Strawberry Waffles by Diamond Vapor

This is an expanded and revised version of a review that I originally posted on the Planet of the Vapes forum.

I won this 30ml bottle of Strawberry Waffles e-juice in a giveaway run on Facebook by the vendor, Diamond Vapor. www.diamond-vapor.com Diamond Vapor are a US company based in Florida run by a very friendly and enthusiastic couple. Their attention to customer service has inspired a loyal customer base who have formed a likewise friendly, enthusiastic and helpful community on Facebook.

The bottle of Strawberry Waffles that I received is a 12mg 50% PG, 50% VG juice. The RRP on the website is $12.00 for a 30ml bottle. Each of their e-juices are offered in 10 or 30 ml bottles at nicotine strengths of 6, 12, 18 or 24mg and PG/VG mixes of 50/50, 60/40 or 70/30. There is also the option to specify your own preferred PG/VG mix if you so desire.

The bottle is an easy to squeeze plastic with a pointed dropper. The screw-top lid is not childproof, so vapers with children will want to be careful about where they store it. The label does however, advise the user to "keep away from children". Further information includes the date the juice was "born", nicotine strength and PG/VG percentages.

The colour of the liquid is an inviting amber, which when held up to the light reveals a subtle roseate hue. When the lid is removed the aroma is unmistakably that of freshly toasted waffles with hints of strawberry and maple syrup.

The flavour seems more intense using a cartomizer than a mini Nova. As I inhale there's a warm sweet wash across my tongue, that's not immediately identified as strawberry. The flavour blossoms and reveals itself as the vapour hits the back of the throat and grows in intensity during the momentary holding of the breath before fully expanding on the exhale. It's a rich, sweet, full bodied vape that I'm finding very satisfying. So, the dominant note is definitely strawberry, with subtler hints of vanilla, waffle and maple. Using the cartomizer, there is a slight aftertaste of coconut, which sounds a bit weird but is actually quite agreeable. I find this juice very moreish.

Throat hit is average but this is to be expected in a 12mg juice with 50% VG. Vapour production however is excellent: very satisfying plumes of opaque vapour that fill the room after a short while with a delicate perfume.

Although surplus to the intent of this review, I want to add that Keith and Sarah at Diamond Vapor also sent me two 5ml samples of their e-liquids which were not part of the giveaway. That kind of service really impresses me, so although it doesn't influence my review it does inspire me to return to them when I want more juice.

Desert Ship by Dekang

I assume the name "Desert Ship" combined with the use of an image of a camel in the marketing of this e-juice invites comparison to Camel Cigarettes. I never smoked Camels, so I can't comment on whether or not Desert Ship is a faithful representation of the flavour of those cigarettes. All I can do, short of buying a pack of Camels and doing a side by side comparison (which as an ex-smoker I'm not willing to do) is explore and evaluate Dekang's Desert Ship on its own merits.

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.

Cell Block Four by The Standard

I received this e-juice free of charge as part of a giveaway run by Todd of Todd's Reviews. http://www.toddsreviews.com/. Todd received it originally from Vape Revolution in California. http://shop.vaperev.com/

This is a 30ml bottle of 6mg nicotine strength e-juice of indeterminate PG/VG ratio. The Vape Revolution website describes it as "Creme brûlée cake with hints of citrus". It is available in nicotine strengths of 0, 6, 12, 18 or 24mg with a RRP of $24.

The brand name is "The Standard", which at first seems a bit unflattering until I recall the saying, "the standard by which all others are measured". There are five e-juices available in The Standard range; Cell Block Four, Irie Nights ("Jamaican rum and brown sugar party"), Dead Man's Party ("Blueberry Lemonade thingamajig"), Frankenvape ("Kiwi Marshmallow and lots of goodness) and Curious Jorge ("Banana, banana, banana and then some more Banana!!")

The day I first received Cell Block Four, the postman brought it first thing in the morning and so I took it to work with me. I was eager to try it and wasn't going to wait until I returned home in the evening. I arrived at work, made myself a cup of tea, filled a cartomizer with Cell Block Four and proceeded to vape it for the rest of the morning. I'm not sure whether it was the fresh cartomizer or that the liquid needed to steep, but there was a slightly unpleasant chemical aftertaste. That was about two weeks ago. I'm happy to say that with steeping, that unpleasant aftertaste has completely disappeared. Also, quality juices probably shouldn't be vaped in a cartomizer.

I'm now using a Vivi Nova, (1.8 ohm coil) on my Ego style battery (4.2 volts)

The bottle is a reasonably thick, clear glass with a black plastic screw top lid and a label that wraps around two and a quarter of its sides. The graphic design on the label is accomplished. All of this adds to my pleasure in using this juice. The one thing that's missing though is a dropper with which to transfer the liquid into your cartomizer/tank/atomizer of choice. This is easily remedied though with the purchase of an inexpensive eye dropper or syringe from your local pharmacy.

The liquid has the saturated amber colour of honey and while viscous is not as thick and gloopy as honey. It has the viscosity perhaps, of vegetable oil, which makes me think the PG/VG ratio must be at least 50/50, if not something closer to 30/70. In terms of aroma, the liquid smells of sweetened vanilla and slightly caramelised demerara sugar with a hint of some sort of liqueur.

Cell Block four appears to benefit in terms of flavour production from a long, slow inhalation straight into the lungs. (Drawing the vapour into the mouth until the mouth is full, before inhaling that mouthful into the lungs seems to mute the flavour somewhat.) A steady stream of vapour along the length of the tongue supplies the taste buds with a richer, prolonged hit of flavour. On the inhalation there is a very subtle tang of citrus on the leading edge of the tongue. In fact, it's so subtle you might almost miss it. I had to search for it and am still not sure that my imagination isn't playing a role in the sensation. The dominant note on the inhalation is of a warm, velvety, vanilla laced creaminess. You can almost taste the egg in the custard. On the immediate, short, sharp inhalation of air after inhaling the vapour, followed by the exhale, a dominant note of caramelised sugar is produced. Being 6mg nicotine strength, the throat hit is negligible. I'm not sure that I want a strong throat hit from my desert vapes anyway. Vapour production is excellent. A sustained drag produces thick, opaque plumes of vapour which dissipate quickly.

This is a very sweet vape (without being cloying). Like its edible counterpart, Creme brûlée, I would probably only want to vape it with a cup of tea or coffee after a meal. I imagine you would have to be quite a sweet tooth to want to vape it all day. Having said that, it is a deeply satisfying dessert vape, intense in flavour with very good vapour production and an aftertaste that is very suggestive of actual Creme brûlée. I feel like I've actually eaten it.

I highly recommend this juice and I'm looking forward to trying the others in "The Standard" range.

Hardware

This has been my vaping hardware since the beginning. I have a pair of VGO2 manual 650 mAh batteries, a number of blank cartomizers and a Mini Nova clone. Cheap and cheerful equipment that doesn't necessarily provide the best results in terms of general vaping experience, but does the job nonetheless. This is what I'll be using initially to review any e-liquids that I can get my hands on.

In the not too distant future I'm hoping to upgrade to a variable voltage device with a dripping atomizer. I've read and heard that genesis style rebuildable atomizers coax the best out of e-liquids in terms of flavour, so I'll be looking into those as well.

I should have noted this in my introductory post, but I'll add it here. Obviously, I'm new to this reviewing lark, to blogging and to the gentle art of vaping itself. I'm not qualified in any particular way to make value judgements on the qualities of taste, mouth-feel or anything of that nature, so I'll be learning all of this as I go along. What I think I can offer, is the ability to pay close attention to sensation, and then write about it.

If you're reading this and you have an opinion backed up by solid experience I'd be very happy to hear from you.

Update 7/6/13: For some time now I've been using an Igo-L dripping atomiser on a mechanical mod running on an 18650 battery. This is the setup I use for reviews. My all day vape lives in a GP Spheroid V2 by VapourArt.

Welcome

Welcome to Vapour Taster. (Apologies to my stateside friends who spell it "Vapor".)

The purpose of this blog is simple: to taste and review e-liquids.

First, a little bit about me. Eight weeks and two days ago I quit smoking with the aid of e-cigarettes. I began smoking in my second year of Art School, 24 years ago. I think it was about 14 years ago that I decided I had had enough and attempted to quit. Cold turkey. Which of course didn't work. Since that time I have tried nicotine patches, nicotine gum and hypnosis. At various times my wife (let's call her V.) and I decided to only smoke outdoors or only smoke in one room to help us cut down with the intent of slowly weaning ourselves off the cigarettes altogether. We were always thinking of ways to make it difficult for ourselves to smoke. None of which worked.

Three months ago V. came home from having her hair done and told me that her hairdresser had managed to quit smoking with the aid of e-cigarettes. They've been around for a few years, but somehow I'd never heard of them. I don't watch much television and I don't listen to the radio or read newspapers, so I guess there's a lot going on in the world I don't know anything about. In any case, the idea that I could quit smoking with the aid of an electronic cigarette took hold of me.

A few weeks later both V. and I had e-cigarette starter kits. On Friday 11th January I began using my e-cig. For the next two or three days I had a regular cigarette after dinner, but my last after-dinner cigarette tasted dreadful and it made me feel ill.

In the time since I had that last cigarette, there have been quite a few moments when I really wanted or felt I needed a regular cigarette. (I've discovered people in the Vaping community call them "stinkies" or "analogs".) Each time this happened I reminded myself that cigarettes would probably be the cause of my death if I didn't stop and that my health would improve and I'd save a lot of money if I continued to abstain. With the aid of my e-cig I've found it much easier than I would have imagined.

My taste buds are reawakening. Everything is beginning to taste intense. I want to explore this and so I'm going to document my explorations in the world of e-liquids and the gentle art of vapour inhalation in the form of reviews. This will include e-liquids bought ready made from vendors as well as flavour concentrates that I'll use to mix my own e-liquids.

Again, welcome. I hope you enjoy this as much as I probably will.