There is an aspect of juice performance that no one has figured out how to control. Fred at Vape the Rockies calls it "lung satisfaction", and that's as good a name as any. Lung satisfaction and throat hit are the two key elements of juice for someone who needs a cigarette replacement. I honestly don't care about vapor. Yes, I would rather blow out thick clouds than wispy puffs, but that's visual and doesn't do anything toward satisfying the addiction that makes me suck on a battery.
Throat hit is easier. You have more say about how much throat hit your juice has, to a point. Oddly, flavorings do play a big role in this and affect the end result, but very pure nic base is the biggest contributor. Most of the nic base out there is of suspect quality. It's clear when you buy it and tinged light amber a few weeks later. The good stuff stays clear, and that's the base that helps give a juice great TH. The problem with TH is that the law of diminishing returns kicks in fast, and that juice that made you cough on the first vape has as much TH as drinking a glass of milk an hour later.
Lung satisfaction is an X factor. I couldn't tell you how we get it. Very few juices do get it. I got lucky and found one of them (Vapor Station Tampa) when I was a brand new vaper. I don't know that vaping would have worked for me if I hadn't found it. I can only really think of a handful of juices that do have it: any VS tobacco, Halo juices, VtR W-J-G Tobac, ECOpure Rich, Mister E 1963, House of Vapor HoVana, Prime Vaping Boston Cream Pie, Nite Lite Gold Rush, Vermont Vapor Smoke. Those are just the one that popped into my head first.
I clearly remember sitting at my dining room table after coming home from work one day last October and opening a package that contained a 30ml of Vapor Station Tampa in 24mg. I took a blast, and that juice told my brain I just took a draw off a full flavor cigarette. I was a new vaper at the time, and no juice makes me feel like I'm smoking a cigarette today and I don't need them to. Smoke and mirrors work with new vapers because they don't have a frame of reference for vaping, so their brains fill in the gaps and tell them that what they're doing is like smoking. That's why those juices that capture those performance cues are so essential. They help the new vaper make the jump and leave cigarettes behind.
