Midnight Marauder (EJM x Chef's One Shot)

Hey, this is the recipe release for a discontinued one shot at Chef's Flavours in the heartrendingly beautiful EJuiceMakers line. Shoutout to Chef's and everyone who picked this one up.

The original description was: "Stir it up with a sweet, juicy blend of blackcurrant and licorice."

I figured it probably needed some actual development notes, so here goes...

You know those "euro" style juices in the vein of heisenberg or whatever? Very sweet, very heavy on licorice or aniseed notes, and absurdly cold? I think they are fun, but they are also absolutely exhausting.

I think it's mostly a balance issue. With the intensity of those aniseed flavors and the heavy cooling they really have to punch through the flavor which requires bigger flavors which requires more sweetener etc... It's like this really weird intense feedback loop of flavor and contrast.

My design brief going into this was "like heisenberg, but for sane people." Judging by sales I didn't really accomplish that but I had a lot of fun and I'm still a fan of this recipe.

Also, Chef's is about the only place I'd risk putting out something with licorice. Licorice is great and anyone who doesn't like that flavor is a coward. Fight me.

The way I figure it, this recipe has four main components:

The "Blackcurrant"

There is a whole lot of creative license here in calling this a blackcurrant flavor. It's mostly a blackcurrant-ish fruit built to work with licorice and cooling.

The base of the currant-esque abomination here is FA Blackcurrant. While not particularly realistic, it's the de facto standard for a "blackcurrant" in vaping. And it's a good standard! It's big, deep and sweet. The flavor leans more toward a swedish fish-esque lingonberry/raspberry/red currant or whatever, but it has that fuller, gelatinous mouthfeel that I needed to stand up to the thinning inherent with WS-23. 2% is a lot, I guess? I think it works well here in context and helps to build a solid foundation for the fruit.

The other fruits here serve to fill out the blackcurrant. FLV Boysenberry is some sort of interesting berry candy flavor that further pushed that full, sweet blackcurrant. CAP Fuji Apple is a fairly soft, juicy flavor that doesn't carry a ton of baggage. It's almost like a sweeter, less funky INW Cactus or a softer FA Pear. It's mostly here to blend into the background and add a pretty solid juiciness to that full, sweet candy blackcurrant. It's at 5%, but I feel like that is about where it starts to get noticeably juicy. It can mute a bit, but everything around it is a bit intense. Whatever. I think it works. CAP 27 Fish is yet more sticky and sweet fuel for the flavor inferno here. The 2.5% is a bit arbitrary and it could be pushed up to around 4%, but I really wanted to hit an even 15% overall for the mix because I'm a sellout and round numbers are cool.

The Licorice

Hey, it's FW Black Licorice. It's the thing that makes this cloudy AF off a shake. I love FW Black Licorice. I think it's a bit warm and dark, but it has a really nice, sweet body to it that provides an interesting contrast with the cooling while helping the recipe cohere up against the WS-23. At 3%, I don't feel like it's particularly overwhelming but it comes through cleanly and acts as a nice counterpoint for that big, sticky, wet blackcurrant flavor. The goal wasn't really to kick someone in the head with aniseed, but serve up an accent for the more central fruit.

The Coolant

I mean, WS-23 is a pretty good coolant. And I use it here. It's not overbearing at .5%, and works more to complement the recipe without absolutely blowing everything out. For me, WS-23 has this weird side effect of making all the flavor around it seem wispy and a bit flat. The rest of the recipe was essentially built to take as much mouthfeel and saturation as possible so it could still stand up to the ws-23 without a huge, huge amount of sweetener.

The Sweetener

Yeah, there is some sucralose in here. I'd argue that it's not a ton, but I do think it makes the recipe better. It's the final thing giving that fruit flavor a nudge into vibrancy. I tend to prefer FW Sweetener but you could easily just use your damn CAP Super Sweet at like .5%. You could make this without sweetener, but the sucralose crutch helps, yo.

And that's the recipe. It really doesn't "need" to steep. It settles a bit after an overnight, but it works fine as a shake and vape.

Also, the name is from Ckemist. I think I was sort of half jokingly threatening to call it something super weird like "Black as your Heart" but I am objectively absurd and he corrected me.

RIP Phife Dawg.