Betelgeuse by Outerworld - Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?

Mixing notes

I'm not sure where you're getting the fairy floss from, there are no sweeteners in Betelgeuse, just fruit concentrates. To be specific, pineapple, mango, strawberry, and raspberry. You might find it easier to distinguish each flavour if you know ahead of time what they are, alternatively it might just muddle things up more. More than one person on the beta portal said they could taste grape, but there's no grape in there.

Juice descriptions

Until this morning when I sat down and started thinking about the vape, I was turned off by the Mango but now that I am sitting down and thinking about the taste and the experience... it does kinda work.

This is a bit off topic because I don't think what I'm about to describe is something you're doing, but that quote reminded me of something I've been pondering in the last few days.

It's becoming increasingly clear to me as I read through the reviews on the portal that there's a reason why juice vendors typically don't write flavour profiles on bottle labels. What seems to happen is that when someone tries a bottle of juice where there's a detailed description of the ingredients, they stop tasting the juice for what it is and assessing it on that basis, but instead start to compare it to what their imagination told them it would taste like.

I found myself doing the same thing with an order I got from Adirondack recently. I fired up some Cayuga in one of my Atlantis tanks. Cayuga is meant to be a blend of kiwi, papaya, mango, and pineapple, and found myself saying "I can't taste any pineapple, I don't think that's kiwi, this isn't what I expected" and was feeling a bit disappointed. I switched out the tank (I usually have four or five tanks on the go with different juices inside, I switch between them regularly) and left it on my bench and promptly forgot about it.

A few days later I saw the tank on the bench, connected it to a battery and started puffing away absent-mindedly. I was racking my brain trying to figure out what I was vaping, and then I realised it was Cayuga. My perception the second time around was completely different than when I was vaping it the first time trying to taste the specific flavours I had in my head. Instead of focusing on what I wanted to taste, I was focusing on what I was actually tasting, and it tasted fantastic. Today, Cayuga is probably my #1 all-time favourite juice.

So I'm in this strange place now where I don't know whether or not to remove the flavour descriptions from the Outerworld labels or not. On the one hand I think it's a sound psychological decision, but on the other hand the juice names themselves aren't descriptive of the contents at all - I mean, what does your imagination say something called "Betelgeuse" would taste like? Or "Fomalhaut" or "Omicron Persei"? If I was using generic names like "Berry Blast" or "Bananarama" or whatever then it wouldn't be a problem, people would expect to taste banana, and whatever other flavours came along for the ride would just be a pleasant surprise.

Who knows. This is all an experiment, so I guess I'll find out what the right decision was sometime later after I've already had the labels printed :)

/r/aussievapers Thread