Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.17 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: FA Blackberry @ 1 drop per 10ml / about .2%, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 43 days.
Flavor Description: I can't get this to work as anything beyond a floral mess. Most of this information is readily available, we just didn't have an official entry in the flavor review wiki.
Inhale has high floral notes right up front with some deeper blackberry sweetness hidden behind that floral punch. Moderately dense, even at .2%. Exhale is mostly just florals to me. Top notes, and the base are just full of the weird florals that flavoring companies apparently think work as a realistic berry note. There again, is some deeper, almost syrupy, blackberry sweeteness... but it's fairly hard to pick out and short-lived overall. Those florals just linger and turn a bit bitter. The sweetness here defintitely coats your mouth, but it's all just ruined by those florals.
Off-flavors: Soapy florals. All the way.
Throat Hit: Moderate, both from the florals and the underlying berry sweetness.
Uses & Pairings: I personally don't have any. I can't make this work in a reasonable fashion. The underlying blackberry is actually pretty good, but it's entombed by an avalanche of florals. They make creams weird and they just dominate other fruit notes.
Notes:
So this was steeped over a month at the lowest percentage I could make without doing a dilution. I'm just going to write this off without doing the usual S&V concentration thing. If you are bound and determined to use this, I can't figure out a way this would be palatable over .5%. I've tried it that high in recipes and those florals just completely dominate over other fruits and creams.
Second Opinions:
HIC Notes, because of course its a positive review:
"(less than)1% !! warning, strong flavor!FlavourArt states this one of their strongest flavors. 1% standalone is very strong. This is a deep, full, complex, rich blackberry flavor. It is not especially sweet, not like pie filling. The background flavor is musky, like wild blackberries. If it tastes like soap or perfume to you, you are using too much. Consider making a 10% dilution to use as your flavoring - this makes it easy to use very small amounts.Fresh Cream is excellent to lighten the flavor, and plenty of other, sweeter flavors in a recipe will give the best results. Fans of berry tobacco might enjoy a tiny (0.1-0.25%) touch of Blackberry in the background for the dark, deep berry flavor."
This is why flavor reviews matter. Especially in this format. Website/vendor reviews can be unreliable and dated. Also, HIC reviews make FA seem like the only flavor company worth its salt. Thanks for doing reviews. If it weren't for people like you, I would probably never be doing my own reviews. More importantly, I'd probably have many more bad concentrates because I wouldn't have all these reliable reviews to read on reddit before making purchases.
Flavor reviews are great. There is a lot of grey area in terms of where a flavor will work and personal preference etc... but they really do a great job of pointing out the straight garbage and giving us a good one page repository of information that is at least held up to some kind of standard.
The HIC reviews are useful sometimes, but really it's a little ridiculous when shit like this isn't called out for being a disaster. I think the only FA concentrate he didn't slobber all over was probably FA Green Tea. And those FA reviews are damn near all you end up seeing when you're looking for the flavors on ELR, which is disheartening.
It would be nice to see more reviews by people that just elaborate a bit more rather than saying something is their favorite 5 stars!
Also can't be mad at HIC at least he took the time to write and share all his notes. The more resources the better
Hahah yeah why does everyone who is putting FA notes into ELR just decide to CTRL-C/CTRL-V the HIC review? It's already there 6 times, dumbass! :D
I get what you're saying but your notes are at the top of the page when you click on a flavor, so it's a lot easier to reference those notes quickly if you just put them there, rather than try to find the original source.
I really like TFA blackberry... still very strong but the floral notes are more muted and you get a nice tart blackberry flavor