mycarsifarst,
Both this and your previous post are extremely thought-provoking to me.
I reads posts over and over in the juice forums about how "juice X no longer tastes yummy like Juice X did before." Obviously, the many posters reporting this aren't just making up their disappointment. I'm sure that whatever juices they're writing about (and Bounty Hunter has repeatedly been one of those juices) do indeed taste different to them.
Is it possible that there's something we don't know that's inherent in how the brain processes flavors (and especially through vaping more so than with food consumed via eating) where the yumminess of a given flavor profile tends to diminish or be exhausted over time? Or perhaps it's not the processing of flavors, but the way memory recall works in the brain that accounts for the difference between the here-and-now taste and what is remembered?
Personally, I haven't noticed Bounty Hunter tasting different to me, but I don't really remember what it tasted like back in May 2011 when I first came to like it so much. I simply can't call up that memory, although my brain still says "Ah, Bounty Hunter!" when I vape it. That happens most with my custom 2:1 mix of regular Bounty Hunter and goodejuice Vita Bella, which is mostly how I vape BH these days. (That mix is very much like the now-discontinued Vape TV 95% VG version of BH.) When you write that Bounty Hunter suddenly tasted to you like mere "vanilla cake," I wonder if that might be the reason that I'm custom-mixing BH now with a juice that is more tobacco-rich.
As it happens, I'm the creator, head honcho, and janitor of The Big RY4 Roundup thread, which is now up to 64 RY4s and RY4-variants reviewed, ranked, and categorized since last June. And I'm very aware of how my evaluation systems have changed over time for making the rankings. In the beginning, I favored deeper-tasting, less-sparkly RY4s, and that bias was reflected in my rankings. Then for some months, caramel-rich RY4s seemed to get higher rankings from me. Now, stronger tobaccos and natural tobacco extract RY4s are taking over many of the top spots in the rankings.
To cite one example, Backwoods Brew RY4 started out the initial list ranked at #1. At the time, I had a bottle of BWB RY4 that was eight months old and nearly gone, so, a month or so after beginning the RY4 thread, I purchased a new 30ml bottle of BWB RY4, but it no longer pleased me nearly so much as my year-old bottle had. In my most recent rankings, BWB has sunk all the way down to #26 on the Big List. Hmmm.
Some of these changes are the result of my starting the thread with 20-some RY4s and now having added another 40 RY4s over seven months. All that experience of vaping more and more RY4s has helped to refine my ability to identify the RY4 flavor profile. But something more than that is going on as well, and I imagine it has to do with me and my changing palate.
I'll be very interested to hear what people have to say here in this thread about how Bounty Hunter tastes different to them now.
