Always use sweetener but looking to go to the next level. I want real fruit flavor, not pies or creams just a real good fruit. I've had them from vendors and friends but have not been able to get it myself. Plan on getting sweet cream Bavarian cream brown sugar vanilla swirl and marshmallow. Any others I'm missing to start playing around.
As Andria mentioned, a fruit flavoring is not a complete mix flavoring. You do have to add the supporting flavors to get a complete mix. This is one of the primary differences between TFA and other brands. TFA allows us to construct complex mixes by giving us "incomplete" flavorings. They are flavoring pieces in an incomplete flavor puzzle. Until we add creams and vanillas and butter and sweetener, etc., we won't have a complete mix. We've learned this from trial and error and countless 100DT mixes. Flavoring juice is NOT INTUITIVE. It's a learned skill. When we keep the supporting flavorings around 6% or less (this will differ by individual preferences, but you get the idea), you bolster, as Andria said, the incomplete fruit flavoring, moving toward a complex and complete fruit flavoring. Keep adding more for pies and creams, less for "bolstered fruit." You get the idea...
I've mixed and learned from several commercial juice makers and I assure you, the ones I know DO add supporting flavors to their fruits (in this case, for example) to get to a delicious "Pure" fruit flavoring. If everyone could just buy strawberry and add PG, VG and nicotine to it and it tasted perfect, no one would buy juice for ten to twenty times this cost. Yes, this is hyperbole to some extent, but I'm trying to illustrate that juice making is learned skill, often counter-intuitive, and governed by experience, not cerebral machinations. It took me six months to stop thinking the problem, and start experimenting with all manner of combinations to finally make a single decent juice, my ADV cinnamon Danish by TFA.
Using this one flavoring for example purposes, I thought cinnamon Danish flavoring would be a great flavoring. It has cinnamon, creams/vanillas/Sweetner (Danish), and I all I need to do is mix it with PG/VG and add some nicotine. No way, Jose! My final mix was 10% CD, 10% Cotton Candy (a type of sweetener), and 6% Bavarian cream (but what about the "Danish" in CD?). That became a complete mix and a good ADV for me. Others have really liked it as well, I'm told. There are hundreds of similar examples of flavorings being incomplete mixes, most of them not obvious. So, I recommend you have a completely open mind to the possibilities of what may be required to make some really great juice, and what may be required and necessary to get from A to Z, or to a "Pure" fruit flavoring.
There's also no rhyme or reason regarding flavoring strengths either, and this varies by brand and within brands too. Some flavorings are too heavy at 1%, some not enough at 15%. Every one is like its own science experiment. So, we mix and learn how different flavorings work alone, combined, together, each influenced by our own personal likes and dislikes. It just really helps to be open to suggestion about all this mixing business.
And, if that weren't enough, there's different ways to mix flavorings, including Low and Slow (lower flavoring percentages and long(er) steeping time frames), and High and Fly (high flavor mixes (HFM) ready to vape at time of mix (ATM), or shortly thereafter with complete blending). Truly there are advocates on both sides of this one, and the truth is they both work great, particularly if one is both diligent and patient, and has time to both experiment and wait for a complete steeping process. Even so, there are many ways to reduce the time required to steep including heat and oscillation, among others. None of this is really intuitive, per se.
Finally, the hardware we use strongly influences our juice. Surely we can also understand that a clearomizer will atomize and flavor a vape differently than an RBA dripper. Different air flow, wicking, chamber volume, heat and temperature, coil construction, even vapor channel distances all influence the "taste" and vape we experience at the end of the day.
I belong to the High and Fly group, mixing with high flavor mixes and lots of ingredients to literally force flavoring ready to vape, rather than waiting for the subtle flavors to emerge over time. Truth be told, I like both methods, but talk primarily about one only as it is more useful and helpful for new DIY'ers. The only time I really take exception is when our "experienced" mixers insist there is only one way, or that one is superior to the other, which is not the case, as we not only have different tastes, but different ways we use juice, experience vaping, and even different mixing strategies. If the goal is great juice, there is no question that there is more than one way to do that.
So, live and learn, experiment, read, mix, but most importantly two things....be patient and keep and open mind. That's my two cents....stepping off soap box....
Good luck to you and all the new DIY'ers participating and lurking. Jump in, your questions help us all.
