The follow up by ConcreteRiver. The full article here
Taking Flavor Notes
It’s not the most intuitive thing to write about flavor. People are used to conveying stuff like visual information in writing, but it’s tempting to stop at “good” or “bad” for flavor. Vaping itself is relatively new, but there are several other areas where writing flavor notes is pretty standard practice.
One of the most helpful fields for drawing analogies, for me at least, is wine. There is a pretty thriving industry of people paid to write adjectives about wine, and a healthy hobbyist or amateur following for developing the skill of writing flavor notes. The best quick guide I’ve found for wine so far is from the “Wine Folly” blog, in a post titled “How to Write Excellent Wine Tasting Notes.” I like this guide, but like most specific tasting guides, it isn’t really broadly adaptable. There is a ton of focus on the unique properties of wine, and then it kind of encourages a word salad approach where adjectives are cataloged.
Most of these field specific guides do emphasize one thing though, thinking about what you’re tasting. For me, that part of the tasting process is a whole lot more important than how refined or sensitive your actual palate is. We will all give due respect to the supertasters out there, but you’ve got to think about the primary audience for your flavor notes. You’re taking these for yourself, to speed up recipe development.
For as difficult as talking about flavor can be, you’re usually pretty good at remembering specific flavors. You remember what pretty much everything you’ve eaten tastes like. It’s not like you’re surprised each time you pick up a banana. Writing down your flavor notes helps cement the taste of a specific concentrate in your brain. In general, your recall is going to be pretty solid, but you need to give that a jump start. Writing down the characteristics of that flavor will hopefully give you something solid to latch onto when recalling that flavor and trying to place it in a profile.
I did want to talk really quickly about the limitations of your palate. I’m a hard strawberry non-taster. Something like TPA Strawberry (Ripe) is basically non-existent for me, and any strawberry I can taste is basically just green plastic. I also taste black pepper on anything rich from TPA. And I’m starting to think I don’t pick up butter notes all that well. That’s shaped my vaping, for sure, but it’s also shaped my notes. It’s always tricky to compare your tastes with other people, but if you ever run into something that seems odd based on other people’s notes don’t be afraid to explore that and work within your own limitations. My notes on strawberries are going to be damn near useless, so I pretty much don’t do them… but the cool thing about DIY is that I can talk to people I trust. So don’t be afraid to pump your fellow mixers for info on the stuff that you have issues with. I’ve balanced strawberry recipes entirely based on feedback from other mixers before and if you trust the people you are working with it usually ends up working pretty well. Yet another reason to roll with some DIY mixing buddies, either online or in person.
Beginning on Flavor Notes
Assuming you’re convinced flavor notes are a good thing, how you do actually get the ball rolling on writing your thoughts down? I’ve found the easiest way to wrap your head around flavor notes is to mix up multiple samples of the same profile from different manufacturers.
When confronted with a flavor like INW Pineapple, it’s pretty valid to say it tastes like a pineapple. It’s even a pretty good pineapple. But what happens if you taste next to some other pineapples?
Establishing the profile, in some ways, the easy part. I’d argue that INW Pineapple, CAP Golden Pineapple, and TPA pineapple all taste like some kind of pineapple. But how do they differ? We are going to start refining the profile here. INW pineapple has a fresher taste to me than either CAP or TPA. It tastes more like a raw pineapple than the flatter, sweeter taste of CAP or the tarter pineapple candy taste of TPA.
So we’ve already established a pretty refined profile for INW Pineapple. We know it’s a pineapple, and we know that it’s a fresher take on a pineapple. You’ve already done more work here than a lot of mixers. You now know that if you need a fresh pineapple, you’d generally want to reach for INW Pineapple. That saves you a substantial amount of time in developing a recipe. But we can do better.
When you taste that Fresh Pineapple, how is it working? Is it tart? Is it acidic? Is is sweet? All very easy things to pick out and add to your notes. This speeds your development even more now. Say you want a tarter flavor in a milkshake? You now have a record of whether or not that pineapple counts as a tart flavor. Boom. The more descriptive your notes are, the easier it is to maintain a running tally of what concentrates are going to fit in what recipe positions.
I’d argue that mouthfeel is underrated in vaping. I like to note the mouthfeel of specific concentrates when I’m testing flavors. Think about how the flavor vapes. Is it thick or is it thinner? Does it envelop your palate or do you just get a nose full of tart pineapple notes without a dense heavy mouthfeel. Is it cooling, is it warmer than you’d expect? All useful data points. A record of mouthfeel or texture is going to be a godsend when it comes to diagnosing issues in your recipe. Does that pineapple milkshake feel too top heavy, like the pineapple doesn’t really sink into the base of the milkshake and instead sits on top? Then your pineapple probably isn’t dense enough. You’ll now have an idea of what’s causing the problem without having to batch out a bunch of mixes and testing each individual variable. Each data point just speeds the development process.
It’s also important to note the “off-flavors” in a concentrate, or the things that are there that shouldn’t really be there. An off-flavor doesn’t necessarily have to be unpleasant, but it doesn’t belong to the specific profile of the concentrate. You see a lot of deeply unpleasant looking descriptors like plastic, rubber, and gasoline but these are necessarily negative in the right context. You’re just trying to figure out how to use these concentrates and account for them. INW cactus gets vegetal and starts to taste like aloe at higher percentage. Grack Juice used that off-note. It’s as helpful to have a list of the things that don’t belong as descriptors of a particular profile.
I also like to note throat hit. It’s easy to make a recipe based on flavor, then realize it’s harsh and damn near unvapable. Adding together the throat hits of constituent concentrates doesn’t necessarily equal the overall harshness of a recipe, but it’s a hell of a clue and useful information to have.
Now that you’ve basically described a flavor profile, now it’s time to figure out how to use the damn thing. Another really vital portion of a flavor note is going to be figuring out the percentages a concentrate works at. Flavor in vaping is odd, because flavor intensity doesn’t really stack so much as cohabitate. In general, unless you’re looking at shared aroma volatiles, the percentage at which a solo flavor works is going to be largely the same in a mix.
Going back to part 1 of this guide, you mixed up multiple samples of this concentrate at varying percentages right? Test those, and note the difference. At a low concentration, what sticks out? Does it taste like the same concentrate, but weaker? That’s generally referred to as a linear concentrate. Those tend to work well as supporting flavors in mixes, as they scale predictably. If you need a light touch of pineapple, you can just use a lower percentage of pineapple. Easy enough. Alternatively, if tested low do you just get acidity? Then it’s worth noting that. That concentrate is going to be used primarily to make other things more acidic at an accent percentage. Moving up in concentration, when does that flavor really click into tasting like a full pineapple? That would be closer to percentage you’d use if you need that specific pineapple flavor in a mix. The flip side of concentration testing would be taking a concentrate too high. At what point does the whole thing fall apart? If it’s a fruit, when does it become floral? If it’s a bakery, when does it taste burnt? Or if it’s a tobacco, when does it taste too dirty? Congratulations, you now have a useable range.
Trying to tie this all together, using this system, you’d end up with something like this:
INW Pineapple- Fresh Pineapple, mild acid, tart. Thin and light. Mild sulfur note. Linear. Accent 2-4%. Primary 6-8%.
I’d say that’s a pretty good flavor note, as it conveys all relevant information you need to remember that flavor and a general guide on how to use it. Of course, finished mixes are each going to be different and individual concentrates don’t work exactly like legos. But, you’ve saved a ton of time by putting in some effort up front.
How I think about flavor
Just personally, my priorities in single flavor testing are probably a bit different. I’m still, at the core of it, giving myself some hooks to remember a flavor, but I also make some concessions for the “review” process. My written flavor notes are a pretty good guide to what I look for in a concentrate. In giving a flavor description, it’s just (hopefully) a bit more fleshed out to click with a wider audience. Instead of just cataloging a list of descriptors, I try to turn it into sentences.
With the amount of testing and writing I’ve done, I’ve started to view flavors in a really specific way… so this is where it gets a bit weird…
I present to you, for the first time ever, the patent-pending Concrete Flavor Prism.
WE GOT A CHART. When Apexified asked me to write about this, I had to really think about the way I break down flavor, and this was the result of all that thought and a half hour in inkscape.
This is purely a synthetic framework that I use to describe how the flavors I’m testing work. Misappropriating some perfumery terms, I try to break down a flavor into the top, body, and base.I sort of imagine a diamond in the back of my mouth, where the top is up in the sinuses, the base is actually activating food-like mouthfeel, and the body is in the middle holding most of the actual flavor. Is it “correct?” Probably not, but it gives me some hard attachment points to try to convey the way that things work. For me this is probably the easiest way to convey the structure of a flavor.
The “top” of a concentrate lives primarily in my sinuses. We are talking sharp, aggressive flavors that I feel more in my nasal cavity than really taste like a food analogue. It’s the scent heavy portion of a concentrate. Top flavors are usually floral, citrus zest, wood, or dirt and ash. It’s stuff that doesn’t really seem to migrate down into the body of the flavor and sits on top of a vape.
The “body” on the concentrate is going to be where most of the profile lives. To me, it feels like the biggest part of a concentrate. Here is where I start to pick out all of those recognizable flavors and catalog them based on relative intensity. Thinking about the “body” of a complex concentrate, that’s where I’m going to say I “taste” things. Whatever tastes like the actual flavors making up the more complex concentrate. It’s a pretty squishy category, but I need some kind of schema to keep everything straight, and it seems to work well enough.
And the “base” of the flavor is where I relegate most of the mouthfeel modifiers. If something feels creamy, crunchy, rich, juicy, or chewy I visualize it more down on the actual tongue. To me, it the more food-related part of vaping. I realize that vaping itself isn’t eating or anything, but it occupies this weird middle ground between having actual mouthfeel effects and just being scent and I need a bin to put that all in. Hence, the base.
The other big concept I try to tackle is relative emergence of flavors in a concentrate. Again, this is sort of borrowed from perfumery. Instead of trying to break a concentrate down to top and heart notes based on when the aromas peak through, I’m relating back to the mechanical act of vaping.
Vaping has pretty discrete periods of action, primarily being the inhale and the exhale. Needing to complicate that further, I end up splitting the exhale into three distinct parts, the front, the back, and the tail. It helps me to visualize the temporal space that flavor lives on based on these mechanical actions.
The inhale tends to accentuate top notes and base flavors for me. I get a lot of texture off the inhale.
The front of the exhale has quite a bit of overlap with the inhale and tends to accentuate top notes.
The back of the exhale lets more of that body come through, and those textural effects of the base show back up a little stronger.
Finally, the tail end of the exhale is where everything starts to fade out. For me, the tail goes back to being mostly top notes and it picks up some weirder stuff that doesn’t really show up behind all the noise of the body and base of a flavor. I’m mostly just noting anything weird there.
When I’m testing flavors or recipes, this is usually the approximate thing my brain is doing when I try to pick things apart. It helps me contextualize and report back out on flavors. I wouldn’t advocate some goofy rubric based on a geometric shape and hubris as necessary or anything, but if you had any questions about how warped I am after a pile of flavor notes, then now you know. I hope it was at least entertaining.
Just from a philosophical standpoint, I see the goal of my flavor notes as not to substitute for your own work, but as a rough buyers guide. I try to describe a profile as accurately as I can, so if you’re looking for a specific tool for a profile, it can hopefully put you on the right path.
The conclusion?
I’ve tried to outline a couple of different ways to approach your flavor notes. Where you choose to go with those is up to you, basically. If scrawling “green, candy, dirt” is enough to conjure up the memory of INW Wild Strawberry for you, then it’s officially a “good” flavor note. It’s all about doing future you a solid, when you’re staring at a desk full of flavors and trying to figure out what strawberry to use in your brand new strawberry and cream recipe. The primary purpose of your own flavor notes is to speed up the recipe development process so whatever works.
Taking Flavor Notes
It’s not the most intuitive thing to write about flavor. People are used to conveying stuff like visual information in writing, but it’s tempting to stop at “good” or “bad” for flavor. Vaping itself is relatively new, but there are several other areas where writing flavor notes is pretty standard practice.
One of the most helpful fields for drawing analogies, for me at least, is wine. There is a pretty thriving industry of people paid to write adjectives about wine, and a healthy hobbyist or amateur following for developing the skill of writing flavor notes. The best quick guide I’ve found for wine so far is from the “Wine Folly” blog, in a post titled “How to Write Excellent Wine Tasting Notes.” I like this guide, but like most specific tasting guides, it isn’t really broadly adaptable. There is a ton of focus on the unique properties of wine, and then it kind of encourages a word salad approach where adjectives are cataloged.
Most of these field specific guides do emphasize one thing though, thinking about what you’re tasting. For me, that part of the tasting process is a whole lot more important than how refined or sensitive your actual palate is. We will all give due respect to the supertasters out there, but you’ve got to think about the primary audience for your flavor notes. You’re taking these for yourself, to speed up recipe development.
For as difficult as talking about flavor can be, you’re usually pretty good at remembering specific flavors. You remember what pretty much everything you’ve eaten tastes like. It’s not like you’re surprised each time you pick up a banana. Writing down your flavor notes helps cement the taste of a specific concentrate in your brain. In general, your recall is going to be pretty solid, but you need to give that a jump start. Writing down the characteristics of that flavor will hopefully give you something solid to latch onto when recalling that flavor and trying to place it in a profile.
I did want to talk really quickly about the limitations of your palate. I’m a hard strawberry non-taster. Something like TPA Strawberry (Ripe) is basically non-existent for me, and any strawberry I can taste is basically just green plastic. I also taste black pepper on anything rich from TPA. And I’m starting to think I don’t pick up butter notes all that well. That’s shaped my vaping, for sure, but it’s also shaped my notes. It’s always tricky to compare your tastes with other people, but if you ever run into something that seems odd based on other people’s notes don’t be afraid to explore that and work within your own limitations. My notes on strawberries are going to be damn near useless, so I pretty much don’t do them… but the cool thing about DIY is that I can talk to people I trust. So don’t be afraid to pump your fellow mixers for info on the stuff that you have issues with. I’ve balanced strawberry recipes entirely based on feedback from other mixers before and if you trust the people you are working with it usually ends up working pretty well. Yet another reason to roll with some DIY mixing buddies, either online or in person.
Beginning on Flavor Notes
Assuming you’re convinced flavor notes are a good thing, how you do actually get the ball rolling on writing your thoughts down? I’ve found the easiest way to wrap your head around flavor notes is to mix up multiple samples of the same profile from different manufacturers.
When confronted with a flavor like INW Pineapple, it’s pretty valid to say it tastes like a pineapple. It’s even a pretty good pineapple. But what happens if you taste next to some other pineapples?
Establishing the profile, in some ways, the easy part. I’d argue that INW Pineapple, CAP Golden Pineapple, and TPA pineapple all taste like some kind of pineapple. But how do they differ? We are going to start refining the profile here. INW pineapple has a fresher taste to me than either CAP or TPA. It tastes more like a raw pineapple than the flatter, sweeter taste of CAP or the tarter pineapple candy taste of TPA.
So we’ve already established a pretty refined profile for INW Pineapple. We know it’s a pineapple, and we know that it’s a fresher take on a pineapple. You’ve already done more work here than a lot of mixers. You now know that if you need a fresh pineapple, you’d generally want to reach for INW Pineapple. That saves you a substantial amount of time in developing a recipe. But we can do better.
When you taste that Fresh Pineapple, how is it working? Is it tart? Is it acidic? Is is sweet? All very easy things to pick out and add to your notes. This speeds your development even more now. Say you want a tarter flavor in a milkshake? You now have a record of whether or not that pineapple counts as a tart flavor. Boom. The more descriptive your notes are, the easier it is to maintain a running tally of what concentrates are going to fit in what recipe positions.
I’d argue that mouthfeel is underrated in vaping. I like to note the mouthfeel of specific concentrates when I’m testing flavors. Think about how the flavor vapes. Is it thick or is it thinner? Does it envelop your palate or do you just get a nose full of tart pineapple notes without a dense heavy mouthfeel. Is it cooling, is it warmer than you’d expect? All useful data points. A record of mouthfeel or texture is going to be a godsend when it comes to diagnosing issues in your recipe. Does that pineapple milkshake feel too top heavy, like the pineapple doesn’t really sink into the base of the milkshake and instead sits on top? Then your pineapple probably isn’t dense enough. You’ll now have an idea of what’s causing the problem without having to batch out a bunch of mixes and testing each individual variable. Each data point just speeds the development process.
It’s also important to note the “off-flavors” in a concentrate, or the things that are there that shouldn’t really be there. An off-flavor doesn’t necessarily have to be unpleasant, but it doesn’t belong to the specific profile of the concentrate. You see a lot of deeply unpleasant looking descriptors like plastic, rubber, and gasoline but these are necessarily negative in the right context. You’re just trying to figure out how to use these concentrates and account for them. INW cactus gets vegetal and starts to taste like aloe at higher percentage. Grack Juice used that off-note. It’s as helpful to have a list of the things that don’t belong as descriptors of a particular profile.
I also like to note throat hit. It’s easy to make a recipe based on flavor, then realize it’s harsh and damn near unvapable. Adding together the throat hits of constituent concentrates doesn’t necessarily equal the overall harshness of a recipe, but it’s a hell of a clue and useful information to have.
Now that you’ve basically described a flavor profile, now it’s time to figure out how to use the damn thing. Another really vital portion of a flavor note is going to be figuring out the percentages a concentrate works at. Flavor in vaping is odd, because flavor intensity doesn’t really stack so much as cohabitate. In general, unless you’re looking at shared aroma volatiles, the percentage at which a solo flavor works is going to be largely the same in a mix.
Going back to part 1 of this guide, you mixed up multiple samples of this concentrate at varying percentages right? Test those, and note the difference. At a low concentration, what sticks out? Does it taste like the same concentrate, but weaker? That’s generally referred to as a linear concentrate. Those tend to work well as supporting flavors in mixes, as they scale predictably. If you need a light touch of pineapple, you can just use a lower percentage of pineapple. Easy enough. Alternatively, if tested low do you just get acidity? Then it’s worth noting that. That concentrate is going to be used primarily to make other things more acidic at an accent percentage. Moving up in concentration, when does that flavor really click into tasting like a full pineapple? That would be closer to percentage you’d use if you need that specific pineapple flavor in a mix. The flip side of concentration testing would be taking a concentrate too high. At what point does the whole thing fall apart? If it’s a fruit, when does it become floral? If it’s a bakery, when does it taste burnt? Or if it’s a tobacco, when does it taste too dirty? Congratulations, you now have a useable range.
Trying to tie this all together, using this system, you’d end up with something like this:
INW Pineapple- Fresh Pineapple, mild acid, tart. Thin and light. Mild sulfur note. Linear. Accent 2-4%. Primary 6-8%.
I’d say that’s a pretty good flavor note, as it conveys all relevant information you need to remember that flavor and a general guide on how to use it. Of course, finished mixes are each going to be different and individual concentrates don’t work exactly like legos. But, you’ve saved a ton of time by putting in some effort up front.
How I think about flavor
Just personally, my priorities in single flavor testing are probably a bit different. I’m still, at the core of it, giving myself some hooks to remember a flavor, but I also make some concessions for the “review” process. My written flavor notes are a pretty good guide to what I look for in a concentrate. In giving a flavor description, it’s just (hopefully) a bit more fleshed out to click with a wider audience. Instead of just cataloging a list of descriptors, I try to turn it into sentences.
With the amount of testing and writing I’ve done, I’ve started to view flavors in a really specific way… so this is where it gets a bit weird…
I present to you, for the first time ever, the patent-pending Concrete Flavor Prism.
WE GOT A CHART. When Apexified asked me to write about this, I had to really think about the way I break down flavor, and this was the result of all that thought and a half hour in inkscape.
This is purely a synthetic framework that I use to describe how the flavors I’m testing work. Misappropriating some perfumery terms, I try to break down a flavor into the top, body, and base.I sort of imagine a diamond in the back of my mouth, where the top is up in the sinuses, the base is actually activating food-like mouthfeel, and the body is in the middle holding most of the actual flavor. Is it “correct?” Probably not, but it gives me some hard attachment points to try to convey the way that things work. For me this is probably the easiest way to convey the structure of a flavor.
The “top” of a concentrate lives primarily in my sinuses. We are talking sharp, aggressive flavors that I feel more in my nasal cavity than really taste like a food analogue. It’s the scent heavy portion of a concentrate. Top flavors are usually floral, citrus zest, wood, or dirt and ash. It’s stuff that doesn’t really seem to migrate down into the body of the flavor and sits on top of a vape.
The “body” on the concentrate is going to be where most of the profile lives. To me, it feels like the biggest part of a concentrate. Here is where I start to pick out all of those recognizable flavors and catalog them based on relative intensity. Thinking about the “body” of a complex concentrate, that’s where I’m going to say I “taste” things. Whatever tastes like the actual flavors making up the more complex concentrate. It’s a pretty squishy category, but I need some kind of schema to keep everything straight, and it seems to work well enough.
And the “base” of the flavor is where I relegate most of the mouthfeel modifiers. If something feels creamy, crunchy, rich, juicy, or chewy I visualize it more down on the actual tongue. To me, it the more food-related part of vaping. I realize that vaping itself isn’t eating or anything, but it occupies this weird middle ground between having actual mouthfeel effects and just being scent and I need a bin to put that all in. Hence, the base.
The other big concept I try to tackle is relative emergence of flavors in a concentrate. Again, this is sort of borrowed from perfumery. Instead of trying to break a concentrate down to top and heart notes based on when the aromas peak through, I’m relating back to the mechanical act of vaping.
Vaping has pretty discrete periods of action, primarily being the inhale and the exhale. Needing to complicate that further, I end up splitting the exhale into three distinct parts, the front, the back, and the tail. It helps me to visualize the temporal space that flavor lives on based on these mechanical actions.
The inhale tends to accentuate top notes and base flavors for me. I get a lot of texture off the inhale.
The front of the exhale has quite a bit of overlap with the inhale and tends to accentuate top notes.
The back of the exhale lets more of that body come through, and those textural effects of the base show back up a little stronger.
Finally, the tail end of the exhale is where everything starts to fade out. For me, the tail goes back to being mostly top notes and it picks up some weirder stuff that doesn’t really show up behind all the noise of the body and base of a flavor. I’m mostly just noting anything weird there.
When I’m testing flavors or recipes, this is usually the approximate thing my brain is doing when I try to pick things apart. It helps me contextualize and report back out on flavors. I wouldn’t advocate some goofy rubric based on a geometric shape and hubris as necessary or anything, but if you had any questions about how warped I am after a pile of flavor notes, then now you know. I hope it was at least entertaining.
Just from a philosophical standpoint, I see the goal of my flavor notes as not to substitute for your own work, but as a rough buyers guide. I try to describe a profile as accurately as I can, so if you’re looking for a specific tool for a profile, it can hopefully put you on the right path.
The conclusion?
I’ve tried to outline a couple of different ways to approach your flavor notes. Where you choose to go with those is up to you, basically. If scrawling “green, candy, dirt” is enough to conjure up the memory of INW Wild Strawberry for you, then it’s officially a “good” flavor note. It’s all about doing future you a solid, when you’re staring at a desk full of flavors and trying to figure out what strawberry to use in your brand new strawberry and cream recipe. The primary purpose of your own flavor notes is to speed up the recipe development process so whatever works.
