Index

1. How to develop your product knowledge
2. How to test many flavours efficiently
3. How to mix e-liquid creatively
4. How to Brand your e-liquid
5. How to get feedback on your recipe

Mixing DIY E-liquid is very enjoyable due to its naturally creative process that anyone can easily get involved with. Many mixers feel deeply in their heart that they have come up with plenty of world-class flavours, but have they? And how did they do it? In this article, we’ll walk through the process of modelling your E-liquid mixing practices to best ensure you create a world-class flavour.

How to develop your product knowledge

There are two ways to build product knowledge: reading reviews and trying many different flavours. Realistically the only way good to build a thoroughly accurate repertoire of product knowledge is to smell, taste test, and vape a wide variety of flavours personally.

Analyzing and recording flavour profiles

Taste is subjective and fluctuates wildly in the greater community; some people love flavours that others despise. Read reviews of popular flavour concentrates and One-Shots to observe this. When you’re smelling, tasting, or vaping new flavours you should keep the following questions in mind:

1. Do I like this flavour?
2. Is this flavour too weak, too strong, or just right?
3. What percentage should I mix this at next time?
4. What flavours would this mix well with?
5. What are the weaknesses of this flavour?
6. What are the strengths of this flavour?

Let’s use Vapable Raspberry, mixed at 15%, steeped for 4 weeks as an example, answering each of our considerations from the questionnaire:

1. Do I like this flavour? Yes.
2. Is this flavour too weak, too strong, or just right? Strong, but not too strong.
3. What percentage should I mix this at next time? 10%.
4. What flavours would this mix well with? Natural tasting regular fruits, berries, and possibly citrus/tropical fruits.
5. What are the weaknesses of this flavour? It’s a bit perfumey, and it doesn’t have a solid base or real body.
6. What are the strengths of this flavour? It’s got a sweet, light, artificial taste, and has no colour, totally clear.

Don’t be afraid to record certain qualities of the e-liquid in an abstract manner, such as using the term “sticky”, or “bubbly” because more information is almost always better than less information. Implementing this important process into your regular mixing routine will improve your detailed knowledge of each flavour you try, and it applies to pretty much anything you’re likely to vape: flavour concentrates, One Shots, shortfills, short shots, and whatever innovative product types come next. We’ll come back to this in this next section, explaining how to effectively use this information.

Sharpening and adjusting your perceptions

Taste is very subjective, and as such, some people’s taste is better defined and more precise than others, this can be due to either physical advantages or a well-trained nose. This can be a problem for many people, who simply can’t taste as well as they would like to, but there are solutions to this. It is possible to train your sense of smell by focusing on smells you come across in everyday life. Get up close and personal with the entity you smell, and internally analyze what exactly you are experiencing, or write it down for later evaluation/remembrance. After a long time of engaging in this process, even if there is no physical change to your olfactory system (the sensory system in your head that serves and processes smell) you will construct a greater understanding of how to analyze, recognise, and remember different smells and odours.

For references to your competition, you should buy and try the top One Shots and flavour concentrates on the market for analysis because you can use them as a pool of inspiration for your own mixes later down the line. After an online shopping expedition, when the postman has finally dropped off the flavours you’ve ordered, it’s time to assess the products. But how can we do this effectively? It is recommended to focus on individual flavours, one at a time. First, give the flavour a good sniff, maybe also taste a drop if it is free of nicotine, and finally mix up a bottle of e-liquid. Follow the brands specific mixing percentage advice. Don’t worry about the ratio of your e-liquid; just use what you’re used to.

Now how do we take full advantage of this newfound flavour profile knowledge, and using it to guide our way to creating world-class e-liquid recipes? By experimenting, of course!

How to test many flavours efficiently

Batch testing is far easier with a little knowledge and some equipment, namely, 10ml bottles, pre-made base mix, an RDA, and labels. Many Vapers are put off making 10ml e-liquids because of the time and resource investment it requires, but there is a better way.

Use an RDA and premix 10mls

The common problems, for a Vaper using a regular vape kit with stock coils, and an undeveloped mixing lab are: if you have a recipe you want to try out then you would likely need to break out your full mixing setup, opening your PG, VG, nicotine shots, and syringes, and gloves, all for a one little 10ml e-liquid. And then you’d have to dump the e-liquid in your tank, fit a new coil and wait for the new e-liquid to soak in. This is slow and inefficient.

The proper way to batch-test e-liquids is to buy an RDA to build your own coils, and premix 80% of 10ml bottles with your base mix, and use proper labels. The RDA (Rebuildable Dripping Atomizer) allows you to very quickly and cost-effectively change out the cotton in your coil, without dumping any un-vaped e-liquid. And the 10ml bottles, 80% filled with a base mix you have made beforehand, allow you to open it and syringe flavours in. This saves you having to open up any PG, VG, and nicotine shots, saving time, and allowing you to focus solely on your creative efforts. Be sure to informatively and properly label your recipes, as this can be a lifesaver down the line.

After implementing this method of batch testing, you can be more nimble in your ability to test flavours, and test more flavours per hour than ever before. We have guides on coil building, one for general information, and one for actually building. You should read both before using an RDA.

Premix One Shots

Let’s say you’re working on a flavour, it’s really good, and you want to use it as a base for many other flavours. If you’re attached to it, you’ll probably want to use it more than once, on different days, and therefore it would be a waste of time adding the same set of four or five ingredients to every bottle, syringing each flavour separately over and over again would also probably result in an error at some point. The solution to this is premixing your One Shot flavours.

As an example, say we’ve made a cake base, that should total 10% (1ml in a 10ml bottle) in any given mix and want to mix it with 20 different side flavours. I would make 20mls of this base, beforehand, then add it to every bottle, and then go through and add each side flavour. If this base is, say:

• 2% Capella Cake Batter
• 3% Flavor West Cake Yellow
• 5% Perfumer’s Apprentice Frosted Donut

We can mix up 20mls to it, by adding, to a 20ml or larger bottle/container:

• 4ml Capella Cake Batter
• 6ml Flavor West Cake Yellow
• 10ml Perfumer’s Apprentice Frosted Donut

This will undoubtedly speed up the process because instead of syringing 3 times per bottle (60 times) you’ll only need to do it once (23 times, because of the 20 bottles, and 3 times syringing each ingredient into your premixed One Shot).

 

How to mix e-liquid creatively

If the goal is to create a world-class flavour, we’re going to need more than a single flavour concentrate; expertly combining flavours is the heart of the issue, and is the most problematic area for mixers, whether they know it or not.

Ideas to keep in mind

The process of actually creating a recipe should be based on your own favourite flavours, and what you specifically want from an e-liquid. Don’t blindly conform to the traditional or market trends that have been thrust upon the industry. This is your vision, your recipe, and your project is more likely to succeed if it is a carefully executed plan that has come from a single omnipotent source. The old adage “a camel is a horse designed by committee” comes to mind. So play to your own strengths, using your favourite flavours, and the flavours you best understand.

After deeply contemplating a flavour, it’s time to consider what you could add, and what would mix well with it; which means thinking about its strengths and weaknesses, then applying that knowledge in the form of identifying other flavours that can support, cover-up, or absolve the weaknesses of the original flavour whilst playing to each flavours strengths. When hypothesising improvements to particular flavours you should be enthusiastic about any potential possibility for improvement. This means laterally thinking about ways to either massively change the direction you were heading in, or making smaller adjustments to gradually refine and enhance the overall flavour profile.

Walking through the creative process

Let’s go back to our Vapable Raspberry analysis, and think out loud how would improve this flavour, sorting through the questions step by step. I like the flavour; it should have a decent flavour at 7.5% and is likely to mix well with berries and fruits. This is all good information that we can use to our advantage. One issue is that there appears to be a lack of a natural tasting fruit and body. We can rectify this by adding a flavour that has more than enough fruity body to go around. I have, in a past taste test, identified Vapable Blueberry as a fairly natural tasting, very full-bodied flavour, good at 7.5%-15%. So the next logical step would be to make a new 10ml e-liquid, mixing Vapable Raspberry at 7.5%, combined with Vapable Blueberry at 7.5%.

• 5% Vapable Raspberry
• 5% Vapable Blueberry
  • Totalling 15%

Now it’s time to whip up a new analysis, and entirely new contemplation for this new flavour. Incremental improvements can be labour and resource-heavy, but very clearly walks us through how to improve the weaknesses of a given recipe.

1. Do I like this flavour? Yes.
2. Is this flavour too weak, too strong, or just right? Strong, but not too strong.
3. What percentage should I mix this at next time? 10%.
4. What flavours would this mix well with? Strawberry, something sweet, maybe cooling agent.
5. What are the weaknesses of this flavour? It’s a little bit perfumey, and maybe lacks a ‘juiciness’ I would expect from a fruity flavour.
6. What are the strengths of this flavour? It’s got a sweet, fruity taste, has an ok body and has a very slight yellow tint.

Now we’re cooking! We have successfully created a recipe that is superior to each of the two flavours individually. But we mustn’t stop here; more improvements can be made. So how do we do this? Simply follow the same steps that got us to this point already. Repeat until you’re either elated with the result, bored, or seemingly unable to improve the recipe further.

I see in the response to the question about the weaknesses of the current flavour, it is stated that the e-liquid is “a little perfumey, and lacks a ‘juiciness'”. I have identified Capella’s Sweet Strawberry New RF as a potential candidate to solve this problem, as well as dropping the raspberry down a bit, as it is the sole perpetrator of the ‘perfumeyness’. So it’s time to mix up a new 10ml, in this case, I’ll drop down the current recipe’s total flavour percentage from 15% (7.5% Raspberry & 7.5% Blueberry) to 10%, to make room for the incoming strawberry. So our new recipe is:

• 5% Vapable Raspberry
• 5% Vapable Blueberry
• 10% Capella Sweet Strawberry New RF
  • Totalling 20%.

1. Do I like this flavour? Yes.
2. Is this flavour too weak, too strong, or just right? Just right.
3. What percentage should I mix this at next time? 20%.
4. What flavours would this mix well with? Cooling Agent, Apple, Blackberry.
5. What are the weaknesses of this flavour? No obvious weaknesses, it could potentially benefit from some cooling.
6. What are the strengths of this flavour? It’s got a fairly sweet, full-bodied, fruity taste, with a solid base and has a very slight yellow tint.

So let’s give it some cooling.

• 5% Vapable Raspberry
• 5% Vapable Blueberry
• 9% Capella Sweet Strawberry New RF
• 1% Vapable WS-23
  • Totalling 20%.

1. Do I like this flavour? Yes
2. Is this flavour too weak, too strong, or just right? Just right
3. What percentage should I mix this at next time? 20%
4. What flavours would this mix well with? blackberry, apple, maybe bubblegum?
5. What are the weaknesses of this flavour? There is a weird balance of sweetness and cooling, one should be dampened/removed
6. What are the strengths of this flavour? It’s got a sweet, full-bodied, fruity taste, with a solid base and has a very slight yellow tint.

The cooling didn’t work out too well, but that’s fine. We could change many more qualities of this recipe, making many, many more iterations and incremental improvements, but you get the picture, and can hopefully apply this method to your own experiments.

 

How to brand your e-liquid

You can find much more authoritative and technical information online and in marketing strategy books. This section is therefore aimed more at a non-technical look at creating a brand at home, where you don’t have the resources of a company, such as a team of marketers, creative types, technical staff, printers, and software.

Visualizing the brand style

Branding is the biggest challenge marketers often face, due to the extremely opinion heavy, non-demonstrable nature of coming up with a great brand idea. When there is a new e-liquid recipe that we all love and it ready to be branded, everyone has an opinion on what the name should be, what the colours are, the general theme, style, feel, and every other inconsequential detail is lauded over. There are no clear right or wrong answers unless you run into explicit, copyrighted, or trademarked ideas. A team of idea blurting individuals will throw off the single, organised vision that originated the recipe in the first place. A camel is a horse made by committee.

Hopefully, you are the commander in chief of your recipe and can do with your brand whatever the hell you want to do with it, even ignoring copyright protections because it is for personal use only. Branding a flavour should put many questions out there, as there are question marks next to the:

• Brand name
• Brand logo
• Recipe name
• Colour Scheme
• Font
• Type of bottle

Visualizing and prototyping a brand style is a creative endeavour, but has many common best practices that help to sculpt the finished product. This largely refers to fonts and colours. For example, we’re branding a cold, icy blackcurrant flavour, so we should follow such practices as using light and/or dark blues, dark purples, whites, greys, and blacks. These colours come to mind because of the colour of ice, being light/aqua blue, and blackcurrant being dark purple/black. Sharp cornered/edged fonts, because the cold, icy part of the recipe brings such visuals as the Antarctic, icicles, and strong, frozen mountain tops to mind.

Designing and printing a label at home

There are a whole host of free graphic design tools out there, and all of them are capable of producing a graphical representation of your vision. Creative, technical people are best suited to this, and if you’re struggling to cope with/meet the demands that this challenge offers you can always outsource or look up guides and tutorials for basic graphic design.

Once you have a label you’re happy with, the easiest way to acquire a physical label for your bottles is to print your design out on a piece of paper, play with the size, and tape it onto your bottle with clear, transparent tape. Without technical knowledge of computers or graphic design, this is the easiest way to do things.

 

How to get feedback on your e-liquid

This is a tough one, because people in general, tend to be much more focused and invested in their own trials and tribulations, rather than anybody else’s. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does make it hard for you to get any kind of wide-scale, qualitative feedback on your concoctions. The solution to this issue will be different for different people; especially depending on your personality (people that are confident and moderately high in extravertism will be much more effective in acquiring feedback through new social connections both in-person and online). Here are a few suggestions to gain feedback on your e-liquid recipe:

• Offer samples to friends and family that vape
• Join a social media group of like-minded people (Facebook, Reddit, potv etc)
• Reach out directly to mixers in the community
• Look for similar recipes online and see if any feedback could also apply to your mix
• Try your e-liquid in different atomizers, at different ohms, wattage levels & airflow
• Go to a brick and mortar vape shop that sells mixing gear, and talk to the staff
  • Vapable Ltd, Unit 19 Dalweb Industrial Estate, Southport, Merseyside, PR9 8DE
  • Opening Hours: 9.30 am -5.30 pm Mon – Fri
  • Feel free to pop in

If you’re not having any luck getting feedback, don’t worry, at the end of the day you’re recipe is probably mainly just for you as it has been developed purely to suit your ideas for what constitutes a great e-liquid. And that is absolutely fine. Revel in your achievement and enjoy it.