I Want to Make a Café-Style Coffee Candle at 8–10% Fragrance — How Should I Test Whether the Fragrance Is Affecting Wick Performance?

What “affecting the wick” looks like in a coffee candle

At 8–10% fragrance, a café-style coffee candle is carrying a lot of oil. Fragrance changes how molten wax travels up the wick and how completely it burns at the flame, so the same wick can behave quite differently at 8% and at 10%. The usual signs are a carbon cap or mushroom forming on the wick tip, a taller or jumpier flame, soot on the glass, or the opposite: a flame that shrinks and drowns in a pool that has become too fluid.

The only reliable way to see this is to compare. A candle at 10% that mushrooms tells you very little on its own. The same wick in an unscented control that does not mushroom tells you the oil is involved. So the test on this page is built around a control jar and three loads on the same wicks.

First, be sure which 10% you mean

This series measures load as a share of the whole candle. Roasted Coffee's product page, like CSI's other oil pages, phrases its range as a share of wax weight. At the top of your range that difference matters.

Take a candle with an example fill of 180 g. At 10% of the candle, that is 18 g of oil and 162 g of wax. As a share of wax, 18 ÷ 162 is about 11.1%, which sits above Roasted Coffee's stated soy range of 6–10%. If instead you mean 10% of the wax weight, the candle holds about 163.64 g of wax and 16.36 g of oil, which is about 9.1% of the candle.

The same arithmetic matters when you buy. A 100-candle run at 10% of a 180 g candle needs 100 × 18 g = 1.8 kg of oil, while 10% of the wax weight needs about 1.64 kg. Ordering from the wrong figure leaves you short or overstocked.

This page tests 8%, 9% and 10% of the candle so you can see the effect, but treat the 10% jar as an experiment beyond the stated load range on the product page, not a production candidate, unless your own testing gives you good reason.

The eight-jar test: control plus three loads on two wicks

Use the 200 ml clear salsa jar with its 63 mm lug cap. CSI does not publish a fill weight for it, so weigh your own; this example uses 180 g. Pour every jar from one melt of CSI 464 on the same day.

Eco C1 and Eco C2 are candidates to test in a jar of this size, not a recommended size; CSI publishes no wick sizing chart. Keep both controls. They are the yardstick for every scented jar on the same wick.

Why two wicks rather than one? Because a single wick can only tell you that something changed. Two wicks tell you which direction to move. If the 10% jar overloads Eco C1 but burns cleanly on Eco C2, the oil needs a stronger wick at that load. If it overloads both, the load itself is the problem and no wick change will rescue it in this jar.

What to record at each checkpoint

Cure everything for at least the page's stated 48–72 h in soy. Then burn each wick group together in a still room, trimming every wick to the same length before lighting. Choose checkpoints that suit your day, for example at one hour, two hours and the end of a session, and record the same five things every time.

Run more than one burn. Some effects only appear once the pool has formed fully or on the second and third sessions, when residual carbon and a deeper pool come into play. A suggested routine is three sessions per jar before drawing a conclusion.

Keep the sheet simple enough to use

A burn record only helps if you fill it in every time. One row per jar per checkpoint, five short columns, and a photo of the jars together at each checkpoint is enough. Number the jars on their bases rather than their lids so labels cannot be swapped. At the end of the test, put the scented jars beside their control in your notes and read across: any column where the scented jars drift away from the control as the load rises is the fragrance showing its effect on the wick.

Never leave any of the eight jars burning unattended, keep them apart from each other and anything flammable, and stop any jar that smokes heavily or flares.

Reading the result, then buying

Pick the lowest load that gives the café-level throw you want with a burn that looks like its control. Here is what each load costs in a salsa jar bought at the 100-pack price of ₹29.50 each, with CSI 464 at ₹0.5074 per gram, Roasted Coffee at ₹3.738 per gram and Eco C1 at ₹5.90.

These exclude packaging, labels, labour, shipping and GST. Going from 8% to 10% adds ₹11.62 per candle. If the 10% jar soots on C1 and gains little throw, that money buys you a worse candle.

For a café order, the per-candle difference multiplies quickly. Fifty candles at 10% rather than 8% cost 50 × ₹11.62 = ₹581.00 more in oil, which is worth spending only if your burn record shows the higher load is both cleaner and stronger, not just stronger in the first hour.

Where this page fits

CSI already has guides that cover parts of this question. This page turns the product above into a raw-material list; these go deeper on the rest:

Three things to buy for this job

Frequently asked questions