Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.17 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: FLV Lovage @ .5%, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 23 days.
Flavor Description: This is more of a flavor additive than stand alone. The review on the Flavorah website states that it "tones" flavors, and that seems as good a description as any. It seems to round out and give volume to green flavors, for better or worse. It also works a lot like a better version of ethyl maltol on citrus and seems to really define the edges of the flavors in tobaccos.
Again, not really a single flavor but just for the proverbial lulz... Inhale is sweet and dense, with a straight green note that has no kind of corresponding vegetal body. Exhale is dense with an earthier sweetness. The green note kind of vanishes but it leaves a space on the tongue where I can kind of just feel like my tastebuds for sour and bitter have been lit up. Like something here is just priming those taste buds. Just out of curiousity, I vaped a bunch of this and took a sip of a lime mineral water (shoutout to Trader Joe's) and the lime was especially bright and effervescent without tasting sour. It's definitely strange. I've also tried this all the way at 3% solo and it bears an uncanny resemblance to the filling from sweet potato pie. Definite marshmallow sweetness and an earthy caramel taste. Not bad, but weird as all hell.
Off-flavors: Hard to tell what to call an off-flavor here. The earthyness solo definitely has just a hint of wet wool but I've never noticed that in a mix.
Throat Hit: Light but there. Good deal of tightness in my throat vaping this solo.
Uses & Pairings: So, this is where it gets useful. This is a flavor toner all the way.
This does some really interesting things to green notes in fruits and fruit-like concentrates. INW Rhubarb is my personal favorite. It definitely gives the green, astringent note there some major depth and definition. At .5% Rhubarb and .25% Lovage it gives you something that tastes a whole lot like lightly cooked rhubarb. I tried this at .25% Lovage and 1% JF Honey Peach and it just pushed the green notes there into some really unpleasant territory. It doesn't add to the perfume aspect of the flavor but it does make the green notes a lot grassier and prominent. Tested with FA Raspberry, FW Huckleberry, and FA Blackcurrant and it does largely the same thing. It pushes fruits into a weird green area that is a little too realistic to underripe fruit to make it pleasant.
Citrus actually works surprisingly well, it seems to keep the brighter parts of those flavors while adding some volume and rounding off the harsher edges. Tested with FW Ruby Red Grapefruit, HS Green Orange, and FA Bergamot and the overall net effect was pretty damn positive. I'd say this deserves serious consideration as a citrus additive or alternative to Ethyl Maltol to make those harsher citruses more palatable.
I also had a tester of FLV Native Tobacco lying around and ended up with about .5% Lovage and 3% Native Tobacco. It definitely gives some added dimension to the Tobacco and pushes the entire thing into a denser but still leafier and more defined taste. Going further and adding in 2% FA Hypnotic Mist I got a really interesting, slightly sour, but still robust and defined tobacco mix.
Notes:
Use sparingly. Like really sparingly. This is an additive at heart, so treat as such. I'd use this at .25% with something like rhubarb or citrus. Tobaccos are a bit more robust and so I'd bump it up to .5% in those applications.
Worth noting, this concentrate doesn't blend worth a damn. It's extremely thick and tends to just clump up when added, so amp that shaking up quite a bit to get it into suspension. It's also impossible, as far as I can tell, to get a small drop of it with a dropper bottle. The surface tension here gives you .05g drops at a minimum so bust out the pipettes to hit a low percentage.
I still don't feel like I've cracked the case on this one. The flavor, and even the consistency of the concentrate is confusing in a relatively good way. Lots of potential for the person who nails down the usage here.
Second Opinions:
Not a whole bunch, somewhat understandably.
You're like a review machine. Thanks for another great one. Looking forward to trying out some of the suggestions.
Some say he literally is a machine, some kind of flavor-testing artificially super intelligent robot. I don't know if I buy into that rumor, but I'm tempted to believe the one about the Devil's Bagpipes.
There's never an inappropriate time for the Protestant Reformation.
The Devil's Bagpipes are real. I had to laugh a bit when I had three mods lined up and going the other day. It was a sad moment of self-realization.
Wet wool? I can't help but wonder how you achieved such a reference point. Lol
You ever smell wet wool socks? I mean, i didn't shove them in my mouth or anything but you can extrapolate quite a bit.
I spent around a month screwing around with Lovage when it first came out, and I've yet to complete/release the results/long term testing. But man is this stuff neat. My first impression standalone was exactly as you describe it, non distinctly vegetal. My first testers were also with INW Rhubarb as that's a favorite of mine, and also with some NETs which went very well. It also does really well with herbal types like horehound and sassafras, if everything stays low.
To combat the difficulty in getting the usage in ultra low percentages I made myself a dilution at 50% in PG to help thin it out some. This makes it much more manageable when you're trying to get down to the .15%-.25% range. The citrus part you mention is surprising, I can't wait to get home to test this out.
Good tip on the horehound and sassafras, I wasn't thinking about that and it makes a whole lot of sense. I tried doing this solo a couple times and then read the additive part on the flavorah website and it kind of clicked a bit for me. Really, really interesting concentrate. I'm now pretty excited to do some solid recipe development with it to try to get something really cool out of it.
Nothing to add but I just wanted to say I really appreciate your reviews. They are in depth and descriptive. I wish I had the refined palate to dissect flavors like that. You mentioned Honey Peach... is that flavor really all that good? I keep hearing about it and haven't pulled the trigger yet. *nevermind... just saw your review posted on that flavor :P
Thank you, I've been circling around doing this review for a while, so this is like the 3rd time I attempted it. My palate isn't all that great, I end up following a lot of the cues I get from the second opinions and stuff. It's a whole lot easier to get into the flavors when I'm looking at other people's opinions and have some sort of jumping off point.
Yeah, that honey peach is weird. I can't call it bad at all, the overall peach flavor is pretty solid.. Like I say in the review, it feels backwards. I've never had anything juicy on the inhale and then dry on the exhale. Odd stuff.
Lol. I just really love peaches but every peach flavoring I have tried is harsh. It's so weird. (Lorann's, TFA Juicy and regular, FA Peach, FA White Peach, Flavorah Peach, INW Peach, Capella Yellow Peach, all harsh) It's similar to the harshness you get with an alcohol based flavoring but leaving the cap off does nothing to help it. I don't know if I'm sensitive to the ingredient that provides peach flavor or what.