My thoughts are, that it's an impossible question to answer. Anybody can throw together 2 or 11 flavors and make it taste like absolute garbage, but it can go the opposite way too.

You simply cannot compare the two ways of mixing to eachother.

As a standard I always try only two or three main flavours.

For example is you want to create a coffee milkshake. You might use espresso and ice cream as your two main flavours

Ice ream is your base and espresso will be your high tone.

But you may find that the two alone are not well rounded and flat. The espresso on its own might be too strong or bitter but if you reduce it you feel like the ice cream is now too overwhelming.

So you can drop 1 percent of espresso and replace it with 1 percent latte or cuppacino. Or any milder flavour in the same category. Now you have a more rounded coffee flavour.

Or you want the ice cream less sweet and a bit smoother. Then drop 1 percent ice cream and add 1 percent whipped cream.

Finally you can work with low tones. Or overtones. The flavours you generally get after an exhale. For this one maybe I want a bit of a nutty addition so I can maybe add 1 percent hazelnut praline or almond.

So you might en up with something like 4% ice cream 2% whipped cream, 2% espresso and 1% cuppacino. And then 1 % hazelnut praline and 1% almond.

In total you have only 11% flavour but only 6% is your base flovours.

As a newby I used to mix two or three flavours that I wanted in my juice as the main taste and I never got a good result. Only sometimes with fruit flavours.

As soon as I started rounding each flavour profile off like described I really good nice full juices. Especially for bakeries and desert recipes.

When you use too many different base flavours you will start tasting almost like a soapy taste.

For fruit juices it's a bit different. If you have a really good flavour you can honestly use 1 basic flavour as a profile like 4 or 5 percent blueberry. Then you can add a similar berry at about 2 percent which won't overpower the blueberry. Maybe a raspberry (good raspberry is hard to find). But now again the flavour might be nice but won't feel full. So I would add a filler and I personally love to use a yoghurt flavour or nougat. Ice creams often ruined the fresh fruit taste. Adding a bit of sour also helps for fruit. Sweetener I find is always neccesary in fruit profiles but not always with deserts.

Fruits are generally harder to get right but requires less additional flavours. You want to keep to a single main flavour, compliment it with a candy that goes well with it like a gummy, add a rounding off with a similar type of fruit and add sweetener. Btw ripe strawberry with any fruit in low quantities does wonders to any fruit juice.

I've made desert recipes that uses 4 different types of cookies 4 types of nuts, two types of banana and even cream on top of that. Comes out great and if I would leave 1 of the cookie flavours out it's just not the same. But my total percentage never went over 14%.

But fruits. I've always stuck to three fruits max, generally of the same type, one candy, sweetener and maybe yoghurt on top. Less flavours but you can use higher percentage total for fruits for a stronger base.

A good idea is to first make a tester just of two or three main flavour profiles you want. Then try it and determine what you want to change or add or round off. It sounds tedious but usually after the first test I would make a pretty good juice on the second try and on the third id have it just right.

Recipe development is all about trial and error, and the number of trial mixes required to balance everything perfectly increases exponentially as you involve more flavors.

If you're not into systematic testing to fine-tune your recipes, then you should limit yourself to no more than 3 flavors in a recipe. 3 flavors is enough to achieve many good things, without having too many variables to control.

Look at it this way: With 3 flavors, it only takes 9 samples to test the effects of increasing/maintaining/decreasing each flavor. With 4 flavors, 27 samples are needed to do the same thing; with 5, 81 and so on.

I have always mixed like you. Keep it simple. At first I was cramming too many flavors into a recipe, trying to get it a little better. Chasing a dream. When i see recipes that appeal to me but have 6 plus flavors, i usually simplify for my tastes.

Every time I come to this sub I find answers I didn't know I needed to know. Thank you all.

Context. In a squonk, with a good RDA and fused Clapton, I can taste the nuances of my seven flavour ADV. I delight in the combination of caramel, cinnamon, vanilla and custard. Try that one in a pod.

Now, try my two flavor lemon tart jacked with nicotine in a pod and you'll beg for more. That same recipe will blow you away if you hit that in an RDA.

It took me almost a year to perfect my ADV. Do you really think a three flavour recipe is going to be better? It depends on the context.

It's all about balance.

10 flavors used just right, can work just as good as 2 flavors.
There's no either or.

i rarely do over 2-3 these days, must be getting old. one base, one accent, and optional one to reinforce either base or the accent. as zen as it can be.

I think well constructed recipes are better than ones that are thrown together. Whether that means carefully picking out the perfect set of strawberries to make a simple strawberry recipe or taking time and crafting something dozen nuanced flavors.

Between the two there is no best option. Both have merits, both have points where they are better executed or are better able to shine in a given set up. Like, I don't typically aim for near as much nuance in pods or MTL recipes, but I am content to build more complex recipes for my DL atomizers, but even then there are exceptions to the rule.

Depends on what you're attempting to replicate.

Ex. Try making Baklava with 3 flavorings.

It's like cooking. A chef can put 11 ingredients into a single dish, but a teenager is barely able to mix 1 together. The number isn't really a good indicator of taste, but instead the profile you're looking for.

With only a few exceptions, we're not dealing with "simple" flavourings to begin with. Your two-flavour recipe can easily be a far more complex blend than someone else's fourteen-flavour tour de force - it just looks simpler because you used fewer bottles getting there. And if you have a single, simple flavouring that's already bang on point, all you can do is steer it away from your end goal. The question is meaningless.

There's no real answer. There are 2 flavor bangers and some that got over seven. But IMO 6 flavors is a pretty good number. You have to look at the recipe and really read the notes then you can understand why there's 6 flavors in it

It depends how simple the concentrates you have are

I think it mainly depends on what hardware you are using.

With that being said, I don’t see a difference between a 2 flavor mix and a 10 flavor mix if both of them have achieved the end goal.