Thank you guys. I am a newbie so please bare with me. Most recipes I see are 70%vg 30%pg. I beleive vg is cloud and pg is flavor. Also think I read somewhere Elfbar is 50/50. Where I am confused is where to start with flavor %. I think about 10% but is that per flavor or are we looking to be at say 10% total flavoring? How much does Cap super Sweet do and what % should that be. Maybe 1%? I will start digging into recipes more today to see if I can find answers there. Thanks again
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I RARELY go over 1% with my Super Sweet. It’s just too much for my palette. And youre saying the Flavor Concentrate is 50/50, or their house juices?!
The ELR calculator will do the math for you, so if you want 70/30, just type that in. 75/25, 60/40, whatever floats YOUR boat. Everyone is different. I personally wont go anything less than 70/30 as the throat hit from the PG is like ripping a Camel non filtered. Ha
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Congratulations on quitting!
Elfbar is an American company but the product is made in China. I would be looking to buy Asian flavors. Reka is one but there are others.
Most Asian disposables are Sweet with added cooling agents. Most of the major reseller’s (US and Canada) don’t offer the Asian flavors for one reason or another so you may have to do a little more homework researching for Asian flavor house’s then buy directly from the flavor house’s.
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Congrats to both of you for quitting smoking. One of the best health choices the two of you could make. As others have said, check out some of the fruit type flavors by the active posters and you may find some flavors that tickle your taste buds. Enjoy your mixing journey and glad you joined and posted.
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@dbsquirt welcome to ELR, and congrats on quitting after 30 years of smoking. I cannot vape most “bars”, and/or “pods”. I’m sure they are probably fairly saturated in sweetener from what I hear.
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@dbsquirt you are correct. VG typically adds the “clouds” and PG adds the throat hit, and it a FAR superior flavor carrier.
Many “pod” recipes have much higher flavor percentages, than more typical sub-ohm mixes.
You CAN do that, but I suspect you may end up gunking up your coils early/ier and still not achieve the desired effect. There is a VERY strong possibillity that they are using BLENDS of different sweeteners to get that level of sweetness. I did a review of an alternate sweetener Sugar Daddy …
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@dbsquirt although not “bar” recipes, you can take a look at some of the Pod / MTL (Mouth To Lung) recipes on the recipe side for some better starting points.
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Can you help me? When I went to adapt the recipe to 6mg nic, same pg/vg %'s, I get the error notice. Why is that?
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Check the PG values of the nicotine. OG nicotine is VG based. Your PG base nicotine is approximately 6 percent over a 70/30 mix. Adjust your mix 64/36 and all should be fine.
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Thank you very much.
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You’re very welcome @dbsquirt. The irony is I DO vape MTL, high NIC as well as low NIC DTL. Even with that, my MTL (stronger flavors and NIC) are limited, and I never really tried to perfect it/them.
Frank on the other hand, really has a good grasp on it/them.
https://e-liquid-recipes.com/list?q=pod&missing=0&recipesonly=0&filter=125786&adaptedfrom=&sort=score&direction=desc
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Those are excellent choices for someone who wants to change from disposable vapes to using pods with DIY pod juice. The total % of a recipe depends on how potent the flavors you use are. Using a really potent fruity flavor like medicine flower the total % of flavor could be as low as 5% total flavor for the recipe. Where as if you are using something like TPA flavors the total flavor % of the recipe will be a lot higher like 20%. Starting with 1% sweetener is a good starting point. And then adjust to you personal tastes. I know that most of the disposable vape pods are very sweet. What I typically tell new DIY mixers start small with recipes, mix a really small batch 5-10ml and then once you get the recipe where you really enjoy the flavor move to mixing larger batches. The nicotine in most disposable pods are somewhere between 35 and 50 mg of salt nic. Freebase nic is completely different animal mixing a recipe with 50mg freebase isn’t recommended. With freebase nicotine I wouldn’t personally go above 6%
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Ahh, there ya go. I was going to suggest looking at @Iv3shf’s recipes, his pod mixes retaught me how to mix old school. In that frozen BB mix i subbed Super Sweet PUR at 1% and it was excellent, still vape it.
EDIT: Pardon my manners, or lack thereof. Welcome to the forums. 
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Welcome to ELR @dbsquirt and glad you and your wife have been able to quit, mine still doesn’t want to… I can actually do whatever she wants, but… the irony, nevermind.
It was for her and my son that I started exploring POD mixes, been a Genesis/mesh fanatic I would have never gone into that labyrinth, but mixers love challenges and that definitely was a challenge but gave me the chance to go deeper and study that world.
My wife is allergic to some compounds, and allergic to high freebase, and can’t feel salt nics (in EU you can only buy 20mg, the equivalent of around 10mg on freebase) and I could go on and on and on and be boring as usual, but I won’t, enough to say I had even more obstacles to remove, so I tried them all, high PG, mixed freebase with salts tried different flavours from different manufacturers Reka, Chemnovatic, Flavorah pushed high and so forth.
You saw POD recipes with 70V/30P?? no chance that they’d work for various reasons, VG is a bad carrier on its own, long steep times, POD/vape pens won’t be able to hold the High Vg and prob might even give that “burnt” taste, Flavor will be mehh, new pens with mesh coils are slightly better but still, why high VG? if it’s simple and you fancy doing it, just switch it to 50/50 and you’d be ok, it won’t be exactly the same as intended? Who cares… it’s for you.
Trivia: Did you know that the orginal RY4 (Ludo Timmerman’s) did NOT have any VG? And it was made for a vape pen, still today one of the best liquids, exact recipe still unknown, I love vapefiction…
PODs don’t love complicated creamy, cakey recipes, those with 7-8-9 flavours simply won’t work, unless they’re layered (but that’s another story) just avoid them, KISS and you’d be ok
Just yesterday I made public a recipe with a pairing taken from the Flavor Bible, when complicated thought processes make simple recipes.
That translates to: know your flavors and your palate, Disposables use high percentages but simple mixes, high PG, flavors with a strong head note with additives to enhance the mix, AP, Citric acid, loads of WS23, Malic acid (the “sour” something) and loads of sugar, yes, they are either freezing cold or very sweet tricking your receptors with strong flavours is a trick (unfortunate pun…) , Anise, Cinnamon etc.
Sugars… now this is a bit controversial (not really) , I mean, do they care if they gunk the coils? Definitely NOT, disposables get thrown away, so they can go as high as they want (we don’t have to) keep that in mind, put loads of sugar and WS23 in a Chemnovatic/SSA/Reka Mango and you have your liquid, add some papaia/banana and you made it fancy, probably better then the OG, there’s nothing to it really.
As already said above it’s just a matter of guessing the right manufacturer at the right percentage if you want to clone it, for a remix of the profile we can do a lot better (bearing in mind it’s a vape pen) even with lower percentages but with healthier and better flavors, because we don’t know what they used, we do know what we’re using!
It’s a matter of getting the hang of it, it’s a state of mind that we used to have when mixing “old School” as @Ken_O_Where said, the difference is that today we have so many more options.
Choose a recipe, see the percentages, test it and tweak it to your taste,you might blunder some, but it’s easy to get the hang of it, nothing to it really, want to make it complicated? Of course we can… e.g. my Lost Mary… but it’s layered… 
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Which makes it a lot easier to make recipes for Pods that are low in total flavor %, which if we are being honest is likely the only real troubling component as the others have been studied for inhalation for years and years.
And man, what a fantastic write up. Thank you kindly for taking the time to share this excellent information.
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Dont get caught up trying to reach or be at a certain total pct. The most important thing is to get the flavir where you like regardless of pct.
For a pod recipe 1pct SS will be a great start , it is used in most commercial mixes at 1pct and higher
I personally like to try NOT to use creams in pod devices like the caliburn or similar. I find that the layers you can taste with sub ohm tanks/rdas /rtas etc dont come across in pods so I eliminate them . If i do use a cream or something to try and add mouthfeel its usually a marshmallow or a neutral cream like FLV cream or FA fresh cream.
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Perfectly said Fiddy! My 3 (4, meringue is the ithe other one) first choices, and, as a matter of fact, on Pushing the limit, my thought was FA’s fresh cream, but with those two buggers it would have got lost.
MM might have been a better choice coz I wanted to support the Maple bar really, but decided to build a darkish layer, but as I said on the recipe note, can you tell it’s there? yes and, not really!
@fidalgo_vapes is right KISS! If you don’t feel it, you don’t need it, get rid of it.
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You’ll never get the flavor of an Elf Bar without a device like the Elfbar.
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This is the sad truth of the matter. Everything from airflow to coil type, number of coils, etc makes a difference. Then you have flavor types and %s to go after.
Its not an easy task at all. Id been trying to make something i liked in a disposable for a couple years only to realize it wasnt gonna be possible unless i switched to a different device. The hardware many of the disposable companies use is MUCH different than the Caliburn A2 i was trying to create for. Find something similar to their hardware and start there.
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