What would help you most now in progressing your mixing if a First Order resource were to be expanded on beyond a very well crafted basic 20 flavors into a resource for advancing your mixing knowledge?
Based on the wonderful work of u/Apexified in the FAQ Friday BEST flavors, one can get a totally explained breakdown of getting the bang for your buck in terms of (1) the original FIRST ORDER list (2) how that list plays out on atf and (3) what you would need to add to your stash as you expand your mixing to include top rated recipes at atf and reddit monthly winners. All with comprehensive charts at the end.
Research:
I was curious to see what would happen if you took a different approach and added one flavor at a time to your stash going down the top 100 flavors at atf. I created a new account and decided to start by adding ONLY the fruit flavors all at once to eliminate them as a limiting factor. All 35 together clocks you in at an underwhelming 11 recipes. (Except of course I had missed FW Blueberry until I got to it near the end of this experiment.) I then added each flavor that was missing one by one and checked to see if there were any significant changes to the highest rated/most popular/hottest recipes on the front page based on the "what can I make?" feature. I only recorded the number of recipes as it grew and any notable recipes that were added but I wasn't very thorough or scientific about it. I wasn't thinking ahead and just saved it all in a reddit table rather than in a google sheet (which is probably too long to add here). I was planning to just add the top 10 flavors that were missing and, when I added those and found only sugar cookie, cliche and mother of god's milk had been added to the top of what I could make, I was frankly surprised that one could only make 50 recipes and only few that were highly rated. So I plowed through (like an obsessive fool) until I couldn't take any more about down to number 50 (butterscotch ripple) where the list had grown to 176 (with the addition of FW blueberry finally) with a larger number of notable additions. This was all excluding fruits as they were already included. There's more to this but Ill keep this short (not my forte).
Thoughts:
As noted by u/Apexified in the FAQ Friday BEST Flavors:
"If you were to buy just the Top 20 flavors from ATF you would be able to make a whopping 29 recipes."
Continuing,
"..if you were really ambitious and bought all 100 of the top flavors, you’d be able to mix up 350 recipes and 21 of the top 50 recipes. You’d also be +1 flavor away from 1159 recipes but let’s be honest, you just spent $215 on flavors, maybe it’s time to take a break. " (and tobaccos will lack representation outside ry4's!)
Also,
'“My First Order” Flavors from the sidebar gives you 20 flavors voted on by all of us here as the best way to start and even includes a few recipes that you can make with them. ATF returns a solid but not quite astonishing 48 recipes with those flavors in your stash.'
With only 11 recipes for the top 35 fruits, this is clearly not an entry point into mixing. Adding to your arsenal the top 50 will yield few notable mixes at easily close to $200 (if not more) and doesnt seem worth it as a FIRST order."
Conclusions:
Apex said it best in his own conclusion, "All the data in the world isn’t going to come up with a list of flavors that will cater perfectly to your palate. I was hoping to put together a more definitive list that could maximize flavor buying efficiency but every which way you look at it you end up 1 or more flavors short of making the next best thing."
This leads me to believe that organizing resources for mixers such as user suggested profiles/highly rated recipes in basic categories may help meeting the needs of one's palette. Most people start DIY to save money, have control over their juice (nic, flavors, sweeteners etc) but also because we want what we want: variety and customization and newness.
To this end, I think it would be a useful expansion to the My First Order to have a resource including a variety of basic profiles to work with and start out messing with, a list of swappable building blocks in terms of fruits to drop on top of a cream/custard/bakery base which we started doing in update 1. u/juthinc is working on expanding that list to more specific categories (so we can vote on some and get a community discussion/consensus) While I am working on researching the rest of the profiles for threads that will facilitate discussion. Hopefully, people will share their knowledge or awesome saved links!
Also, based on the feedback from the last post, I think it might be useful to explore the possibility of a suggested substitution list. It seems having limited flavors keeps people from trying some recipes as they are written. It might be nice to compile a sub list so that people starting out with the basic first order list can try additional recipes (not true to the recipe, of course, but close) and expand the list of possible recipes to try.
Lastly, I will compile everything I can find on SFPs, flavor pairings, 3 flavor recipes so newer mixers can try them and more intermediate mixers can use them as building blocks.
Please comment, up/downvote, give feedback, or just share ideas/questions you want someone more obsessive than you to research!
I’m just kind of going to think out loud here, and I think it’s pretty related to what you’ve got written. I’m kind of thinking about things a little different than what the majority of the community will be looking at when it comes to these things because I’m only really interested in tobaccos. The thing with tobaccos is searching top recipes is going to throw some RY4 stuff at you and some tobacco+fruit stuff. While I dabble in both of those kinds of things, I’m personally more interested in dirty, real tobacco tasting things. So finding the right tobaccos for the first order is like 1/3 the challenge. Now you gotta figure out the flavors to buy along with them to make whatever kind of “tobacco” recipe you want. So a list of all the best tobacco flavors isn’t really going to help a whole lot because then you’re still going to need to find the right vanilla, fruit, caramel or butterscotch, or whatever to mix with that tobacco.
The other challenge with a tobacco related first order is that not all flavor suppliers are carrying a whole lot of them. You can get all the FLV from a few different places, but all of (in my opinion, of course) the essential INW tobaccos are at Vapers Tek, and they don’t carry FLV, HS, TFA, or FA, which you’re probably going to want some of those in a first order.
So I think what I’m going to do, not really for the sidebar or anything like that, mostly just for fun, is go through the flavor suppliers and put together a suggested buy list for different tobacco profiles, and throw out some recipes to make with those flavors. So if you’re doing your first order at Nicotine River and you are interested in RY4s and dessert tobaccos, I’ll suggest maybe 10-15 flavors to pick up and try to do a few recipes so that you can use every flavor and get a little variety, while still being within the realm of what you’re interested in. I’ve done that before for someone, and it was kind of fun.
Look out for that by 2020 haha.
I'd be willing to bet money a whole buttload of people would want to read that, myself included. I was lucky to use the search function to read through old discussions and I found that older link by t_mace (I think maybe you linked to) regarding some tobacco flavors. I felt I went off that sort of for my first tobacco foray and it was definitely lacking. The thread i found most useful was this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY_eJuice/comments/7m487m/top_5_tobacco_concentrates/?utm_content=title&utm_medium=user&utm_source=reddit
so much concensus I finally had the courage to invest in some more pricey flavors. I almost didnt get the for pipes you mentioned simply because they were at vaperstek only. Now I wish I had tried more but I'm gonna be a good boy and do my homework first working on my wish list until labor dale sales.
I think that part of what makes diy so great is the ability to mix a juice that nobody has ever mixed before (this is my best guess as to why so few recipes use only the top 100 flavors) that's one of the main reasons I got into mixing. In my experience the first order list was a great start, but I stoped using it as a reference after my first ($50ish) order. After that I began to use the reviews on this sub and my own discretion to find new flavors. I am aware that there are many people who just want to mix up a few recipes from other mixers and be done with it, but I hardly think that a rework of that particular article is the most efficient solution. Instead I would suggest writing up something new like a guide to buying the fewest flavors to yield the greatest variety of recipes that already exist. It seems to me that these resources already exist in the flavor of the week. If you wanted a starting point for an article like that I would start by compiling the best of the flavors in that thread, cross reference with recipes on ATF and throw in some advice on subbing flavors (probably the one technique that will boost flavor buying efficiency most efficiently, but usually spoken ill of probably due to that creative side of mixers not wanting their hard work to be Frankensteined in such a fashion) butwith the caveat that it will be different. Anyway thanks for stopping by San Diego.
Great points. For me, FOTW hasn’t been as illuminating in terms of being beginner friendly. It’s useful to see where someone is going, where a flavor can be taken, or what one can do with a flavor. This last mango post had that chart/graphic by username I forgot but wow that was helpful. The discussion generated by that alone was markedly different from prior FOTW threads I’ve read. If every FOTW had that, I’d see them as a stronger beginner friendly resource.
I think I like the goal of a bare bones beginner list. I think I was leaning towards this with the SFP, 1/2/3 flavor mixes, profiles stuff I am looking into. And a follow up article/discussion on how to bend the beginner list into a substitution cheat for accessing recipes.
I could see why people are reluctant to entertain willy nilly subs. Mostly what I’m doing here is also really for me to be more organized about my mixing and to gather all the bits I’ve seen but to do it publicly so maybe others could benefit. Maybe some of this is just an exercise for me to get the basics down and leave a paper trail so the work is accessible to all.
> this is my best guess as to why so few recipes use only the top 100 flavor
I think you overlook a real possibility: not every mixer, even those with 2-300 concentrates, has all of the 'top 100' and likely has some less popular creams and/or fruits and/or bakeries. I expect everyone mixing custards has one or more of FA/INW Custards and VCV1.
There's basically two approaches to making a first order of flavors.
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Find recipes that appeal (assuming such exist and are findable) and buy flavors for them.
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Figure out what recipes you want to make and buy the building blocks for those. ie: LA Lemonade, INW Lemon Mix, FA Polar Blast, WS-23, and then a collection of fruits that work well in lemonade, like INW Grapes, INW Raspberry&TFA Raspberry sweet, FLV&TFA cranberry(?), maybe elderberry, a decent orange choice or two, that sort of thing. Or FA Fuji, FLV Rich Cinnamon, FA Caramel (and then whatever else to make up apple pie/danish/crumble/fritter type recipes, and then the blueberry trinity to vary the fruit element.) Or buy the FLV tobaccos (with or without the additive ones, distinguished by having 'cigarette' in their name) and the INW "for pipe" collection. Or some assortment of FA Fresh cream, a coconut of some sort, some other cream types, and caramel/chocolate/mint (and cooling agents) to make milkshake flavors. Or puddings or mousse or whatever. And so on. Personally, I find the second approach would be better iff the information is available as to what those 'building blocks' should be. That's what I view this project as ultimately building - a shopping list of "for this recipe type buy these concentrates" so beginners can pick what appeals to them without having to search for recipes.
I think there’s a few more entry points but that covers loads of people. (Those two weren’t necessarily my situation either since I was mostly shot in the dark and went with frequency rather than actual recipe.)
As for the bulk of #2, I’m excited to collaborate and feel like we’ll cover large portions of that. And I’m certain I’ll learn much in the process.
Oh, there's other techniques. Like the "trying to clone X juice... here's the basic flavor profile, and grab every flavor close to the base ingredients to see which version was used" but that's not much good for enabling multiple different mixes. And I firmly believe in switching between two or more completely different juices throughout a day to avoid building tolerances and/or losing the ability to taste a particular flavor.
Basically, I don't think there's any good alternative to those two approaches.
Yeah the clone wars is underlying many an entry to mixing. Like thinking, $20 for this juice when I can buy every strawberry under the sun to try to figure out which one they used. Lo and behold it’s more complicated than that. For one, my palette ain’t that great. I learned I like bolder flavors mostly because I don’t appreciate nuances. It’s funny what you learn on the journey.
But yeah, letting go of the clone and understanding the potentials of diy was a bit for me to grasp. But a cool revelation to have.
I bought flavors based on frequency for quite a while. My first flavor order was a mess though because I didn't know what I was doing and I just picked flavors that sounded good (tfa cheesecake). But if I wanted a sweet cream, I would go to atf and see which sweet cream was used the most, this worked out well for me for a very long time.
This is a great post my guy, doin cool shit that I never had tbe drive to do. Then writing about it.
I’m glad to hear. I’m kind of a counterintuitive thinker and I usually do things backwards to learn the hard way why it’s better to simply follow advice the first time around. But what that also does is give me a glimpse of the big picture. But the work I would never just do for myself. I’m much more motivated to do it for the benefit of the community which also happens to be in my own best interest. :)
One thing throws the system out of wack and that's marshmallow's and sweeteners. I would tick all the marshmallows which isn't crucial compared to others and sweeteners which is tpa 5/5 EM/SUL - FW 10% - CAP SS - 20%.
WS-23 kill koolada and menthol pretty much, so tick all the versions of koolada and menthol too as you'd sub that for WS. For Marshmallow, just getting FA's version would be the best middle ground, no way somebody should get 4 different versions of Marshmallow that is used in so many recipes. FW sweetener would be my choice but CAP's does add other stuff however we're not 100% what that is but people hate CAP's like crazy Shyndo where Wayne uses it pretty much exclusively so there is a debate on that.
See if that opens it up a bit.