Last fact-checked 28 February 2024 | Report a content error
Fancy becoming a bit of a vaping expert? You’re in the right place!
From coffee to liquorice, menthol to milk chocolate, the flavour profiles you can pick up from an e-cigarette are virtually limitless. So why not take the time to appreciate it?
To become a proper e-liquid connoisseur, all you’ll need is practice, patience and a pen & paper. In this week’s article, we'll teach you some of the basic tricks professional tasters use to train their taste buds. Follow these steps and you’ll be vaping like a true connoisseur in no time!
How to taste e-liquid like a pro
Just like the perfume, wine and coffee industries, e-liquid is all about the taste.
The best e-liquid manufacturers employ professional tasters to fine-tune the products they’re developing. We got to meet a few of these professional tasters when we were creating our own vape juice (Fog Addicts - learn all about it here). These tasting pros taught us a few things about how to properly taste a premium e-liquid. First, there are a few ‘tasting basics’ you must do:
Record your experiences
The most important thing you can do is to keep a record of every flavour you try. You should always make a note of what vape juices you have tasted, when you tasted them and what they tasted like. This is something that professional tasters and wine sommeliers do all the time.
Tasting notes don’t just protect you from picking a bad juice twice. The simple act of writing down your tasting experience forces you to slow down and concentrate on the flavours you're experiencing. Armed with pen and paper, you can start to articulate what it is that you’re tasting. It gives you something to look back on and learn from, and over time it improves your palate.
Understand how we taste
Whenever we taste food, we’re almost always using our tongue and our nose to do it. The same goes for vaping.
When you take a draw on your vape device, parts of your mouth and nostrils will pick up different flavours in the e-liquid. Professional tasters will divide these two sensory experiences in their own minds. When they’re sampling wine or perfume, they’ll keep separate notes on how something tastes on the tongue and how it smells in the nose. You can do the same with an e-liquid.
Learn about Top, Middle and Base Notes
You might have noticed in our product descriptions we’ll often talk about ‘top notes’, ‘base notes’ and ‘middle notes’. This language comes from the perfume industry. It's perfect for e-cigarettes, too.
When you spray and smell a perfume, you might notice that the fragrance usually has a beginning, a middle and an end. Your senses don’t interpret the whole flavour at once. Some parts of the fragrance are less stable than others — they don’t ‘last’ for the duration of your smelling experience. Other smells will hang around in the background, like the canvas upon which the other scents are painted. E-cigarette vapour works in the same way.
So what's the difference between a top note, base note and a mid note?
Top Notes
Typically sharp and fresh flavours, the top notes are the flavours that hit first and fade fastest. Ginger and Citrus are good examples of top notes. You’ll usually taste top notes on the inhale, but very often they will fade away on the exhale.
Base Notes
The base notes are the ‘flavour foundation’. In e-liquid, a base note is a flavour that hangs around for the duration of the vape. Base notes are often earthy or creamy flavours — they’re the ‘heavy molecule’ flavours. You’ll usually taste base notes most clearly on the exhale. This is because the top and mid notes ‘crowd out’ the base notes on the inhale, then fade away as you breathe out.
Mid Notes
Mid notes are the complex, slightly richer flavours that follow the top notes and hang around a little longer to complement those base notes. Florals are a great example of mid-note flavours. Mid notes can be harder to define in some e-liquids, but you’ll learn to pick up on them with practice.
Interesting flavour facts: menthol and tobacco
Two of the most popular flavours are menthol and tobacco. These flavours don't behave in the same way as others (fruits, spices, breakfast flavours etc). It's worth bearing this in mind when you're testing and tasting different e-liquids.
Menthol isn’t ‘tasted’ like a normal flavour
E-cigarette vapour can give you an extra sensation that goes beyond the traditional ‘five basic tastes’ of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Menthol gives a cool sensation which is transmitted to the brain via the trigeminal nerve (the nerve responsible for sensing hot & cold). When you get the menthol kick of a vape juice, your brain isn’t tasting a cold flavour — it’s quite literally feeling a cold sensation (source: ift.org). If you vape a lot of e-liquids with menthol in them, pay attention to the ‘iciness’ of the vape in your tasting notes.
Tobacco isn’t as diverse as we thought
As ex-smokers, we vividly remember the tasting difference between cigarette brands when we were younger. Gareth and I had both always assumed that this difference in flavour was down to the type of tobacco each cigarette brand used, but this isn’t the case at all. The tobacco ingredient in most cigarette brands actually plays a very small role in the final taste.
In 2016, a group of scientists tested the flavour of 28 different commercially-available tobacco products. They found that the tobacco flavour in each product was accompanied by a mix of 144 different flavour additives. It's the additives, rather than the tobacco leaves themselves, that give a cigarette brand its distinctive flavour (source: bmj.com).
This is especially important for quitters to bear in mind. It can take a while to find an e-liquid flavour that closely matches your favourite brand of tobacco cigarette.
Get help finding the flavour that’s right for you
One of the reasons we started Gourmet E-Liquid was because we genuinely felt like there was room for connoisseurship in the world of e-liquid. For us, vaping is one of the most enjoyable ways to quit smoking, because there are literally thousands of flavours to choose from.
If the sheer number of flavours to choose from is a bit too overwhelming, remember you can always give us a call. You don't need to be a connoisseur to get started with vaping. We can offer advice on which flavours you're likely to enjoy.
If you just want to roll the dice on a few different flavours, take a look at our mystery boxes. Mystery boxes include a wide selection of different e-liquids at a really good price. It's a great way to experiment with a wide range of tastes that you perhaps wouldn't think of initially ... and it's one of our most popular products.
Stay safe and happy vaping!
John Boughey