, ice cream, lemonade, cheesecake, etc). And with each base, include a list of flavors that can be added to the base to enhance the flavor?
Maybe do a series of "contests" and let the up-votes pick the Top 3 recipes for each base. And it would probably be good if the winners used flavors from different companies - because not all parts of the world have access to all the flavors.
The end result would be that the "First Order Flavors" would look something like this . . .
Cheesecake Recipe #1
-
Add-On A
-
Add-On B
-
Add-On C
Cheesecake Recipe #2
-
Add-On A
-
Add-On B
-
Add-On C
Doing this would make use of the more versatile flavors in the bases and still leave room for personal preferences in the Add-Ons.
I found the list the most incredibly useless thing posted. Less than half are flavors I would ever use. Having a list that's so strawberry/vanilla-centric can only lead to discouraging people who don't like those crap flavors, and turning the sub into a echo chamber where everyone likes the same crap.
I really think a better approach would be a 'best flavors' thing, where it was broken down with a high degree of granularity - best [insert type of fruit] for realistic flavor/for candy flavor/for juice flavor... best chocolafe (again for individual purposes, such as beverage/bakery/bacco blend/etc), best cream (for different purposes, also vanilla-free as a category), best cereal, best bakery (for pie crust or muffin or bread or toast or cake, best toxic concentrate is the only place to include FW Yellow Cake), etc. Best florals(just get /u/hocuskrokus to do up that bit), best tobaccos(let /u/chemicalburnvictim do that part)... Anyone who wants to nominate a flavor has to give a short writeup of how the flavor is best used, preferably giving flavor combos it works really well with, and concentration levels for main/support roles. That way, instead of five strawberries crowding out better fruits, there's a range of flavors given.
I did one up a long time ago, though it's a bit outdated. Here