*Old mixer, first post*, been long pondering on identifying the exact moment when a liquid transitions from that unfinished taste into the wonderful stage we are all familiar with, and why, this is less about aging, and more about detectable complexity threshold, which is amazingly less subjective than you might think, maybe a tiny bit but not entirely, which led to the question and this post, **how can a mix smell wonderful yet taste not so good**.
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Let's take a popular example, Strawberry and Cream, most fruits by nature's design and our programming smell good, and we've come as humans to like Creams too, majority of us anyway, now smell your favorite strawberry flavor and you will feel good, smell a Cream and it's good too, taste or vape them solo and the're *'lacking'*, mix shake & steep them, and they're still lacking, add a third flavor be it vanilla, another cream, caramel or cake and here is your detectable complexity threshold, it mostly transforms and the taste is beginning to rise up to the smell's goodness (excluding here complex flavors that act like shots and are good solo, also the effect of sweeteners).
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It is as if liquid needs to be 3D or Stereo for a chance to register as good (vs. 2D and Mono), also irrelevant to this question how some complex mixes still taste bad, and how mixes transform by aging over time, remember this is narrowly about detectable complexity threshold, and there's little parallels in the real world, you won't bite into a ripe apple and feel it lacking as most of us would FA Fujii, it's as if man-made is 2D, while nature has set our acceptable complexity threshold settings to 3D and high.
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On taste and its being subjective: Yes we are as unique in our taste abilities as our thumb prints, and there are separate chemicals in the flavors we buy for smell and for taste, and the percentages of each affects our subjective detection and liking, also us humans have unique & complex smell abilities and relatively low resolution taste detection, even while eating and drinking, it is our smell powers that mostly shape what we perceive as taste, but this is about what the majority of us would agree upon as lacking or acceptable and good, otherwise we'd all be vaping one and two flavor mixes.
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So the two questions I'm sharing with you are:
**A- How can a mix smell wonderful yet taste terrible.**
We've established that smell is the decider on taste, and that taste buds are limited to salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami, it should follow that what smells good and is not excessively salty, sweet, sour or bitter should also taste as good, or at least not bland or unfinished or lacking, one possible answer to that might be that in taste (remember the strawberry cream here), 1 + 1 is not two but 3 or 4 or 5, with complexity being what's extra above 2.
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**B- How do flavor manufacturers** like TPA, FA, FLV, INW, CAP.. Produce single flavors that (mostly) smell good, but taste bland when vaped solo, how are they assessing potential success for their product, or even selecting among different versions on say a Strawberry for the final release?
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Can't be based on smell alone, for we do have examples of flavors that taste ok yet smell horrible, e.g. TFA Guava, also Honey .. Or do they produce them mostly for Foods and vaping just is just an extra bonus, another possibility is that they develop single flavors that are tested to work well in mixes not solo, but if that was true wouldn't they have leaked those said mixes to boost sales?
This is something I researched quite a bit when I started DIY, but it is still more complicated than I can fully explain. The basic answers..
A) Your sense of smell is exponentially more powerful than your sense of taste. The reason for this is both physiological and mental. Your brain has a giant reference list for the way things smell, when compared to the way things taste. Your taste buds are much more limited to what they can process as a taste than your olfactory has for what they can process as a smell.
B) Flavor companies who are not developing specifically for vaping aren't taking into account what their product tastes like in a vaping environment. They are developing taste based on oral consumption and how the chemicals release and/or attach when prepared in a food application. You are smelling what your brain can associate with the properties available in the liquid form, but those properties change once they are vaporized and potentially destroyed or changed during that process.
While eating, you are also breathing, seeing, and feeling, so you are using all these senses at the same time. You are processing all of the available properties and using/creating associations to decide taste.
When vaping, you have to use your nose and allow the flavor to be processed. This is totally dependent on the device you are using and how you are physically vaping.
The surface area of receptive tissue is also a lot higher in your nasal cavity than your tongue and whatever the area is just immediately behind it that I always forget the name of (not the esophagus). It has many folds which dramatically multiply the area available for receptor growth and subsequent sensing.
And, as you already mentioned, there are many, many more receptor types in our scent system than in taste - receptors which are believed to basically detect functional groups (R-OH, R-COO-R', R-COOH, R-O-R', and so on) and "chunks" - particular discrete chemical fragments (say, "ethyl ester with 2-carbon spacer to alcohol", "5-member electron rich heterocycle", and so on). Due to this mixture of highly specialised and more general receptors, you have a very high fidelity in smell, which taste simply cannot match, having so few distinct receptor types (only a dozen or so IIRC)
Most flavors were designed to be ingested, not inhaled. Flavors don't necessarily taste the same vaped as they were meant to taste. Also, most companies want to be able to combine several flavorings together, more than getting one perfect flavoring. Besides which, you'd never get one perfect flavor that everyone would like. You'd at best get three or four clusters of preferences. (Check out the TED talk on choice happiness and spaghetti sauce from Malcolm Gladwell.)
The best example is like eating ass, taste good but smell bad
Oh boy.. DIY ass e-liquid incoming?
If you are breave enough
Your nose is not your tongue. Who knows, turds might taste like chocolate after all. They do use certain anal chemicals in foods. =)
Wut? I have trouble believing that skatole (2-methylindole) is used in any foods... unless you meant something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoreum#In_food
That's a bit of a reach, TBH. Doesn't qualify in my opinion - though, good attempt.
And it wasn't skatole, as expected. I severely doubt that it will have ever been used in food.
Castoreum seems to be a dirty mixture of many different mono and diphenol & acetophenone derivatives. Catechol and such. I've synthesised quite a few of them before incidentally! They usually smell somewhat "organic", some earthy, some even have diesel notes. But none really smell like shit the same way that skatole does (which I have smelt, and I can confirm that it most definitely smells like shit).
If I recal they use beaver anus juice in some food flavors.
Nose is not tough plain and simple... candles smell wonderful... ever eat a candle?