Recommended steep: 14-20 days for the grapefruits to meld and the watermelon to come out and play

I guess I’ll start out by first explaining the stupid non-descriptive name. Hungry Hippo Safari began as an attempt to clone Hippo by Safari Juice back when I first started mixing and was still vaping some store- bought. Hippo was a sweet watermelon-grapefruit mix and until now I was calling my version Drunken Hippo. I’m not evil enough to release a booze-less recipe with the word drunken in the name so I’m going with Hungry Hippo Safari. Maybe someone can make a boozy version and call it Drunken Hippo.

Safari Juice seems to have disappeared sometime after Nov 2018. It’s too bad because I liked their entire lineup and they sold 30ml bottles for $5 USD each. They could ship from Canada or the US which meant that Canadian customers had to pay in USD but didn’t have to worry about customs fees. You can see the archived version of their website here: https://web.archive.org/web/20181122213439/https://safarijuice.com/
Here’s a picture of their lineup:
Image: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XEBPO5sD6O0/maxresdefault.jpg
And some ancient YouTube juice reviews for the curious:
Youtube review:



So what does it taste like? Well it tastes wet and pink. With grapefruit. That’s about it. It’s a really simple profile. It’s taken me around 5 years to finish but that’s mostly because there was a 2 year gap where I completely forgot about this one while working on other recipes. Last August I remixed the version where I left off and realized this recipe was too good to leave unfinished. So I decided to finish it off and I’m glad I did. It’s quickly become a favorite of mine and is a frequent appearance in my 100ml rotations.

I’ve summarized my (boring) development notes in the table below. The recipe started to come together at V4 when I decided to try the base from yetisuncle’s Kanzi Clone (e-liquid-recipes.com/recipe/322721/%20Kanzi%20Clone), but with LA Watermelon instead of FA. I own about 6 watermelon flavors now but LA is still my favorite and during the steep it gets better and better. Cheap and good. I like that.

V5 became my reference version but contained too much PG for me at nearly 20% total flavor. The goal from there was to target 10% total flavor without reducing the taste. I also tried FA Kiwi at V5 and slightly preferred it over FW, but FW Kiwi will work almost as well in here.
In total I tried 2 different Kiwis, 4 different sweeteners, and 4 different grapefruits. Flavors that were rejected for this recipe because they weren’t working out are: HS Watermelon, FA Watermelon, TFA Honeydew, TFA Dragonfruit, FA Grapefruit, INW Grapefruit, FW Ruby Red Grapefruit, and Ethyl Maltol.

I knew right from V2 that a touch of INW White Grapefruit was required to really sell the grapefruit experience. But INW White Grapefruit is all top notes. I wanted a 2nd grapefruit in there to fill it out and it took a little while to find the right one, which turned out to be CAP Grapefruit. Once I nailed the right grapefruit it only took one more revision to dial it in and wrap everything up at V14.

That’s all for now. It’s a pretty boring recipe but very tasty. I haven’t tried it with coolants because I think they will mute the grapefruit top notes and defeat the one thing that separates this recipe from other watermelon recipes. But you are more than welcome to play around with it!