FLAVORING Posts
On alltheflavors.com we have formulations that you use to "mix" flavored recipes. Most people on the site use these to create eliquid, but we have a lot of different ingredients to create other things to. I've been drinking a lot of tea lately, mostly green tea, but also some mixtures with green, oolong, and white teas. I mostly have individual size tea bags, so I would put in 2 green tea bags and 2 oolong tea bags, to make a green tea with a little kick. I also have used some flavored tea bags. It eventually occurred to me, I have all of these flavor concentrates, I wonder if I could flavor my own tea. Well, I can!
I did some research, some math, and compared usage percentages of different concentrates. The concentrate bottles most of us get drop 0.02 grams of concentrate per drop. I wanted to try to create a simple formula for use, that would work for drops or grams (or mL). Based on the research, it looked like people were using 2 to 3 drops per 8 ounces of water, while one site recommends 5 drops per 12 ounce of water. I deduced this down to 1 drop per 100mL. Since 0.02 grams is 0.02mL, this approach simplified usage percentage, which comes out to 0.02%.
I created a formulation on ATF that uses brewed green tea and a flavor modifier of 0.02x. I left sugar out of the formulation and it assumes you've already sweetened the tea to your liking. I've made my formulation public, you can see it here: Mixnjuice's Green Tea. To use it, just select it under a recipe with the Mix button in the formulations list. I've only tried it with Flavorah flavors, one of them made the best Mango Green Tea I've ever tasted, but it should work with other brands. I plan to test others, so if it doesn't work as well, then I'll make a v2 formulation to adjust the modifier, but none of the Flavorah flavors I tested used the same percentages, so it should be fairly universal.
One downside to my methodology, is you are more limited at smaller quantities. For instance, there are a lot of flavors that you wouldn't, easily, be able to use at the 100mL minimum, because it would require less than 1 drop. You would need to find a less concentrated flavoring at 100mL, something like Capella or The Flavor Apprentice comes to mind, but that means you'd need to use more flavoring as the scale goes up. Overall though I'm extremely satisfied and surprised at how well this works.
