wait
@1973PortlandToker bro, you're taking slow draws or fast?
slow draws low temp is the best setup for taste
around 170-C180C in most vapes, ~200C in TP80
tl;dr Taste is a personal and variable thing, but go slow and low as recommended above works best for me too.
Update after reading this:
I'll notice slight difference in the tingle of the terps of some strains or strong pine/fruity notes but I get really big flavor on dabs
if there's flavour in a dab, maybe that's because the material kind of all boils off in a flash - so everything is present in that first taste. Never tried but it sounds pretty good to me. I only use dry herb vaporisers so that's what my experience is limited to. The chemistry doesn't change.
The odours tend to be the terpene molecules that come out mostly at the start of your extraction profile. At a given temperature, they have high vapour pressures so they vaporise fast. Table 3 of
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/can.2021.0173 shows some vapour pressures at 180C. Cannabinoids are low compared to smelly terpenes so slower to leave the bud. Graph copied below to illustrate.
Indeed they happen right at the start for me.
"Taste" is really complicated but the tongue you expose to vapour coming and going is mostly responsible for core flavour dimensions like "salty" and "sweet", not terpene odours.
The back of your nose is where most
flavours are detected.
Perversely, any particular combination of nerve cells stimulated by a terpene are quickly exhausted temporarily.
Take a while to recover from a heavy bout of detecting I guess. Non-vaporising people will smell your vapour a lot longer than you will in my experience.
Try occasionally, but don't much like inhaling vapour through my nose, because it's too much sensation for me, even going low and slow as recommended above and it paralyses any real sense of smell for a while. Do not like.
Blowing
at least some vapour out through your nose, particularly from the earliest vapour, will probably help figure out the flavour thing.
Those tasty terpenes disappear fast for me. Subsequent vapour taste is probably mostly those slower cannabinoids. Hard to describe but a kind of
all terpenes at once almost rich chemical taste for me.
If the earliest vapour smells horrible when blown out your nose, try a lower temperature setting on your device - it's probably too hot. You can always raise it again to get all the THC goodness out when you've had that first taste of the extraction at a lower temperature. Not sure there's a reliable dry herb technology to provide both flavour and THC impact simultaneously since they are sequential in the extraction profile?
The ritual can be part of the fun if flavour is of interest.