After reviewing Country Clouds Banana Bread Pudding, I still wanted more banana. Banana e-liquids are hard to find on a shelf, so this DIY roundup collects four well-liked banana recipes from E-Liquid Recipes, the recipe site I use most. My DIY posts normally stop at three recipes. This one has four, so both sides of banana get covered: two fruit smoothie mixes and two desserts.
The four recipes
Blood Orange and Banana Smoothie
Blood Orange and Banana Smoothie stood out to me because of the blood orange, a sharp, tangy citrus you rarely see in a recipe. Here it is rounded off with banana and a little sweetener. Cream, yogurt and vanilla are in the flavor list too, so expect something between a fruit mix and a dessert.
- VG/PG: 70/30
- Nicotine as written: 1mg, which you can change to suit yourself
- Steep: three days recommended, so treat that as the minimum before tasting
StrawNanShakes
StrawNanShakes stays with smoothies and uses the classic pairing of strawberry and banana, a duo that works in a real blender largely because banana thickens the drink. Unlike the blood orange mix, this recipe has no dessert flavorings, only fruit and smoothie ones, so pick it if you want a smooth, sweet fruit vape.
- VG/PG: 70/30, the ratio many commercial brands bottle at
- Nicotine as written: 3mg
- Steep: a week is suggested, though you can experiment with shorter or longer
Banudding Cake
On the dessert side, the first pick is a banana pudding cake. My complaint about the Country Clouds bottle was how faint its banana turned out. This recipe uses banana and vanilla custard in almost equal amounts, which should give a creamy vape where the banana still comes through thick. It also calls for graham cracker crust, the ingredient I am most curious about.
- VG/PG: 70/30, adjustable
- Nicotine as written: 3mg, adjustable
- Steep: none listed; a week or more is a sensible default for any new mix
Banana Moon Pie
Banana Moon Pie is the oddest recipe of the four, a dessert that would suit a Mardi Gras celebration. Its flavorings are marshmallow, graham cracker, sugar cookie and banana cream. It will not be for everyone.
- VG/PG: 80/20
- Nicotine as written: 3mg
- Steep: none listed, but several commenters said waiting a week worked well
Tools and ingredients
Getting set up takes longer than the mixing itself. Once everything is on hand, you can make several batches in one sitting.
- Tools: a graduated beaker, cylinders, empty vape juice bottles and an e-liquid mixer
- Base: Vegetable Glycerin (VG) and Propylene Glycol (PG)
- Nicotine: optional, for anyone who wants a throat hit
- Flavorings: whichever concentrates the recipe names
Liquid Nicotine Wholesalers stocks all of these. For the flavorings I go to The Perfumer’s Apprentice instead.
The recipes I post come from two sites, E-Liquid Recipes and All The Flavors. Both are filled by ordinary users, who can also rate, review and comment on each other’s mixes. Recipes there tend to name exact flavoring brands with three-letter codes such as CAP, FLV, SA and PUR. Many of those brands are sold by The Perfumer’s Apprentice, and using the named concentrate is how you get the result the recipe author intended.
How to read and adjust a recipe
What I like most about E-Liquid Recipes is that every ingredient can be set to your own preference. My usual mix is 3mg nicotine at 70/30 VG/PG. A small wrench icon above each recipe lets me enter those values, and it also switches the measurements between drops and weight. Mixing by weight needs a kitchen scale so each ingredient is measured accurately.
The site also has a flavor search. For an earlier post on chocolate e-liquid recipes I typed “chocolate” into the search bar and got far more highly rated results than I could use. Under each recipe, users leave notes about steeping, flavor substitutions and how the mix turned out. The layout is basic and easy to browse, a bit like Reddit for DIY vape juice.
Wrapping up
Mixing your own e-juice is less intimidating than it looks. Every commercial brand began somewhere and reached its finished flavors through long trial and error, and nothing stops you from doing the same with a flavor of your own. I plan to post one themed DIY article each week and would like to do a Halloween one toward the end of October, so flavor suggestions are welcome by social media, phone or email. If you mix any of these four, tell me how it went.