Howdy y'all,
Welp, here we are. December is upon us and we are quickly approaching the end of our first full covid year and entering the Gift-of-Giving season. Between Lockdowns, vaccine high hopes, seconds and thirds waves, variants, schools reopening, businesses not returning, it's almost easy to ignore the politics that still transpire outside the window of this hobby. Legislation is slowly chipping away at vaping as an industry and its effects are definitely being felt trickle down all the way to this quiet corner of DIY. What is has brought us here in this subreddit for sure, is a steady influx of new mixers, many of whom simply could no longer find their favorite house juice in their local vape shop or aren't able to order from their regular websites anymore, and being able to get nicotine has become an issue all around. Evidence of this is abundant with the near once a day posts asking where to source nic and how to actually physically mix or which kit is the best to buy for beginners.
Reminders
- Check out the Recipe Roundup from 2021 (updated with November's recipes)
- Check out the companion Front Page Recipes 2021 for some more in-depth look at some recipes and development notes
- Check out all our weekly posts: Flavor of the Week (and accompanying show 10pm EST), What are you vaping? thread, Suggest a recipe (for my flavors) thread, New mixers thread
Last Week's Highlights
- u/Future_Negotiation62 started a dicussion on adding Sweetener to testers?
- u/NostalgicTX started a discussion on “Commercial vs DIY” as if there's even a comparison, amirite?
- u/WillingHuckleberry1 continued the Versus battle with Ws-23 vs menthol?
- when u/sonnycrack isn't schooling me on OG Bacco flavors from the SC/FE line, they're asking what are the BEST FLV tobacco flavors. Hope ~~everyone's contributions~~ my post contributed to gettin moms off the analogs!
- u/Trailmagic was suggested more than a few times to try out the AWS LB-501 for a scale in What Scale Do You Use?
- u/ghost_bub asked Is 70 VG, 20 PG and 10 Water bad? Spoiler: Yes.
- lastly, u/isuamadog has committed to being full retro Brooklyn hipster with yet another review of an SC/FE Flavor: Turkish. Someone tell them that Flavor Review Friday isn't a thing, please. Not yet, at least! (Post your notes, people!!!)
A Little Subreddit History Lesson
Looks like you are looking for a mini history lesson. Ok, well, the doggo has just the thing for you. Every so often, we've tried to aid the new mixers who come through our doors with recommendations on what flavors to get for their first order. This gets... complicated for a number of reasons. You get your flavors associated with certain newer popular recipes (hype), flavors that are unique and give very specific effects (ie inw cactus), and flavors that are considered 'best in class' (ie FLV Red Burley). If you check out this list from 2019, you'll see a bunch of heavy hitters from that time and maybe even remember the recipes that made some of them popular. But, imagine you were new and you just wanted to pick up 3 top flavors to start mixing with... and you ended up ordering INW Cactus, FLV Red Burley and WS-23! I'm gonna leave that madness to u/Philosophucker to make work. It isn't until you get down to #24 or #27 that you get any other actual tobacco flavors/accents again. Sure you could try mixing RB with some custards, creams and vanillas, but this hardly met the goal of making something usable for a new mixer as a guide to insta-mixing. Thankfully, in swoops u/ID10-T to share some knowledge of the history of how these flavors became popular and why. Do give this a read and Check out Noted's Flavor of the Quarter tonight to find -- yup, you guessed it! -- the new, hot must have flavors.
> First Order Flavors: A History. Volume 1.
> First Order Flavors: A History. Volume 2
> First Order Flavors: A History. Volume 3
> First Order Flavors: A History. Volume 4
> First Order Flavors: A History. Volume 5
So my question for you is:
If you had to suggest 5 flavors in any of the broad major profiles (tobaccos, bakeries, candies, fruits, custards/creams, drinks, etc) for a new mixer, what would they be, and why?
Use the following criteria as a guide to explain your reasoning:
- affordable price (or worth the $$$) - new mixers dont usually want to walk into a $200 first order
- versatile flavor - the flavor can be used in a variety of recipes or applications later down the line
- tasty af - who doesn't love a "best in class" flavor? Just avoid something super niche without explanation
- widely available - let's just say, if bcf/chefs don't have it, scratch that for now
- recipe ready - used in recipes (preferably simple ones for new mixers) that are highly rated/regarded.
Let's see what y'all come up with!
Happy Mixin', doggo
This list was so hard to create because there are so many great flavors. I tried to keep it simple and versatile you can see in the recipes as well.
- TFA Vanilla Custard II - Can be used for custards as a main note, bakery, a support flavor and as an accent for other vanillas and creams.
Simple Recipe for beginners Simple Blueberry Custard
- FW Blueberry - Authentic blueberry, kind of syrupy you can push towards candy or natural fruity. Use anywhere you want fruit, cheesecake, milkshake, donuts, yoghurt, etc.
Simple Recipe for beginners Frigid Punishments
- LB Vanilla Ice Cream - Sweet, creamy, DAAPy vanilla ice cream. Put it where you want milk, cream, vanilla. Add it to chocolate or coffee. Very versatile indeed.
Simple Recipe for beginners Banana Swirled Ice Cream
- CAP Sugar Cookie - I find this a bit weak but it’s so good for adding depth in bakeries, pastries, pies, or in butter bases. I’d buy a 30ml for a first order. Add whatever you want to it, it’s pretty forgiving.
Simple Recipe for beginners SICK AF
- FW Butterscotch Ripple - Sweet and creamy butterscotch with caramel notes. Use in ice creams, coffee, & tobacco. Compliment nuts like almonds and pistachios. Use in bakery with apples, toffee, caramel, or brown sugar. Don’t skip on the ButtRip.
Simple Recipe for beginners Butter Almond Custard
5 easy to rec flavors?
- FW Blueberry - cheap, unobjectionable, sweet, versatile.
- INW Shisha Strawberry - nesquik strawberry syrup. fits well with other fruits and creams
- TFA Bavarian Cream - just an all around good cream flavor and it's super cheap
- TFA Vanilla Swirl - it's sort of like a cheat code for a lot of recipes. it's not great on its own but it works well to accent creams and can help bend a lot of fruits toward candy.
- FA Soho - the tobacco hater's tobacco. With almost no tobacco to it (if you get any from it at all) it's nutty caramel. Works just as well in a cream or bakery recipe as it does in an actual tobacco recipe.
Awww I guess I wasn’t clear in my asking. I was kind of hoping for 5 for each profile. I mean, I could cover tobaccos but I’d be hard pressed to say definitively anything outside that. Although I wasn’t expecting anyone to rattle off 35 flavors (5 for each of 7 profiles).
How's this doggo?
Fruits
- FW Blueberry - cheap, unobjectionable, sweet, versatile.
- INW Shisha Strawberry - nesquik strawberry syrup. fits well with other fruits and creams
- FA White Peach - really good all purpose peach flavor
- TFA Lime - frustratingly similar to lime skittles, absolutely delicious
- LA Lemonade - generic, standard, cheap, and tasty.
Creams
- TFA Bavarian Cream - just an all around good cream flavor and it's super cheap
- TFA Vanilla Swirl - it's sort of like a cheat code for a lot of recipes. it's not great on its own but it works well to accent creams and can help bend a lot of fruits toward candy.
- LB Vanilla Ice Cream - ben and jerry's style "high fat" ice cream flavor that works well in a lot of applications
- INW Custard - it's a foundational piece of a ton of good cream/custard recipes
- FW Yogurt - probably the single best yogurt flavor overall, super cheap, and a nice change of pace with a little bit of tang that most other creams don't have
Bakery
- TFA Belgian Waffle - good, if not great, waffle that's super cheap and widely available
- FW Waffle - the other half of my favorite waffle base, making the TFA Belgian waffle into an eggo.
- CAP Sugar Cookie - really good sweet cookie base, something very easy to build off off
- FE Sweet Rice - One of two rice flavors that come to mind. Probably the better of the two on its own, though prone to fading. Still an excellent place to start for a rice pudding
- WF Croissant - light, flakey, borderline bread crust flavor that can be used to help add a bit of an airy dryer bakery to others.
Candies
- FA Oba Oba - sort of a neutral candy shell, a good additive candy flavor, though uninspiring on its own
- CAP 27 bears - probably the cheapest of the various "gummy" bases. It carries some pineapple with it the whole time but it does bear the right "feel" for a candy, so maybe lean tropical with it?
- WF Sour Ball Candy - one of very few flavors that actually sells "sour" and works as a generic base to build off of
- FLV Peach Gummy - it's peach rings. You could tweak it to make it better but it's functionally a one shot.
- WF gushy fruit - generic "wet" base to build off of for various fruits.
Drinks
- FA Black Tea - Arguably over-steeped but definitely black tea. Really good, really easy to build off of.
- FW Grape Soda - Strictly speaking, this is a grape flavored sweetener but it's a really good, way too sweet, candy grape flavor
- FLV Citrus Soda - sorta fizzy, totally accurate to the name. Great to build off of
- FLV Eisai Tea - very reminiscent of the Lipton bottled green teas
- CAP Cappuccino - it's a plain coffee flavor, very much milky coffee, but a great place to build your preferred starbucks-y "coffee" drink recipe
Tobacco
- FA Soho - the tobacco hater's tobacco. With almost no tobacco to it (if you get any from it at all) it's nutty caramel. Works just as well in a cream or bakery recipe as it does in an actual tobacco recipe.
- FLV Red Burley - Nutty, "dark", not terribly dry. Hints of chocolate and generally just really pleasant to work with
- FLV Tatanka - Not a particularly "tobacco-y" tobacco but another great place to start a tobacco/bakery hybrid recipe or to sweeten up a recipe without neutering the tobacco aspects of it.
- FLV Cured tobacco - a blank slate to build off of but a good one. Not nearly as distinct as something like Red Burley but when you need something to read as a tobacco without having to fight with whatever other elements a more complex flavor brings, Cured is... well, the cure.
- FLV Turkish tobacco - Spicy, but not aggressive, a touch of sweetness but a good "exotic" tobacco to build from.
Booze
- TFA Kentucky Bourbon - it's cheap. It's a good bourbon flavor, none of the burn you'd associate with the actual drink
- FLV Bourbon - Here's the burn! it's maybe not the most full bourbon flavor on its own, but combined with TFA's it makes for an excellent place to build a more complex recipe.
- FA Irish Cream - it's boozy, too "fluffy" to read as a cream outright but an excellent place to build from.
- VT light rum - not a silver rum, but a good gold rum kind of flavor. little spice/caramel notes that help sell it as rum without losing the booziness
- FLV Juniper Gin - piney, floral, fun to work with. Maybe not the single best gin flavor, but an excellent additive for recipes that you want to add a twist to.
Additives
- FLV Beer nuts - one of very, very, few that actually adds a "salt" note
- FLV Starch base - generically starchy, help bolster a bread or bakery that needs more weight
- INW Cactus - add wetness, or make a recipe taste like you stood on the wrong side of the lawn mower chute while the grass was still wet with dew. (keep it low)
- WS-23 - very possibly the most neutral cooling agent and similarly one of the most popular.
- FW Sweetener - probably the most neutral sweetener you can get. easier to work with than CAP super sweet and less prone to weird muting effects.
LB Vanilla Ice Cream, TFA Vanilla Swirl for your beginners ice cream base. If you like fruity flavors: FLV Guanabana is a great additive to fruit mixes for body and juiciness. It tastes good too. For purple lovers INW Grapes as a main purple filler and TFA grape juice for any purple soda recipes (really under the radar flavor even though it is amazing), it has this extra watery juiciness that will make your soda like a soda Cactus flavor of my personal choice is ssa cactus. I like it, it is wet enough and it is tastes very good. Inw cactus is more like a tool than a flavor for me. Anyway. It wouldn’t be me without saying that Cap sweet lychee is one of the bext Lychee flavors around. Cheers
>If you had to suggest 5 flavors in any of the broad major profiles (tobaccos, bakeries, candies, fruits, custards/creams, drinks, etc) for a new mixer, what would they be, and why?
For a new mixer? I'd rather pick 5 recipes for them and then let them choose 1 or 2 of those and buy the flavors they need. Picking 5 solid flavors that are worth having for all the reasons you listed still leaves them (most of the time) with nothing to mix.
Also: /u/ID10-T where's Volume 6? It's been more than 2 years!
I squirrelled, obviously
Pick 5 recipes then!
Fine...
For Tobaccos my go-to is always this guy nowar on ATF. He's a self-proclaimed tobacco guru.
-
Grey^ Burley to start because, as it says in the title, it's beginner friendly. Every flavor in the recipe is worth having for multiple recipes further down the rabbit hole.
-
Frank's Vanilla Cohiba because Frank knows what's up. That's it. I trust Frank.
-
Classic Blavendish for Pipe He actually sent me a bottle of "this" for MC but actually pulled the ol' switcheroo on the label, so I never got to try it. It's on my bucket list, though.
-
Acai Bacco is a simple two flavor banger and I read somewhere you can substitute either flavor with flavors that share a similar tonal quality to get near identical results.
-
December 26th just mix this now, steep it for 20 days, and enjoy it all on the one day you're allowed to.
Wow. Ok, let's talk about what's crapola about those recipes, shall we?
- Grey^ Burley: Red Burley is the most overrated overhyped flavor and using it at 2.5% is a sad attempt to push those chocolate notes out when really, why? There's already chocolate in there. And, why HS Aus Choc? That's like the Worst. Chocolate. Flavor. Ever. And, Cap vc? Let's go ahead and make this a big joke by using cap vc like super sweet to cover up any off notes. Nice hedge. Cured? Sure, because you didnt use enough *real* tobaccos from the start. Fake news recipe.
- Frank's Vanilla Cohiba: Let's take a flavor that has as its beauty that it is a bold af cigar and throw every flavor we have at it to run it down into mediocrity, shall we? and it's as uninspired as, yup, TPA Ry4D. Sure, it's a simple recipe, but clearly so was the mixer.
- Classic Blavendish for Pipe: Cool, let's use a flavor no longer in production (Black Cat for Pipe) and make a shitty name out of it. Oh and the best part? Let it steep for a few weeks and that lavender becomes brazenly strong to where it's more floral than bacco. ick.
- Acai Bacco; It's a problematic recipe. The Acai is an odd flavor and to do a two flavor pairing is asking for trouble unless they are perfectly in balance. And these are not. There needs to be something else added to this to make it more banger than just flavors thrown together. Hello, amateur hour.
- December 26th: to be fair, this one is lovely. I could vape this all day long, if only for one day a year. But why vape that when you could vape December 24th which genuinely tastes pleasant?
Those recipes look more like a guy who is trying too hard, yet somehow not hard enough. Next thing we'll see is that mixer releasing something using FLV Pucker. Just to be cool, of course. Next!
Why so negative? At some point I agree but I think by suggesting flavors what we actually do is giving a direction of discovery of your own mixing journey. With recipes we give only the ready product, encouraging consuming ideology. But I am too deep into philosophy here
Bakeries:
JF cookie- its everything i want in a basic cookie
WF Cookie Butter- meh on its own, its gives body to a dry cookie
CNV Lemon Cream Wafer- exactly what the bottle says, its light and bright, can hold its own and is a great foundation to a lot of mixes
WF Croissant- great for filling out texture in a bready mix
TPA Cheesecake (graham crust)- that graham cracker you want sometimes
Custards/Cremes
OOO Marshmallow Vanilla- look, its just a damn good marshmallow. I sub it for cream quite often
WF Vanilla Cream Extra SC- cream with no bad/milky notes
FA Custard Premium- its a steeper but its worth it
WF Bavarian Cream- just another good cream
OOO Vanilla custard cheesecake