Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.15 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: FLV Lychee @ 1% and 1 drop per 10 ml (about .25%), 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 7 days.
Flavor Description: Sweet lychee with a pretty intense, bright floral edge. Floral note here tastes pretty solid, not really thin and perfumey. The base is fairly accurate to canned lychee, which somewhere between tarter rosehips and the grapes out of fruit cocktail. Syrupy sweet, and a bit of a bully. I'd recommend mixing this sub .25% up to .5% and use it as a sweet, tropical base.
Inhale is sweet and moderately dense. Full, tart elderflower florals and a syrupy white grape kind of base. There's almost a red berry kind of vibe to that the grape base, but it doesn't really taste like red grapes at all, if that makes any kind of sense. Exhale is sweet and full, with that canned lychee picking up some tarter rosehip kind of character. Florals in the top notes, but they are quite a bit more solid than the lighter perfumey notes you get off most other fruits. Really reminds me of FLV Elderflower, where it's a more solid, substantial floral note with some leafy green body to it. Syrupy sweetness with just a hint of a darker caramel to it, that sticks to your mouth a bit. Not a lot of harshness, but it definitely has a throat hit to it. Lingering florals and sticky sweet mouthfeel.
Off-flavors: This has pretty heavy floral punch to it. The florals here aren't really offensive, and don't really have the thinness to taste perfumey. It's a tarter, green, slightly more solid kind of floral. I also think overall the concentrate can come off a bit soapy, especially when it's up too high in mix or mixed with something that has some earthniess to it. Shout out to Tootall for saying it kind of tastes like fresh laundry smells, because that's an excellent way of describing it.
Throat Hit: Light, it's not harsh as much as those florals are pretty intense and tart and it's pretty sweet overall.
Uses & Pairings: A tricky flavor to mix. The florals here tend to stick out in mixes, So i'd focusing mostly on brighter fruits and candy profiles. It's pretty intensely sweet, so at a lower percentage you'll get some good sweetness without a ton of that floral edge. The florals here seem to work well with that entire tropical thing, guava, grapes, cherries, and citrus in general.
Not a ton of use in the cream or bakery department, but if you want to go in that direction keep it really light. This doesn't play well at all with any kind of buttery or eggy notes. Something like marshamllow or vanilla swirl is about "creamy" as i'd get with this, and the selective muting in those flavors should help mellow out the florals here a bit.
Notes: This is really strong stuff. I get the full dose of those floral top notes at .25%. The base is definitely sweet, but it doesn't quite cross the line into syrupy and there's a nice tartness to it. .5% is much more syrupy, and some of the bite of the florals is balanced out by that deeper sweetness. 1% is pretty overwhelmingly sweet for me, and it's getting a bit darker and caramelized. Florals aren't necessarily stronger, but they do seem to picking up a bit of that fresh laundry vibe. At 3%, this is surprisingly un-terrible. Really heavy and sweet, and the florals don't really get perfumey so much as they get really green and leafy. It does get really plastic-y for me this high though, so I probably wouldn't recommend trying to roll over the odometer on this and making it work again higher.
Quick comparison to the other Lychees I've tried, this is probably my favorite of the bunch. CAP Sweet Lychee is okay, and may be quite a bit easier to mix with. It's much less floral than this, and it's a pretty decent candy lychee if a bit boring. FA Lychee isn't quite as sweet, and the florals there come across more chemical and have a bit of hairspray to them. FA Lychee has a sticky mouthfeel too, but it's more a weird grape jelly sticky as opposed to the heavier syrup of the FLV. And before /u/ID10-T chimes in here, FE Lychee is apparently awesome. He said as much in the comments for my review of FA Lychee, and this post would seem to confirm that.
Second Opinions:
Here's an older FOTW covering Lychee. Lots of good info on FLV Lychee in there.
Have you tried going even lower than ~0.25%? After Milk Chocolate, I think my starting place for new FLV flavors is going to be 0.08%. Whether means making a dilution or doing 60ml SFTs, I'm not sure, but someone's got to do the limbo with these flavors and found out how low they can go.
I respect your resolve with that... because I'm pretty sure I drop per 10ml is about the minimum I'm going to do for testing unless something seems completely out of whack with the concentrate. From a practical standpoint I'm still dumping way more juice than I'm comfortable with just making 20ml of each flavor, and I'd have to be mixing a 30ml to get close to that, along with another 10ml at a higher percentage. I tend to use my .25 tests to start on my concentration testing, so that's at least 3x the concentrate used, or getting another bottle in the mix.
funny. I think FLV does not taste like real lychee at all, pretty terrible actually. Cap sweet lychee is the most authentic and realistic of any of the ones ive tried and IMO the best. Im a big fan of lychee as well, its one of my fav drinks/fruits Thats why you just have to buy them and try for yourself. YMMV :P
I've never had a real lychee before but I found this flavor enjoyable. I picked up some exotic notes along with some skin, almost a peppery type flavor from this. At 1% I personally didn't find much of a floral edge to this but I did try it in a mix so it might have cut down on those notes.
Not a bad flavor just a little too one dimensional for my tastes.
I like this stuff, but pretty much because it's an oddball flavor. I have a personal mix that is just 1% Hops, 1% Elderflower, and 1% Lychee. It's like a floral gasoline in a weirdly satisfying way. The only part of this tastes realistic to me is that syrupy base, and holy hell is it sweet enough to stand up to intense stuff like the hops and elderflower.
Now that is an interesting idea. I keep forgetting to use those odd ball flavors they have.
I have been playing around with Lychee to help sweeten the melon mix I'm working on. It does provide a background sweetness to flavors like,FLV Wild Melon, JF Honeydew, FA/FLV Cantaloupe but the odd skin/pepper flavor kind throws off the whole mix but the sweetness did punch through the profile.