Now this might be a given, but if you’re a newer mixer you might not fully understand the importance of taking notes. Getting into DIY eliquid mixing is quite easy these days. You can hop on to liquidbarn.com, wizardlabs.com, or bullcityflavors.com, anything of the sort, purchase a bunch of flavorings, base, and nicotine, and then hop onto diyordievaping.com or some other forum where there are DIY recipes, mix them up, and boom, ADV. Or if you want you can even just go to one of those suppliers, purchase one shots (like my ENYAWREKLAW Concentrates), mix them at the recommended concentration, and then dump in your pre-mixed base, give it a shake, boom, ADV. The only way it could be easier is if we mixed it for you, i.e. “commercial” eliquid. With this ease has come an influx of new mixers. A lot of these new mixers have all the DIY knowledge there is to know at their fingertips with sites like diyordievaping.com and /r/diy_ejuice. There’s a lot of the “work” taken out of DIY. This is a great thing, and I believe that there is still a great amount of info that needs to be covered to make this transition even easier for beginners. But all this information has allowed these newer mixers to skip one of the most important aspects of DIY eliquid development. And that’s taking notes.
Because these new mixers aren’t taking their own notes, they are constantly relying on the palates of others for their flavor notes and recipes. And as we all know, taste is one of the most subjective things on this planet. Everyone tastes everything differently. So not taking your own notes becomes a hindrance down the line when you’re ready to mix up your own eliquids. Now, for the most part, flavor notes can give anyone a good idea of a flavoring before they purchase it. And for the most part, good recipes do a good job of being accurate to its description. But like I said, taste is very subjective. One persons preference and the way they taste flavors, differs from another person. So writing down exactly what you taste is vital when you’re going to craft your own recipes. And I’m not talking about tons of paragraphs on each flavoring, and doing a full testing regime like how we at diyordie do it. All you need to do is when you mix a recipe, note the flavor profiles you get. Write down a little blurb on what flavorings are included, and what you taste. When you get new flavorings in, you can mix them up solo and quickly jot down what you taste. Or if you use them in a recipe before doing any solo testing, write down what it tastes like in that recipe. JUST WRITE SOMETHING DOWN, ANYTHING. Get something like Evernote or OneNote where you can quickly jot stuff down and keep it organized. After a month or so, it’ll be routine. It’ll become part of mixing to you. And eventually, you’ll get more indepth, and more motivated to write better notes. Then writing down intricate notes becomes routine. And by that time, you’ll have this huge encyclopedia of DIY information that you can always refer back to, THAT’S COMPLETELY CATERED TO WHAT YOU TASTE. And that’s priceless. So get out there, taste your recipes and flavorings, and just start jotting notes down. It might seem tedious at first, but down the line you’ll thank me.
