Heatsink

I thought the London Lemon Curd wasn't too bad in EZ soy. It smells more like lemon frosting or pudding than the Lemon Pound Cake from Peak's. After having the testers sample it, they all preferred the Peak's Lemon Pound Cake, but your mileage may vary.

The fresh brewed coffee smelled nutty, and a bit skunky, with a burnt rubber in it somewhere. This was in bitter creek soy, and without curing. I'm hoping it cures out and gets better, but so far: bleh.

I'm only guessing, but it could be that the straight soy wick is pulling too much fuel by capillary action and drowning itself. The higher meltpoint beeswax might be slowing down things in the burn to stabilize the reaction. Or it could be something completely chemically related, and judging from the mass spectrometer report on beeswax, it could be who knows what.

I'm surprised the water bath didn't solve the sink hole problems you're seeing Fern. I have tested the soy UA, and stearic, and beeswax. From what I can tell, the universal additive doesn't improve much over using stearic and beeswax. Scent load and throw don't have any problems either with stearic/beeswax added. The only cause I've found for sink holes has been thermal transfer in the wax from the core to external surfaces of the wax column, which normally can be avoided with low pour temps(around 100-110) with soy. You might try pouring a candle when the wax looks like gritty sandy wet-cement gunk to see how you like it. And don't feel bad about using veggie additives in your soy wax. Soy wax is kinda-sorta-maybe natural. It's manufactured by injecting hydrogen into very high temperature soy oil in the presence of a nickel catalyst if I remember right.

You can get soy universal additive from justbynature.com, and several other places. It works pretty well. The sinkholes and whatnot are probably caused by non-uniform cooling, since the outside walls are where heat is transferred to the container from the wax. So the outside is cooling faster than the inside of the wax column, which would create voids in the middle of the column. I'd guestimate cooling the candles very very slowly in a controlled environment would fix it, but who has time or the equipment for that?