Was discussing earlier how many commmercial juices it would requre trying to find something good enough to vape, and how getting into DIY was mostly for me a way to increase my chances of getting a juice that I would actually like, at the bare minimum to the "good enough" stage.
For comparison, trying maybe ten commercial juices would result in finding one that was "good enough". Of those, maybe one in twenty would rise to the level of "pretty good".
In comparison... I've created and mixed, out of maybe every hundred recipes, two that didn't reach "good enough" status (nobody bats a thousand) and half are "pretty good". With maybe one in ten being awesomesauce. Now, maybe theres some luck involved, maybe some cross-disciplinary skols/knowledge/talent helping, maybe there's some judging bias, maybe there was some OCD-worthy research involved (and maybe some cherrypicking of statistical clusters to make for better impressions, but still)
So how about it, gang? How are you doing mixing up stuff you like versus what it was like trying to find juices you'd like?
As a side note, how picky are you? Not necessarily just with juices, include foods/beverages. (I suspect there's gonna be a interesting correlation going on.)
I'm not picky, nor proud. I'm practical and pragmatic. I eat food because I'm hungry so I generally eat whatever is available. I vape because I want nicotine. I even vape the catastrophes, because they're available.
Life is rough. You're not going to enjoy everything. Lower your expectations and you will enjoy even more of it.
With that out of the way, about 0.1% of anything I've ever mixed was not vapable...as in disgusting. It usually involved a flavor that was inherently disgusting (surprise butyric acid for instance). Then again I don't mix things or buy flavors that I know I won't like (anise, yeast, hops, juniper, whiskey, yogurt, cheese, corn).
I'm not picky at all with food or drinks but I am very picky with vape juice. I've tried hundreds of commercial juices and there is maybe a handful I would ever buy again but with DIY every few recipes I try I would make again. I think a big part of that is that I can carefully choose recipes to try that contain things I know I like versus just guessing with commercial juice. Regardless, I'd say these are my averages.
Commercial juice I love: 1%
Commercial juice I like but wouldn't buy again: 5%
DIY juice I love and will mix again: 20%
DIY I like but probably won't mix again anytime soon: 50%
I’m no mathematician, but I think we’re missing 24%
I'm not sure if that's a serious answer or not.
Extremely picky eater here. Never had good luck with commercial juices... Basically I found about 5 vapable juices over the course of 2 years and around 150 flavors tried.
DIY I was not much better sucess rate wise early on, until about 6 mo in when I had developed a small stable of flavorings that work well for me, and i just develop from those now and have quit trying new stuff completely because 8/10 flavorings are unvapable to me and I'm just over the whole discovery process at this point.
I'm lucky I dont really get sick of juices because at this point I only really vape 2 DTL juices and 3 MTL juices.
Your journey sounds eerily similar to mine. Crafted over 100 recipes. Made 5-6 recipes publicly available and they were well received. Even dabbled in the OG juice seller’s sub and did pretty well there as well. Aside from special requests from friends, I haven’t made a new flavor in well over a year and I haven’t resupplied in awhile either. The plan is to dwindle my nicotine intake down to 0 with these last 90mL of 100mg/mL nic. With me vaping at a 3mg, I have ~2700mL of vaping left. But I’m more than happy rotating my same 4-5 flavors. Now, I just gotta get quantities of all of the stuff I don’t use anymore so I can sell it all.
I have a pretty varied and tolerant palate when vaping, which is sort of a blessing and a curse.
On one hand, most stuff I try will at least qualify as "okay". Purchased juice probably hit "good enough to finish" something like 70-75% of the time. Finding stuff I'd order again was rare though. Maybe 10% of what I tried was worth a second bottle ordered. I did pretty exclusively aim for vendors that used little/no sweetener, as stuff like Jam Monster is cloyingly sweet at the best of times, and at the worst of times is offensively oversweet and artificial.
Mixing I can count my abject failures on one hand. Lot of stuff that's "good enough" but won't go past the 10ml mix and probably 40% of what I have tried gets penciled into rotation and will get mixed again.
I would describe myself as still very new to the DiY game, but this about sums up my experience so far. Very rarely did I purchase a commercial juice that I didn't finish, maybe 1 in 10 purchases. Everything else was solidly good, with a small number (again, 1 in 10 or so) being downright excellent.
Since taking up mixing, I have yet to make a recipe that didn't have some qualities that I liked. It's definitely been easier dealing with sub-optimal recipes, as most are my own creation and serve as jumping off points for improvement. I've tried recipes from others with varying degrees of success, but am quite proud of the fact that my current favorite mix is an original creation.
I'm significantly happier mixing my own juice, the only downsides so far have been forcing myself to finish old batches before getting to mix up something new, and the unavoidable anticipation during the required steep. Knowing that a new recipe is just a few minutes away from being bottled leaves me thinking about juice I have yet to make rather than the perfectly good mixes I have available.
I've probably bought around one hundred different juices since I've started vaping. I know it sounds, to me at least, like a large number, but seldom did I find something I liked. I've bought maybe three of those juices more than once and of those the only bottles I finished were Lenola Cream. I'll still buy that.
I've been diy'in my juice for maybe four months or so. Probably made thirty recipes or so and have enjoyed most of them, but of those I've only remade two, grack and abuela. I looooove those and always have a bottle handy.
I bat about 70% for vapable. 30% of those "would mix again".
The 30% that are abject failures? 15% experiments, 15% somebody else's recipe that has a flavour I find out I can't stand (read -harsh- or plastic/chemical)
Very picky vaper. From all the time I have vaped, I have only purchased "commercial" juices four times maybe. All the others I have purchased were from a guy who opened his shop where he does them himself, and fine tunes the juice to your liking.
Most of them I have tried were very good, I would say about 70% of the time. I have started diy because of him actually since we worked on a bunch of recipes together. I still purchase my stock from him, and his original juices, as a way of thanking him. It's a really great shop.
You give me hope. DIY: 1 in 10 is OK and the rest went down the drain. Commercial: still vaping the juice I started with (that's the standard); been pretty picky with what I'd try, have only tossed 2 out of 20 and 5 out of 10 are good enough to buy again (I like to have 2-3 other than my ADV around). I've spent the last 2-3 months reading and watching, so will be buying a load of supplies soon and trying again.
I'm not picky at all. And although I've made some corkers in my time my main goal when mixing is for a little bit of flavour that is enjoyable. I'm not looking for loads of awesome flavour, just something to take the edge off unflavoured juice.
Which is why I don't like a lot of commercial juice, there's too much flavour in them. Too sweet, too thick, and all round too much.
Today I'm vaping a completely uninspired 2% 27fish with 1% vanilla swirl. Is it good? It's alright. Just a light taste of a fruity chew, like running your tongue along your gums 15mins after eating a sweet.
I have only been in the DIY-game for 1 week and have mixed some of the most popular juices (Mustard Milk, Snowy Fuji and Pink Lemonade)
They are vape-able but dont really fw the taste.
My local vapestore suggested me to buy some CAP sweetener because it’d be the easiest solution to make almost any juice good - are they right about that?
There’s CAP Super Sweet and TFA Sweetener. There’s mire than that, but those are the two popular ones. A lot of people make the switch to DIY because many popular commercial juices use a ton of sweetener. Artificial sweeteners will cut your coil life dramatically. They also tend to mute a flavor profile if used too high. If you need to add some (I wouldn’t go higher than .5%) then that’s fine, especially when you’re trying to get used to DIY juices after coming off of commercial juice. Slowly cut down on the sweeteners and only use it when the recipe actually needs it, or to enhance an already finished recipe. Eventually, you’ll think commercial juices are overly sweet and have no flavor because they rely too much on sweeteners
Coil life doesnt really matter for me because i’m vaping on my Medusa RDA and will just rebuild once in a while.
I think i’ll add the CAP Sweetener because i feel like i miss out on a lot of recipes when i use the “What can i make” tool on e-liquid-recipes.com.
I was informed that sweetener should be used in small dozes (usually 0.5-1,5%) but up to 3% for some recipes which i cant remember.
When I first tried Dinner Lady Lemon Tart I gagged from the amount of sweetness. My brother hyped that shit and brought me a big bottle that I promptly returned to him. This story repeated itself a handful of times with well known brands. I'm obviously biased with my own mixes since I mix for me, but I have reached the point where I find more juices that I like in my own mixes than in commercial juices. Maybe 1 out of 20-30 of my own recipes makes it through the first testing and to a v1.2.
Nowadays every commercial juice is far too sweet for me anyway.
I'm at about 80% "Will definitely mix again," and the % would be higher if not for the fact that certain random flavors give me coughing fits. I can never tell which it'll be before I've used a tank or two, either, though harsh citrus (heavy lemonade, tangerine) seems to be the worst offender. I've only created a few myself, but have dozens of recipes from ATF in rotation, some heavy, others only occasional (I mix 180 ml weekly for myself and my wife.)
I'm not picky with foods/drinks, but getting into DIY really revealed to me how picky I am with e-liquids. With that said though, I still end up generally enjoying most of what I mix. I'd say before I started mixing I would find something like 3 out of 10 commercial juices "good enough", but now that I'm making it for myself and can tailor stuff to my own preferences, I end up with closer to 6 or 7 out of 10.
Adding to that though, I still obsessively tweak my recipes after reaching "good enough" status until I finally get it exactly how I want it.
In my time with commercial juices I'd conservatively say I've tried over 200. Less than ten of those have been "good enough" to be reordered, with only three or four juices being ordered more than two times, and could be considered more than "good enough". So I'm batting under 2% with commercial juice.
With stats like those I bet you can see why I got into DIY. For long time (almost my entire first year mixing), my mixing was largely experimental. At least half were fundamentally unvapable even to someone who is the opposite of picky and with super dull taste buds. After about 14 months DIYing I had 4 solid recipes that I could consider "good enough", but still nothing that I could say I truly love.
Took a year break from DIY and started using JUULs exclusively. I guess I just burned myself out on it. Not really sure what happened. I knew from the start that JUUL pods are a ripoff. Regardless, I just got back into mixing about a month ago. 3 delicious recipes so far, with no trouble at all mixing up anything that I could call "good enough".
The secret is in my year long stretch of expensive failure. With my desperation to find something to vape I experimented far too much, and purchased new flavors far too often. In my impatient laziness I also didn't bother single-flavor testing. I usually went exclusively off the collective flavor notes for that particular flavor. As everyone here knows, this is a recipe for disaster.
Either way, throughout this process I managed to gain greater than beginner-level knowledge on a couple dozen different flavors, and I've mastered about 8 other flavors. I only mix with these flavors, and I no longer purchase new flavors that I have never tried unless there are dozens of people raving about how it's a superior replacement for X flavor. In which case I might pick up a 10ml down the line, but not right away.
I would say, out of 10 different recipes
- 1-2 won't ever try again
- 5-6 vapeable (some I can try again with different ratios)
- 2 would mix again
- 1 adding this to my favourites
Strangely enough, I've actually had worse luck with premade juices. Like I was about to quit vaping until I start DIY.
I'm not really picky in real life. I eat most foods, drink most bevarages. I don't like drinks with high alcohol value (>40%), and absolutely hate those cola+whiskey cans, but that's pretty much all.
> Strangely enough, I've actually had worse luck with premade juices.
Not that strange. Commercial juices rarely tell you what flavors are and aren't in them, making it a challenge to know if you're going to like them. With DIY we can better prescreen to select likely 'likes'...especially when developing recipes.
I haven't tried many commercial juices. Most of the pre-made juice I've bought has been house menu stuff at my local shops, but I can honestly say there's only been 1 that I vowed never to try again. Most have been fantastic, and I'm still trying to clone a couple of ones that really stood out.
I switched to DIY mostly due to cost. It didn't take long to realize that buying juice at $20-25 per 30ml would put a strain on my wallet pretty damn fast, but once I crunched some numbers on the DIY stuff it made way more sense to just mix my own for a fraction of the cost. Early attempts were pretty laughable, but nowadays I stick mostly to recipes that have a high rating or are clones of popular juices, and I've rarely been disappointed. I'd say about 60% of what I mix falls into the above average category, with 20-30% ending up in my permanent rotation. The remaining ones usually end up in my "just ok" pile, but it's a pretty rare case that I flat out dislike something.
In the time I've been making e-juice, which is about 2 years, I have created around five recipes that I enjoy and three recipes that I can vape consistently without getting "vape tongue" or some other sort of fatigue.
During my time of mixing I haven't attempted to make many recipes but instead I focus on the few I want to be great and then work on refining them over and over. When I was buying commercial juice I only found one that I could vape consistently without getting tired of it or it losing flavor and since I started DIY e-juice I've been endlessly attempting to clone it.
I'm not a picky eater, I love almost all food and particularly enjoy trying new dishes. But I am a very picky drinker.
Out of around 20 "DIY Recipes" 5 were acceptable and 3 are absolute staples. 8 successes in total.
An estimated 40% Success Rate
Out of around 50 "commercial juices" 1 was acceptable and 1 was perfect. 2 successes in total.
An estimated 4% Success Rate
For commercial liquids I've found barely a handful that I will ever purchase again. Out of my own recipes there are maybe 5 that get mixed frequently out of countless concepts. As for food was picky as a kid but not now. Just picky with vape flavours.
I haven't tried a lot of commercial juice to be honest. I tried like 8 different flavours maybe, all from the same company. There were like 4 I really liked and they were my main go to's, then 3 I didn't like at all and 1 I absolutely loved. I'm not a picky eater either, I eat and drink pretty much everything. Compared to DIY, I have a lot more juices that I just find to be "meh"
You'd have to account though, that from those 20 juices, about 5 are suggestions or recipes I mixed up, which I quite liked (although my stash was really limited so I had to substitute some watermelons back then), 13 of those are just some weird experiments I made, throwing stuff together how I imagined it could be, that did not work for the most part, although I didn't really use "good" flavors (a lot of TFA Belgian Waffle. I've heard there are way better ones out there)
The other 2 recipes are one I'm extremely proud of.
So I guess, I liked commercial ones a lot more than DIY, if you'd look at what I have now. I'm sure though I'll get better at mixing and the DIY juices I love will soon outnumber those commercial juices