Hello, been on here for a few years… I was really into mixing at one point until my other half threw them away claming ‘there wasn’t much in the bottles…’ so I stuck to your pre-made liquids, have wanted to get back into it… but it’s been so long iv sort of forgot the mixing side of it… I know how to use the calculator etc but what mixes and liquids to make… I currently have a few single fruit flavours which are a walk in the park to make, but if ordered some that " suggest " a good steep… if got capella ’ blueberry jam ’ ’ ny cheesecake ’ ’ glazed doughnut ’ and TFA ’ graham cracker ’ anyone know what I can make using these? Also percentages tips on steeping etc… sorry if any of this sounds dumb been out of it for A few years so it’s like I’m new to it all? Also anyone suggest any flavours… not got tones of money as I’m on £5.20 an hour and work weekends LMAO. Cheers guys!.
Okay, I was going to post an answer then wasn’t going to post a reply… but here it goes, I am not trying to talk down here to you BUT with the wealth of information on the site, the questions you’ve asked or are asking are everywhere on here.
First ans foremost you need to decide what you want to make
Nobody can tell you what you want to vape, fruits, creams, tobaccos, I can say “Oh, you have to make this…” but it might not be what you want, so I’ve wasted your and my time and resources (ingredients). I would suggest going over to the recipe side of things and do a search on one of the flavors you feel you want to try, then look at the part of that ingredient that lists recipes that have been posted that use that ingredient.
Read some of the posts on steeping look at the ingredient side on starting percentages, every ingredient is different and just tossing numbers out won’t help. I highly suggest just picking a couple recipes that you think interests you and ordering the ingredients up. Don’t start with what others say you should make until you narrow down a profile that you are wishing to try. Just asking what you can make is like going into a supermarket and asking what you should buy… everyone will point you in a different direction until you narrow down what it is your wanting to achieve at least in the short term of things.
Cheers! Just confused working the way round the website… Like id like to make a blueberry doughnut… 'capella ’ and graham cracker but percentages where do I start etc
By going over to the recipe side and typing in “doughnut” I got 138 hits… maybe something on the order of:
Capella is a brand not a flavor but if your talking about only using that brand of flavorings for your juice then I would just start looking under that ingredient during my searches of recipes.
You could add these flavors to your flavor stash then click the “what can I make.”
You could also go old school like me. I still have entered my 200+ flavors into my stash. So old school means…look at one flavor…read the flavor notes then look at 15 recipes to see how people are really using the flavor in a recpie. Then go to the second flavor and repeat.
So you need to do this for every flavor? No. Pick the top two in the flavor profile you are going for. So read up on the doughnut flavor concentrate you want to use them maybe the fruit you want to add.
Generally when I start building a recpie I either find one that looks lovely and I rebuild it based on what I am trying to accomplish or combine concepts from 3-5 different recipes.
The main suggestion is to read. I see that you have 2hrs or read time and a couple hundred posted read. Personally I think you have some more reading to do. Do you have to do as much as I have? (Click on my name to view the stats) Nope you don’t have to do that much, but I do think you need to read some of the newest and coolest threads people have added.
In addition to the other good advice you’ve gotten here, my advice would be to shop for specific highly rated recipes and mix them as written, at first. If you’re interested in a specific profile find recipes in that profile, but don’t get too wedded to one specific flavor from one vendor that you haven’t tried yet. For instance, IMHO FA Zeppola is a better doughnut than the CAP doughnuts I’ve tried. Now, taste is very individual, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who like CAP’s doughnuts better than Zeppola, so see what people are mixing with, read some reviews of individual flavors, and then try some specific recipes that sound appealing to you.
I’d suggest mixing a fair number of highly rated recipes before venturing off on your own, to minimize disappointment. I’d also suggest two other things before you start coming up with your own recipes.
One is to make small single-flavor batches of the flavors you want to use over a range of percentages. You can get an idea of what the range should be for a given flavor in a couple of ways. One is to look at the percentages they’re used in in highly rated recipes here. Another would be to look at the percentage graphs for a flavor in public recipes on alltheflavors.com. No offense at all to this site, which is great, but for this specific purpose I think alltheflavors might be more useful, just because it costs money to be able to make recipes public there, which means there are less people randomly posting recipes with really weird percentages.
You need to test flavors alone to know what they taste like, not just to be able to make a good guess about starting percentages, but also so you can adjust recipes that you come up with that aren’t quite right the first time. If you’re getting a kind of funny taste in a recipe, and it has six flavors in it, maybe one of them needs to come down a bit, but which one? If you know your flavors individually it will be easier to make a good guess about that.
The other thing I’d suggest is that you read a lot of highly rated recipes, especially ones with good notes. You can find them posted on these forums, and also on alltheflavors and the DIY subreddit. Mixing is weird. I’m a pretty good cook, and I figured it would be a lot like cooking, but it’s less so than I expected. It’s almost more like making perfume, I think (not that I’ve ever made perfume.) There are some general principles, and then there are a lot of little subtle tricks involving individual concentrates. There’s a certain logic to it all, but it takes a while to start getting a feel for that logic.
There’s no substitute for actually mixing things, experimenting, having successes and failures, etc. But reading other people’s notes and recipes can shorten the learning process a lot. I’ve read probably thousands of recipes at this point, and read a lot of notes from more experienced mixers, and after a while some of the logic to what people are doing rubs off on you. You can look at a recipe and just know, for instance, that it’s going to be weirdly unbalanced. That helps you avoid real disasters. Between that and single-flavor testing you’ll get to a point where most of your first tries are at least pretty decent, though of course you almost always need to tweak some to get things really right.
Cheers guys! Will have a look around watch some videos and get my knowledge up basically you guys mean try it for yourself because you could give me one percentage / flavour and I may not like… so have a mess around with it all till I find it perfect ? Also how do I weaker a really strong fruit it’s " limeaid " coughing so much !