Has this ever happened to you? You’ve vaped all the way from disposables to box mods or the other way around. You may also spent many energies in revamping every single accessory, but still can’t get beautiful flavors out of your vapes. That could be your e-liquid going wrong.
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What’s Inside an E-Liquid?
Before going into details about the mystery of liquid flavors, we should first understand the ingredients inside e-liquid and how they basically work. If you’ve once kept close tabs on the package or manual of e-liquid products, you must’ve noticed descriptions like PG/VG ratio.
- Propylene Glycol & Vegetable Glycerine:
PG and VG are both important contents in vape juice. PG is an odorless liquid commonly seen in the food industry to maintain the moisture and flavor of long shelf-life food. It plays a major role of carrying flavor and nicotine in e-liquid, and creating strong throat hit akin to what we experience when smoking. Too high proportion of PG in the juice might cause a sore throat.
While VG is widely used as a sweetener as a sugar alternative. When it’s heating as a component in vape juice, VG could create super dense clouds with sub-ohm vaping.
If you’re not yet certain about what PG/VG ratio fits you well, we suggest you start from 50/50. Then go for a 70/30 PG/VG mix if you crave for stronger throat hit, or a 30/70 PG/VG mix if you can’t get enough of huge clouds.
- Nicotine:
Typical e-liquid formulas use either freebase nicotine or nic salt. The former delivers harsher throat hit, whereas the latter features higher strength and could give you more bang in one puff.
- Flavoring:
It makes e-liquids smell and taste different. The most popular liquid flavors so far has covered fruits, custardy, mint and tobacco. A growing number of novel flavor options are also emerging to satisfy even the most eccentric appetites.
What’s a Good Vape Juice? – Factors a Professional Flavorist Will Concern
Questions like what kind of liquids are good enough might daunt even some experienced vapers. The volatile experience we get from the drags on heating liquids is hard to clear up in brief indeed. We can actually evaluate a vape juice from three aspects.
- Evaluate as You Inhale
When we breathe the vapor in, it’s the right time to focus on the tastes of a liquid. However, we must make it clear first that tasting is closely related to smelling, so the big bunch of flavors we get is usually half from the taste buds while another half from the nose. When we talk about tastes, it includes in what we smell more or less.
Now here’re two takeaways. First, the flavor intensity in each puff should be similar, if not identical, at least. In other words, good liquid delivers flavors evenly on our inhale. In addition, whether the liquid tastes as described matters as well. If it’s a fruity juice, we could focus on the sweetness and authenticity; while we could shift our focus on the cooling effect if it’s mint or ice flavor.
- Evaluate the Throat Sensation
When we further inhale vapors into our lungs, the nicotine would hit the back of our throats and thus leave a certain strong sensation called “throat hit.” In fact, we have a couple of ways to adjust the degree of throat hit, like swamping to a new coil and tweaking the output power. Switching to vape juice with lower strength of nicotine would also help. It doesn’t really matter whether you love a gentle hit or a harsh one—they’re adjustable after all. While good liquid should allow us to fine tune the hit to our acceptable range.
- Evaluate as You Exhale
When we exhale the vapor, we could also plunge into its flavor intensity and authenticity as we do when breathing it in. Besides, aftertaste also largely decides the quality of a vape juice. Generally speaking, good vape juice wouldn’t create weird aftertastes. And it enables the tastes to stay longer in our mouths.
4 Major Dimensions of Flavors
We’ve combed 4 major dimensions through and classified them into four categories as follows. You can take it as a quick guide for your dazzling liquid selection.
- Taste: sweet, savory, bitter, icy, tasteless, sour
– You might be surprised there is sour taste in juice flavors as most vape juice are sweet or fruity. As we know, nicotine is an alkaloid. Sour in taste actually helps neutralize the pungency of nicotine.
- Aroma: there are numerous aromas in the world we can name. In e-liquid, here are some commonly seen aromas in vape e-liquids: toasty, fruity, minty, spicy, tea fragrance, grassy, nutty, alcohol, etc.
– Different regions have their own preferred aroma and manufacturers will use different aroma in their vape juice at different markets.
- Strength: strength refers to throat hit and satisfaction (the feeling that your cravings are getting satisfied).
- Vapor: the following aspects are taken into consideration: vapor amount, vapor smoothness, aroma of your vapor.
– vapor smoothness can be felt in mouth. If you taste impurity when vaping, or are uncomfortable when inhaling and exhaling the vapor.
Bottom Line
Everything we talk about above is to help you gain more knowledge about what a good vape juice should be like in professional flavorists’ perspective. However, they’re merely some general criterion to look at among consumers. Even if a liquid is regarded as best in class in everything from aroma and strength and vapor quality by majority of vapers, it’s not necessarily the right one for you. Let alone vaping devices could largely affect the performance of an e-liquid as well.
We hope this guide has enabled you to take a glance at the basics of flavored e-liquid. You can also try these methods on your own juice. Explore more fun with it on your own!
