An Arnold Palmer spiked with Bourbon.

This is not really my recipe. It was supposed to be a collaboration with me, @AlfredPudding, and Isuamadog. But you know how there’s often that one guy on a group project who does all the work? Yeah, that was not me. This is really AlfredPudding’s recipe. If he tries to protest and declare otherwise, don’t listen to him. He’s only being overly humble and modest.

FLV Lemon Tea is the heart of this thing, the star of the show. “What? But it’s only at 1% and TFA Sweet Tea is at a whopping 14%?!”

Yes. Usually using one flavor to bend another involves adding a small amount of something to pull another flavor in one direction or another or turn it into something it isn’t. But in this case, the relatively strong Lemon Tea is getting pulled slightly by the stupidly weak TFA Sweet Tea. Things taste different when they’re heated and Lemon Tea tastes like hot tea with lemon and no sugar. TFA makes it more of a half-sweet tea with lemon, that tastes more like iced tea. TFA Sweet Tea wouldn’t work for this by itself because it doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to these other flavors, but Lemon Tea does, it just needed to get bent. We don’t just want tea with a lemon wedge, though, we want lemonade. INW Shisha Lemon and CAP Super Sweet does that. The Shisha Lemon sits on the fence between candy and natural lemon juice. Pairing it with some sucralose and preservative magic transforms it into a solid lemonade flavor. The result tastes like lemonade made from a powder mix, but with few lemon slices added for that fresher flavor thanks to Lemon Tea’s more natural lemon flavor.

The Bourbon Trifecta: The triple bourbon flavors were used because they each have their own strengths. VT Bourbon gives us that boozy top note that lets you know right away this is a cocktail. Think about it; if you raise a Back Nine, Dirty Palmer, or whatever you want to call it, to your face, the first thing you’re going to notice is that there’s bourbon in there, along with the lemon if real lemons were involved at all. VT does that. But this drink is shaken or stirred and the Bourbon isn’t just sitting on top. There’s a deeper, sweeter flavor mingled with the lemonade, one where you can almost taste the corn used to make the sour mash that eventually became Bourbon. That’s where the TFA Kentucky Bourbon comes in. Finally, there’s the flavor of the charred oak barrel in which the Bourbon was aged mingled with the more astringent, earthy aspects of tea. Only FLV Bourbon is capable of that delivering that. The Bourbon Trifecta.

FA Polar Blast was a final addition meant to make this refreshment extra refreshing and make the “cold things should be cold” crowd happy. It was chosen over WS-23 because it’s a more of a back-end cooling that doesn’t get weird with the VT Bourbon’s warm booze top note the way WS-23 does. It still had to be used relatively lightly to also avoid interfering too much with the tea at the end, but is present enough to be reminiscent of an ice cube sliding over and touching your lip just before you lower the glass after taking a drink.

FORTUNE FLAVORS THE BOLD!

Are you brave enough to try this? It's modeled after the tangy, sweet, and spicy frozen Mexican confection. Doesn't taste quite the same, but scratches the same itch for an icy spicy treat. I used both WS-23 and Polar Blast for a well-rounded inhale and exhale cooling, and lots of it.. For the spiciness of chamoy, there's FLV Heat and Apple Filling. The cinnamon in apple filling doesn't quite taste like cinnamon used so low with other strong ingredients, but it gives some body to the heat so it's not just disembodied capsaicin-type heat. The gooey apple part contributes to Jelly Candy and Sweet and Tart creating something reminiscent of the sweet and tangy part of chamoy. Jelly Candy also helps clean up some of CAP Sweet Mango's overripe nonsense. Super Sweet, like Apple Filling, also does double duty. Besides the obvious sweetening, it helps drag that Heat onto the lips and tongue and makes it linger, resulting a long-lasting fire and ice sensation. Finally the mangoes. I was surprised how much how much FLV Mango and CAP Sweet Mango it took stand up to all this other stuff, but with each new version I kept adding more and more until it worked. I also tried using VT Shisha Mango but it was too piney that didn't play well with the rest of the mix.

Impropriety + Papaya + Tea

A refreshing iced tea with sweet papaya syrup.

SkiddlzNinja did it first. Check out his Tenacious T recipe. It was the inspiration for this though I haven't tried it yet; I just wanted to try a simpler mix of papaya and tea first. When I saw Tenacious T, the combination of TFA's Sweet Tea and Papaya looked like a stroke of genius, just imagining the way they'd taste together. But possibly a mild challenge to pull off, since one of those is a brutal bully that can easily get way too funky and the other is a shrinking violet. This is just a simple recipe that celebrates that combination.

I'm surprised there aren't more recipes using TFA Sweet Tea out there. Is my taster broken? As best I can tell, it does a fine job of emulating that sort of fast food drive thru sweet tea flavor. The only problem is that it's ridiculously weak in more ways than one. First, it takes about 6 or 7% of it to taste like much of anything at all. I could easily see needing 15% in a recipe. But at TFA prices, I'm not terribly worried about that. A bigger problem is that it can easily get almost completely obliterated in a mix. "I know I put a ton of Sweet Tea in here, where'd it go?" Accoutrements must be added carefully .

TFA Papaya is the opposite, much stronger in concentration than most TFA flavors and prone to pushing other flavors around. And getting violently FUNKY. Just like a real, ripe, papaya. Careful not to spill it on anything. Papaya for weeks if you do. Starting at 1% and working up 0.1% at a time until it's too much, then backing down, is my approach to taming this beast. Even at 1.4% it mostly overpowers the tea, but so would putting papaya syrup in a tea unless it's a hearty brew.

FA Apricot does a fantastic job of propping up the Papaya fruitiness without increasing the funk or calling too much attention to itself. FA Pear/INW Cactus 0.25% each just a touch of sweet and wet juicy goodness, but not too much of either.

Optional: Add Sweetener and/or Coolant to taste. I've been enjoying this with 0.25% FW Sweetener but I live in the southern USA where sweet tea is SWEET. Speaking of the South, WS-23. It's so hot and I needed another cool, refreshing recipe. I like it with this at 0.75% as an "over ice" type versus "frozen solid" amount of coolant, but coolant tolerance varies from one person to the next.

Give a mix and let me know what you think Or better yet, use a ludicrous-looking amount of TFA Sweet Tea and relatively small dose of your fruit of choice and make your own fruity sweet ice tea to help get you though the rest of summer.

A Bourbon-infused Peanut Butter

Inspiration for this recipe came from two places. First, reading a news article about the EU striking back against the Trump Trade War with targeted tariffs on US peanut butter and Bourbon (as well as OJ and motorcycles). It was already a work in progress that had sort of been back-burnered but got a second wind when I watched Wayne Walker try to turn his Blackout recipe into a milkshake. You can see the influence of Blackout on this final version, with the TFA Bavarian Cream and FW Hazelnut used to support the Peanut Butter. Blackout also used FA Caramel and TFA Brown Sugar, and here you see them consolidated in one concentrate, FLV Caramel. This stuff ties the recipe together in a way that other ingredients in previous attempts didn't. One thing both Bourbon and peanut butter flavors have in common is that they pair exceptionally well with caramel and brown sugar-type flavorings.

TFA DX Peanut Butter. You might be wondering about the DX Peanut Butter. Sure, you could sub TFA Peanut Butter. But here is why you shouldn't: It's fucking better. Like, every PB recipe ever made with TFA Peanut Butter should probably be reformulated to be made with the DX version instead. That much better. Apparently others have come before her and I should have paid attention to them, but the DX version wasn't on my radar until @RinVapes used it in her Cereal Bar recipe and talked about it on Mixin Vixens. Had Rin lost her mind? TFA DX flavors are disgusting. They've taken out the delicious diketones and replaced them with vomit flavor! The couple of DX flavors I'd tried in past made me dry heave. But my curiosity was sparked so I checked TFA's spec sheets and guess what? There's no barfy butyric acid in TFA DX Peanut Butter, just pyraziny goodness and some vanillin. So naturally, I had to try this. WOW! TFA Peanut Butter, you're dead to me. It's like comparing past-the-sell-by-date dollar store peanut butter to Smucker's Natural. Still seems to have some of the problems of TFA Peanut Butter (weak, dries out and gets muddy with a steep, probably needs a good shake before using because it separates but that's good practice anyway) but the flavor and authenticity is top notch in my opinion, far batter than any other PB flavor I've tried and there have been a lot of them.

Sweetener: Always optional, and you might want to add some. I've left it out because I think FLV Caramel adds a plenty of sweetness to this and gives it a lingering, brown sugary finish.

Steeping: Overnight, and while I've not tried this exact recipe with long steep, earlier versions suggest that I probably don't want to. PB just doesn't seem to be built for long steeping.

You're crazy, PB and Bourbon don't go together. Yes, they do. Peanut Butter Infused Bourbon is a very real and beautiful thing and you can make it yourself at home if you don't believe me. Now, this is not that, this is Bourbon-infused peanut butter, simply because that's what I wanted to vape. But, if you wanted to make a peanut butter infused Bourbon vape I think that would be easy enough using this recipe as a starting place but turning the PB down by half, roughly doubling the bourbon flavors, and probably adding some VT Bourbon for more of a boozy bite (TFA, FLV, and VT are the Holy Trinity of bourbon flavors - one for sweetness, one for charred oak, and one to booze it up).

Water Malone from Liquid Barn's Tastemaker Collection. Mixed at the recommended 10%, I liked this quite a bit. I’d heard it was a super authentic juicy yet pulpy watermelon and I had to see for myself. It is that, it tastes like a bold yet realistic sweet fleshy watermelon - but doused with a bit of apple juice. There’s some apple flavor in there and I’m definitely picking that up, both overnight and after steeping for two weeks. It’s like biting into a huge hunk of watermelon... that someone had spilled a little apple juice on. So, natural watermelon with a slight apple off-note. Spilling apple juice on your watermelon is a bit of an odd thing to do, but as off-notes in watermelon flavors go, apple is not a bad one to to have! This solves a lot of the problems many other watermelon flavors have in that it’s realistic not candy and has body but isn’t dry. Very much like biting right into a crispy fresh cut slice of watermelon, except for that little apple taste. It’s refreshing and light like actual watermelon, but with a full fruity mouthfeel and serious depth to it and a lingering sweet watermelon finish. Awesome stuff. I was more interested in how this might work as an ingredient than in having a watermelon one-shot, though. So, I made a fun little recipe with it. What are you going to do with a watermelon that has a hint of apple? Make a Strap-On of course. Wound up dropping it down to 6% to make some room for other flavors while still retaining all of its qualities.

FA Red Touch At first I tried to be fancy and use FA Pazzo Jack - imagine, a recipe made from not one, but two things intended to be one-shots. That was abandoned as soon as the first batch turned out just a bit soapy. I went right back to the tried and true FA Strawberry from the original Strap-On. 3% didn't stand up as well to all that watermelon and apple but 4% does put the Str in Strap-On.

FA Fuji Tried enhancing Water Malone's apple off-note with CAP Double Apple at first but didn't care for the result. It was too much and rather than mess around with concentration levels of that, we're again back to the OG Strap-On's apple.

That's a very funny photoshop, but how does it taste?

It tastes like a well-balanced Strawberry-Apple-Watermelon fruit punch. Like something that you'd expect to find in a Capri Sun pouch. Delicious, sweet, juicy, refreshing. I don't recommend actually shake and vaping it because you might get some harshness from the Fuji, but it needs only an overnight steep to settle down and settle in.

Thanks, D. Keff for the photoshop work.

An ice cold blueberry cream.

Yes, that's 19% total flavor. I am not ashamed. I wanted that flavor fully saturated and satisfying and able to stand up to a lot of cooling for summer and here it is.

It tastes kind of like frozen blueberry pie filling topped with rich vanilla whipped cream except turned upside down because of course the cream comes in underneath, as creams do.

FW Blueberry/TFA Blueberry Extra - Blueberry syrup and blueberries.

TFA Dragonfruit - Blends with FW Blueberry to make it more reminiscent of that thick, shiny goop that is blueberry pie filling.

FE Lemon - A little lemon makes blueberries pop just like it does when cooking and baking. Plenty of other lemon flavors would work here at 0.25% but I wanted one that doesn't fade.

TFA Vanilla Swirl/TFA Bavarian Cream - This has long been one of my favorite combinations of creams for a full mouthfeel and richness and a nice bit of vanilla in the background.

CAP Super Sweet - 0.25%, just enough to really carry that sweet cream to the finish line and beyond. I chose this sweetener over others I'd usually reach for first due to its potency, to keep from going even higher than 19%. But FLV Sweetness or FW Sweetener would work just as well in the 0.35 to 0.5% range.

WS-23 - It's 100+ Fahrenheit every day for the past week and for the forecastable future. I need a cold vape. Not all the time, but I need one I can reach for that's mixed up and ready to go. A different coolant will not work here. They'll rip those creams to shreds.

Steep Time - I put 7 days as a minimum, but best after? Not sure. At three weeks here, it keeps getting better.

It's LUCKY FUCKING CHARMS. With milk.

You might not want to buy FW Cake Batter Dip to make this. It's got fructose in it, it will destroy your wicks relatively quick even at just 1%. It might be bad for you, too, burning sugars can release carcinogens. But if you have some already and want to use it, maybe give this a try. Unfortunately, I don't have a sub for it, it's unique. And it perfects the sweet cereal that's been baptized in milk and is starting to return to its doughy origin.

TFA Lucky Leprechaun has some oat puff cereal hiding in there with a somewhat weird (possibly emulating the taste of artificial coloring?) crisp cereal-type marshmallow. I used CAP Cereal 27 to draw it out of hiding. Took some work to make it happen without turning puffed oat into corn or multigrain cereal, but I think this gets it down. OoO Cream Milky PG helps with that, sort of wraps around it and keeps that cornflake pyrazine taste from being too assertive while also doing a fine job as a cereal milk. If you're lucky enough to own some FA Milk, you can add that at 1% for an even milker cereal with whole milk. TFA Meringue in my opinion is a slightly better option for sugary, toasty cereal and cereal milk perfecting than FA Meringue, which is a more authentic meringue. But if you only have FA Meringue, you can sub that at 1% instead of the 1.5% TFA Meringue. Although Lucky Lep is mostly a cereal marshmallow flavor, cranking it up high enough to really make the marshmallows stand out just gets too chemical-tasting and weird for me. FLV Marshmallow + FLV Whipped Cream finish putting the charms in Lucky's Charms. These two flavors are so similar that if you don't have one of them or are just too lazy to get them both out, you could make this with 1% of either instead of 0.5% of both. The difference will be how long you let the marshmallows soak in milk. All Marshmallow = No soak, just teeth-squeakingly crunchy mallows. All Whipped Cream = Marshmallows are getting milk-logged and have a slippy, gooey outer layer, but still have that crisp sugar center. I just happen to like a happy medium.

No flavor company executives' feelings were harmed in the making of this recipe.