I figured that I'd post my method for determining a flavor's strength and developing a recipe. It's fairly time-consuming, so I do it while watching TV and with another PV around to ensure that I get some nicotine. The second PV is always filled with a light flavor to keep refreshing my taste buds, and I keep the nic kinda high since I don't use nicotine in the test batch.
Prepare a fresh atomizer for use. You want one clean of flavor, so get rid of any primer or old juice. Rinse with Everclear or vodka, soak overnight in water, puff some PG - anything to get a clean, flavorless atomizer. Vape it a bit to ensure that it's dry of juice, but not to the point of getting burnt.
The Process
1. Grab a 3ml bottle.
2. Measure in 1.5ml of PG and 0.5ml of VG. Shake well.
3. Drip out 4 drops. No more, no less.
4. Add 4 drops of flavoring. You're back to exactly 2ml of juice.
5. Drip 2 drops onto the atomizer and vape it until it's dry.
6. If you can't really taste the flavor, add 2 more drops of flavoring to your bottles and shake well.
7. If you can barely taste the flavoring but it's not strong enough, add 1 drop of flavoring and 1 drop of PG. (Occasionally a drop of VG instead to keep vapor production up.) Shake well.
Repeat steps 5 thru 7, keeping track of the number of drops of flavoring. At one point you should have a juice with the right amount of flavoring, and you'll now know how many drops of that flavoring to use for every 2ml of a recipe.
Tips, Tricks, Notes
When you vape, be sure to vape it dry to ensure that the next test round contains only the flavor from that test round.
You have to vape enough to ensure that your current round is in the coil, not remnants of the last round. So I generally ignore the first 2 or 3 vapes of each round. I "huff" through them, not really trying to taste them. It's vapes numbers 3 and 4 that will contain the flavor you're trying to test on that round. I like to "rest" my taste buds before those crucial vapes - sometimes with a sip of water, sometimes by vaping my other PV with the nicotine in it.
If vape #4 isn't cutting it, you can blow out the atomizer to clear the rest of the juice to make the process faster.
Once you hit your preferred number of drops, you can stop or keep going. It can be useful to know how strong you can go with a flavor. But some flavorings hit a point where more flavoring doesn't make the juice any stronger.
When you initially fill the bottle with the PG/VG mix, it can be useful to make a mark on the bottle to note the height of the liquid. Then you can tell if you're going under or over the mark and straying away from that 2ml measurement. This can happen when using either small or large droppers for the flavoring. For instance, the tiny droppers used on the tiny LorAnn's bottle do 40 drops per ml, but a 3ml bottle is generally closer to 20 or 25 drops per ml.
Recipe Development
When developing a recipe - combining multiple flavors - you may want to use a larger bottle (like 6ml with 4ml of PG/VG) so you can fit in enough drops of each flavor.
To get an initial idea of the ratio to use for each flavor, open the flavorings and hold the bottles next to each other, and smell the combined odor. If one flavor is too prominent, move it further away from your nose until the flavors combine in the correct proportions. This will give you an idea of the initial proportions to use in the recipe. For instance, if one flavor is 2 inches from your nose and the other flavor is 4 inches away, then you probably need twice as many drops of the flavor that's closer. This is rough, since smell doesn't always equal flavor, but it helps get you going.
Keep notes!!
