I purchased a 50ml bottle of 12mg nicotine strength Dekang Desert Ship e-liquid with my own money. I bought it online from Electo-ciggie for £11.94. It's available in nicotine strengths of 6, 12, 18 and 24mg. http://www.electro-ciggie.co.uk/
While the label advises the user to keep the bottle out of the reach of children, the screw-top cap is not child-proof. The bottle is labelled as PG, despite the website identifying the liquid as a PG/VG mixture. It is also labelled with the production and expiry dates, the name of the liquid and its nicotine content.
Desert Ship is my all-day vape and has been since the day I quit cigarettes and started vaping. Until recently, I bought it from an e-cig vendor in 20ml rebadged bottles with the vendor's name given prominence over Dekang's. I don't have a problem with rebadged goods as such, but wherever possible I prefer to cut out the middle-man/woman with his/her markup and buy the source's originally bottled and badged product.
I find Desert Ship a low-key but flavourful vape that manages to satisfy without being in my face. I don't necessarily want to eat rich foods all day, every day. That kind of food I consider an indulgence with which I treat myself on an occasional basis. Nevertheless, we all have to eat every day and when we do, we still want to enjoy whatever it is we're eating. It's the same with vaping. A least for me, it is.
As I inhale the warm vapour, I taste a subtle sweetness on the tip of my tongue, with earthy notes registering on the sides of my tongue and a mounting sense of pressure at the back of the throat until I feel a "thump" or "kick" which tells me that the drag is done and its time to exhale. On the exhale there's a slight, but not unpleasant raspiness at the back of the throat and I find that, as with the vapour of most e-liquids, the flavour isn't fully realised until the vapour is washing across my taste buds on its way out of my mouth. This is quite a distinct flavour; it has a certain earthy quality and tastes somewhat like the aroma of a freshly opened pouch of tobacco.
Truth be told, Desert Ship doesn't taste like a lit cigarette to me. The little I've read on the matter suggests that reproducing the taste of burning tobacco in vapour form is a particularly evasive thing. I think Desert Ship, like most, if not all tobacco e-liquids approximates the flavour of the essences of certain tobacco leaves rather than attempts to replicate the taste of the smoke generated by the burning of those leaves.
With a PG/VG ratio of 80/20, vapour production is good. With two back to back drags on the e-cig I get a very satisfactory cloud of vapour that's as good as any liquid I've tried with a higher VG content. At 12mg it produces, for me, a reasonable throat hit without it provoking a coughing fit (or the dizziness and gurgling stomach I associate with nicotine overload).
There is a very slight metallic aftertaste in the mouth lingering on the insides of the cheeks and in the spaces between my teeth and inside lips. This might sound unpleasant but I find it so subtle that it actually forms an agreeable conclusion to the whole Desert Ship experience.
I highly recommend this juice. It's cheap and cheerful. It doesn't make any bold assertions about its pedigree and at no time are words like "gourmet" or "organic" used in the marketing for it but I've grown to love it and for me, it's here to stay.
Vapers with children will want to be extra careful in storing this bottle.
