#Introduction:

Okay, so let’s say you see a recipe that looks like it should match your preferred profile perfectly. It’s got a ton of reviews, most of them positive, but you mix it and it’s absolute crap. What gives? Well, there are a lot of things that could be the reason for this. Sometimes you don’t get on with a specific flavor (TFA Vanilla bean ice cream and pepper tasters?) or maybe your palate doesn’t mesh with that of the recipe’s creator. There’s nothing wrong with that, it happens to all of us. However, there is one other thing that’s worth consideration: the age of the recipe.

#Vaping hardware over time

Let's take a quick stroll back in time, shall we? There has been an absolute ton of innovation and iterative improvement in design for vaping devices over time, and worth consideration, not every change has been perfectly smooth. Prior to the advent of the Kangertech Subtank mini what was the most popular atomizer? It was almost certainly the CE4 or CE5 clearomizer. Those are… not especially good devices by modern standards. That Subtank mini didn’t really start to gain any traction until late 2015. Early reviews were in May, and from my recollection, general availability to users wasn’t until much later in the year, around October. That means that we were looking at the real advent of regulated single cell devices in the mainstream around the middle, or tail end, of 2015. Giving recipe creators all of two months to start adjusting their recipes before 2016 began. At that point we began seeing things like Smok’s TFV4. That tank, for those who were adopting single cell devices late in 2015, would have been too power hungry to bother with as it required 40w at the low end and had coil options that reached up to around 130 watts. While it was, absolutely, a huge hit at the time, it didn’t really start seeing a ton of active user adoption until things like the Joyetech Cuboid and Wismec Reuleaux RX 200 were readily available. Those two devices were released around December 2015 and didn’t start shipping from places like Fasttech until March of 2016.

So we are looking at the move from fixed voltage ego threaded devices to 100+ watt tanks in about 6 months time. That is absolutely crazy in hindsight. From 8-15w stick devices, to 100+ watts was almost no time at all in the grand scheme of things. That’s not to say that the tanks that had suddenly taken over the hype machine were, by modern standards, flavor beasts. They were not. We saw yet more considerable upside extracted in device quality over the following year or so. By the middle of 2017 we were looking at devices like the Wotofo Serpent SMM being readily available and the Smok TFV8 baby beast tank having already been on the market for half of a year. That is an insane step up from the relative trash that had been previously available. We also saw the advent of complex coils (beyond round wire and twisted round wire builds) over this same general span of time. “Popular” gear moved from super low power thin round wire vertical coil atomizers with silica wicks to big fat clapton coils in smartly designed airflow atomizers in under 24 months! Sure, stuff like the two post Kennedy had come out all the way back in 2015, but most folks who were getting their feet wet in vaping and DIY weren’t looking at mechanical mods at the time. Anything worth its salt was expensive and even still we weren’t seeing complex coils regularly in use.

That means that recipes from that era, 2014-late 2016/early 2017 are all likely made with devices that do not in any way represent modern vaping technology in mind. Putting aside that we were looking at a considerably lesser number of readily available flavors from a smaller number of vendors, the gear itself evolved very quickly over a fairly short period of time. If you bought one new device per year from 2015 to 2017 you may have gone from rebuilding a protank III to a subtank mini RBA to a Geekvape Griffin RTA with mods to pair with these tanks and never once taken a step toward the higher wattage and/or more flavor focused gear that came out over the same time frame. This would clearly impact how the recipes put out over that time frame would age. Obviously some have aged very well, but many others have undoubtedly aged like milk left out in the sun. When was the last time you tried something from companies like Cosmic Cloud or Space Jam? The recipes that made them popular were designed with things like the CE4 or Protank III in mind and it shows.

That all fails to discuss the massive impact that mesh based atomizers have had on how recipes present themselves in modern devices, but that may be a topic for another post altogether. Suffice it to say, Mesh was the last major “game changer” in direct lung gear that we have seen, and it meaningfully augments how a lot of profiles can, or cannot, be successfully presented on a given atomizer.

#In summation:

All of this is to say, that there are a lot of reasons why older recipes don’t always work in today’s devices. I think it’s truly important to consider the historical perspective though, and what hardware might have been most readily available when those recipes were put together. Things like the Psyclone Hadaly came out in late 2016, those who were serious about “flavor chasing” in 2015 and 2016 had the Praxis Derringer, the Kennedy, the Velocity, or the Tobecco Zorro. We have come a long way in the past 6 years, folks. Honestly, were it not for the advent of pod devices slowing the rate of innovation in the devices we use day to day, it may be that every recipe released from mid 2016 to 2019 may not present well in the “what could have been” world of modern atomizers.

So, I ask you, when you’re considering a new recipe to mix, to put yourself in the rough time frame when the recipe was released. Did we have “modern” gear yet? Was that gear “available” or was it ubiquitous with the vaping landscape? Hopefully this helps, even if ever so slightly, in your search for your next ADV.

If you fancy a look at some past FAQ Fridays posts, and you absolutely should, do so here

If you’d like to join us for a more immediate discussion on various DIY (and most non-DIY topics), I’d love to see you over on the DIY Discord