Unpopular Opinions

Grilled Peaches, Mascarpone, and Honey.

The FA Perique Black here is measured as a 10% Dilution. Use .025% Perique Black, or .25% of a 10% dilution. It will not go well if you don't use the dilution.

This recipe originally was forced into will by ID10-T, because we bet on PerennialPhilosopher's sensitivity to clove flavors and I lost. This was a punishment. I destroyed it.

This goes out to the circlejerk of pretentious untalented mixers with trash palates. It's a 10 ingredient recipe, using 5 different brands of flavorings. You don't have all of these flavors, and I guarantee you won't find another use for at least the Perique. Buying the smallest available bottles of all of these ingredients would cost you $33.47 on Bull City Flavors. It requires a dilution, and has 6 ingredients used at .5% or less.

This will never be your "ADV." It will taste like hot garbage if you're used to vaping CANDY KINGZ BANGING BLUE SOUR BELTZ. Do not add sweetener to this, it will not go well.

It's okay though, because 99% of people don't actually mix recipes. This is purpose-built to fuel a self-indulgent mental chess match between the people who somehow think they're too talented to answer your questions about where to buy VG in rural Pennsylvania because your mom might learn you vape if you order online.

Here's my unpopular opinion. It's a fucking manifesto.

Development Notes

About 10 revisions went into developing this recipe.

I started out with the grilled peach, because fuck if I was going to try to adjust all the components of this at the same time. I figured I needed a warmer, fleshy peach flavor to try to capture what happens when a peach softens up and sweetens when you cook it. I still go back and forth about where a peach and mango flavor truly intersect, but I figured I'd have much better luck trying to get a juicy warm peach if I just used mango for the base. The FLV mango was always going to be my cooked peach base. I hate CAP Sweet Mango, and that's only been deepening. I didn't want to have those vegetal, overripe notes interacting with the grilling. I figured the FLV Mango was going to give me a heavy, pulpy base and it's essentially lacking strong top notes so peaches just slide right on top of it. I think I initially had it at 1% and it just wasn't juicy and heavy enough. It got bumped up pretty quickly to 2% and stayed there.

The White Peach was basically an attempt to avoid going peach rings or canned peaches with this. I had initially started with JF Honey Peach at around 3% but it was steeping out really candied. I wasn't mad at the sweetness, and was hoping for a two-fer with the honey there... but it was basically peach rings against all the "grilling." I changed it out to FLV Peach by the time I was finalizing the grilled peach component and it was working substantially better. It all went to hell though on the last couple versions when I started fucking around with adding the honey and mascarpone. Not sure if it was the contrast from the mascarpone or the added sweetness from the honey but it was going slightly peach rings on me again. FA White Peach was my attempt at drier, less candied peach top note to pull that mango into a full peach. Seems to have worked okay, and with as much going on here and the added heat and smoke the throat hit didn't seem like much of an issue.

Grilling the damn thing actually wasn't too bad. Black Fire seemed like an obvious thing and it's been at .5% since the first version of the recipe. The liquid amber also seemed obvious to break down some of the peach pectins and get everything all sticky and warm. I want to say this another one that got thrown in at .5% in the first version and hasn't changed. The rest of the grilled note had some help from Kopel. I was bitching about the profile to him before or after a Mixlife show and he suggested Perique and Brown Sugar. The brown sugar thing is a good idea, but pretty inside the box. I threw some in at .25% on like the 4th version of the grilled peach and it helped further cook the entire thing so I kept it there. The perique was fucking genius. It has a pretty strong charred vegetable note to it solo, and it helped add a sharpness and realism to that black fire. 3 versions of this were just dialing back that stuff, it's crazy strong. I initially started at .1% and it was a nightmare. Charred green bell peppers all the way. I made a dilution and then cut the overall percentage back by half to .05%. Better, but still too fucking strong. Finally ended up at .025%, and honestly seems like it might be a bit better dialed back to .02% or maybe even .015%. But it really gives a char to the grilling. It takes the entire thing away from smoked peaches to grilled peaches. The FLV Heat was sort of a last minute addition on the second to last test after the previous version had some issues with separation with everything mixed together. The low percentage of FLV Heat helped to perk those grilled notes back up quite a bit. The grilled note is probably the thing out of the recipe that I'm most excited for. I'm pretty sure it should be applicable to any juicier, thicker fruit. Pineapple seems like a no-brainer, but I'm pysched to give it a shot with plum too. My best experience with a grilled pineapple has been keeping the mango, dropping the peach, and adding 1.5% FLV Pineapple. This grilled base tends to make things taste candied next to it, so I've got some fine tuning to do.

I think it was about 7 versions of just a grilled peach, the mascarpone thing came in later, and it was mostly just trying to not go too cheesy and also not fuck the texture of the vape up entirely. Again, I was bitching about the profile and Shyndo actually came in with the Italian Cream thing. I was already pushing CAP Sweet Cream up too high aiming for that cheesy off note it gets, but it needed more punch to it. Boom Italian Cream. Potent, pretty much perfect mascarpone note. I kept some sweet cream in there for texture and to smooth the vape out, but most of the mascarpone flavor is coming straight from the Italian Cream. I Initially also had some CAP Butter Cream in there in the hopes that the waxiness would kind of stick to the cheese note and provide some separation, but that waxiness was getting too weird so I dropped it.

And the honey. The honey is the part of this that I put the least amount of effort into. I think it was Shyndo that dropped me a link for that Big papaya recipe by Manson where he said it worked like a honey drizzle. Good enough for me, because I wasn't about to add another complex variable to this mix and I didn't have the time to try to re balance it all if I tried to get cute. The second to last version of this had it at .25%. Seemed like it could be stronger, so I cranked it up to .35%. Seems to work about as well I can hope for without digging back into the bones of the recipe and trying to figure out another point of separation for a more discrete honey note.