This Tutorial Tuesday post is actually inspired by one that u/ben_gaming posted just a few months ago. His post can be found here and goes into detail about how to use the +1/+2 feature on ATF.
I wanted to make a post that went over a few more features on ATF due to the high number of new mixers that have recently joined the subreddit. If you do not already know, there are two sites that the large majority of us use in order to find and save recipes, save our flavor stash, and see what the average percentages for different flavors are. The first is E-Liquid-Recipes (or ELR) and the other is All the Flavors (or ATF). ELR is completely free, but that means that anybody can review recipes, post recipes, etc. Due to those reasons, ELR has a lot of very old and outdated recipes, the review system is completely messed up, and it is very hard to find exactly what you are looking for. A lot of people do prefer their calculator over ATF's however. ATF on the other hand has a free and premium version. In order to really enjoy the site, you are going to want to get the premium version. It is only a few dollars a month, or you can pay an annual fee of about $12 (I purchased my subscription back in May, so please correct me if I am wrong on the amounts). However, because there is a premium option, you don't have as many reviews where people don't even have all of the flavors, and it is a bit easier to find a specific recipe. This tutorial post is going to assume you have the premium version of ATF.
- Adding flavors to your flavor stash and seeing the average % used: From the home screen, click on Flavors. When you start typing a flavor in, ATF will try to predict which flavor you are looking for. Once the flavor you are trying to add pops up, click the little check box to the far right of the flavor name. The flavor is now added to your flavor stash! Just to the left of the checkbox, you can also see the average % that a specific flavor is used at. This is extremely helpful for when you are trying to create a new recipe. For example, if I am making a recipe and I want to add FA Fuji Apple, I can see that the average % it is used at is 1.84%. With that information, I can now determine a good starting point depending on what I want to do with that flavor. If I want the apple to be very pronounced, I can go a bit over the average and use it around 2.5%. If I want it to be more subtle, I can go below the average at around 1.25%.
- Saving a recipe to mix later: Found a recipe that sounds really good but you either are not able to mix it up at the moment or you don't have the flavors yet? Well it is a good thing that ATF has a way to save recipes! So say I want to start dabbling in tobacco recipes, and I come across Cabin, but I don't have FLV Virginia Tobacco. All I have to do is click the little star next to the recipe name at the top of the page and it is now saved in my favorites. Now, if you click on the Menu dropdown and click on My Favorites, it will bring you do you favorited page. The same can be done with mixers as well. If you find a mixer that makes multiple recipes that you enjoy, you can click the star next to their name and they will show up in the My Mixers section.
- Finding a recipe based off a single flavor: This is similar to the "What can I make" option, but for a specific flavor. Say you just bought CAP Cinnamon Danish Swirl, and you really want to use it in a mix. Instead of scrolling through all of the different recipes that you can make and trying to find one that uses that specific flavor, you can narrow your search down to recipes that use that specific flavor. There are two ways (that I am aware of) to do this. The first is to click on Flavors from the home screen again. Once there, type in the flavor that you want to use in a mix and click on it. You should now be on a page with a bunch of recipe suggestions using that flavor! To make this even better, you can combine this method of searching with the +1/+2 feature so that you get recipes you can actually make that use that flavor.
I don't want this post to be too long, so that is all I am going to type for now. If you have any other tips/tricks, please feel free to post them in the comments below!
It's such a shame that the two main mixing websites we have are marred by serious problems. I can't wait for MixnJuice.
I've heard people talking about all kinds of powerful searches in ATF by feeding stuff directly into the address bar. I could never work it out. Apparently you can even search by excluding flavours?
Also, I always thought the star was for following the mixer? That's why it's the same colour and attached to the mixers name? That's how I've been using it, I don't appear to have any favourited recipes and come to think of it I have no idea how to.
I'd love to be able to sort flavours by # of recipes - for instance, when search for "cola", I get a heap of results with '0 recipes'... But I'm very sure that there are fantastic cola flavours that I know about that aren't listed there for some reason. In fact, half of the page is filled up with choCOLAtes...
Finally - I encourage everyone to go roll a Random Recipe - it uses your stash, and average percentages from the site. Good luck.
"Excited Textures"
1.5% FLV Wild Melon
2.4% CAP Lemon Lime
3.2% CAP Sweet Tea
3.8% FA Cola (USA Pleasure)
1.1% JF Cocoa
You know, minus the Cocoa... brb.
There's a smaller star by the mixer's name for following a mixer but a larger one by the recipe name for adding the recipe to favorites. Like OP, I use the favorites as a to-mix list. After I mix them and leave a review for them, I click the big star again to take them off the to-mix list.
Jesus Christ, I just checked and there's 280 recipes in my favorites. I better get to mixin! I wish people would slow down and stop posting recipes that look good to me.
Not the person you replied to but I've tried to figure out how to favorite recipes and this is what I see. I only see the star by the author too.
I do love messing with the random recipe option, although I’ve never been brave enough to actually try any of them!
If you're just having fun and don't have the courage to mix them, there's also this: https://www.crazyeliquidmachine.com/
When you click on a flavor, it gives a graph with usage info. Sometimes, you'll notice two distinct spikes in the usage info.. These will be for additive/supporting role (lower) and central flavor (higher). Gemerally tho, you can at least check the mode for usage, which is more useful than the mean usage level.
Also, the 'random recipe' will generate a recipe using a random selection of your flavors at the mean usage rate for each flavor. Most times it'll look nasty, but occasionally it'll give a really interesting combination to build from.
Nice one! I do like that feature on elr where you can search by combinations of flavors. Wish that atf did that too, you know?
Definitely. They both have their pros and cons for sure. My biggest complaint about ATF is that they have some features that would be really cool, but they just don’t work. Like how they have an option to search for tags (fruit, tobacco, etc), bit the tags don’t actually do anything.
ATF has some things that just seem broken, and the developers appear to have obandoned the site. I kind of quit using it for that reason.
Do you use ELR instead? I just personally can’t stand looking through all of the options on ELR. There are so many recipes added everyday that it becomes super difficult to find what you’re actually looking for.
I just use ATF to find recipes and ELR for everything else.
Great post! I'm flattered that my post inspired this, and yours is an excellent companion detailing several more less-than-obvious, indispensable features of ATF!
ELR is super crowded. It's just too much and many recipes are crap. A recipe may look good but that doesn't mean that it tastes good. That's why I prefer ATF when I'm searching for recipes containing a certain flavor or for a specific flavor profile. I only wish that all mixers would take the time to add at least some basic notes as to where they got their inspiration from, how they went about creating the recipe, the decision making process, like which flavors may go well together (flavor-combinations) and why they chose certain flavors (or why not) and also why they use them at that percentages. Especially for the less experienced mixers the flavor notes are extremely valuable. We learn a lot from detailed recipe notes.
In addition to your # 3, Finding a recipe based off a single flavor, when you do that you can sort the recipes in various helpful ways. Default is by newest, but I like to always check by rating and sometimes by most mixed as well.
Here's another thing I always do: Take the extra step to hit the blue "Create Batch" button after hitting the mix button, then using "My Batches" to determine whether something has finished steeping (how long ago I mixed it). Suppose I could just write the born on date on the label, but I like to keep the label minimal with just the name rather than crowding it with info.
That’s where I was trying to go with the combining search features such as the by flavor and then adding the +1/+2 feature. Switching the one recipes are sorted is also a very good idea so that you can find peer reviewed recipes instead of being the guinea pig (although that’s sometimes fun and new recipes need reviews too lol).
I didn’t know about the batch option, thank you for that! Will definitely be using that in the future.