Well just when you think your instinct for mixing won't fail ya....I mixed up a damn DOG last night and won't be the slightest bit surprised if I dump it down the sink next week. I will give it a little time, but my god, there's this back note that is like nasty feet and it is just gross. It'll be a miracle if it ever amounts to anything. I am thinking the culprit is the mixture of FW Hazelnut and TFA Oatmeal Cookie. Won't bore you with the rest.
For the most part I've had exceptional luck with mixing in the slapdash way it's evolved into. I do all the wrong things and still seem to work my way around to stuff that I really, really like. Most of the work I do before mixing is all mental, it's all my imagination with the backup experience of the things I've mixed before plus a bit of info from the Notes section of ELR and the comments I read in VU.
It's definitely gotten into my head now - I've had times when a recipe I've been mulling over will wake me in the middle of the night once my brain has worked a problem out without my conscious intervention. lol (That's an occupational hazard for me anyway, first started happening when I was in my 20s and was learning to write program code at school.)
I think probably because of the condition of my taste buds after 39 years of smoking, mixing isn't that exact a science for me. I have found that I need mixes to total out somewhere between 12 and 18% most times, so that I can taste them, and I'm not the type to mess around with one mix for too long. If I mix it and it isn't what I want, and it can't be fixed pretty easily, I move on. It's a personality thing, I guess - I could never have the patience that some of you have to keep working and tweaking a mix until it's just right. Or maybe it isn't quite that - maybe it's that I don't really care whether a mix is perfect or not - if it tastes good, it's fine with me. Doesn't have to be perfect.
I too have found recipes of real-life foods or drinks and have been able to make a few very lovely mixes that way.
I very rarely single-flavor test anything. Just don't have the patience or the room to spread out and do it properly. And every once in a while I come up with a DOG, like I did last night, but for the most part working it out in my head, with the recipe in ELR and me just going over and over it before I ever mix the first bit, works for me. I always taste my mixes within about a half hour of putting them together, and can usually come up with corrections right then if needed. I make corrections, adjust my recipe, and I'm almost always ok with that.
And the main evolution that has happened with me is that (1) I've had to admit to myself that an 8% recipe most times is not gonna do it for me. At first I followed recipes religiously and was vaping juice that tasted like pure wimpiness, (2) my likes and dislikes in flavors are not mainstream, for example, I am just not that crazy about fruit. I like spices and beverage flavors a lot, so for the most part I'm better off coming up with my own recipes, and (3) the best thing I ever did was buy a damn scale. Counting drops and messing up a bunch of cylinders and pipettes is just bullshit.
Now if someone could help me conquer COCONUT, for god's sake, I'd be a happy camper. Just one damn time I'd like to have a coconut-based juice that has a real sweetened-coconut flavor.