El Toro produce a range of highly regarded tobacco flavoured E-Liquids. House of Liquid, the co-distributors of the El Toro range in Europe http://www.houseofliquid.com/ were kind enough to send me a selection of these juices for review and I have to say from the outset that I'm very impressed.
These juices are produced by extracting the essences from selectively sourced tobacco leaves. The subject of this review, Cigarrillos 12 (listed as Cigarrillos Naturales on the House of Liquid website) is made from Cuban tobacco leaves. From the House of Liquids website: "We are working hard to ensure that all our tobaccos used for the "steeping process" are naturally cultivated and pesticides free. We are using very respectable suppliers that are as committed as we are to natural products and against any form of child labour in the cultivation and production of the tobaccos."
The word Cigarillo is Spanish for "little cigar" or "cigarette" but unlike the white paper wrapped cigarettes so familiar to most of us, cigarillos are wrapped in tobacco leaves and are smoked like a cigar. That is, drawn into the mouth for taste, rather than inhaled. A cigarillo can be finished in seven or eight minutes.Cigarrillos 12 comes in a dark brown plastic bottle with a black childproof cap. The label displays appropriate warning symbols, medical advice and an ingredients list in both English and French. There is also a tactile warning triangle, a "best used by" date and a batch number. It is available in 10ml or 60 ml bottles at 12 or 18mg nicotine strength. The ingredients list on the bottle says it contains both PG and VG but doesn't indicate the ratio. One other thing that the bottle mentions is that it may contain traces of nuts.
The aroma of the liquid is reminiscent of the smell of an unlit cigarette held under the nose combined with a vaguely medicinal quality. This latter doesn't translate at all into the taste of the inhaled vapour.
On the inhalation of the vapour and it's journey along the length of the tongue there's a slightly fruity sweetness that is reminiscent of the dried fruits you would find in a Christmas cake. The moment I stop drawing on the atomiser and inhale the vapour combined with fresh air down into my lungs, the sweetness ends. Holding my breath momentarily followed by the exhalation, the earthy, leafy, almost beefy notes come to the forefront. When I refer to the flavour as having a beefy quality, I mean it is something akin to the rich, full bodied umami flavours found in protein rich foods. The immediate to lingering aftertaste is a reasserted sweetness suggestive of the aroma of a wet rainforest. Alongside this is the sensation of ashy dryness at the back of the tongue and throat most often experienced by smokers which is not at all unpleasant, but rather a convincing simulation of the experience of inhaling combusting substances. Of course, there are no combusted substances in inhaled vapour, so this is an intriguing and very appealing experience.
There appears to have been a lot of debate on the various vaping forums around the satisfaction of smoking a cigarette, versus the somewhat lesser satisfaction of vaping tobacco flavoured e-liquids. Essentially, in smoking a cigarette, you're inhaling the smoke from burning tobacco leaves, while in vaping tobacco e-liquid you're inhaling flavoured vapour, infused (at best) with the extracted essences of those tobacco leaves. Big difference. Apparently, (I have no way to verify this) tobacco alkaloids are delivered into the bloodstream through combusted tobacco leaves but not through inhaling the essence infused vapour. My understanding of this is very limited, so if you know more on the matter or you've seen a glaring error in my explanation, please leave a comment.
Point your browser here to read more on the matter: http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/blogs/dvap/423-whole-tobacco-alkaloid-e-liquid.html and this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19366487
All this aside, vaping Cigarrillos 12 (and El Toros' other e-liquids) comes closer than anything else I've tried to delivering that elusive satisfaction that only smoking a cigarette seems to deliver.
As I mentioned in my introduction, The El Toro range has a significant cult following. It's easy to see why; this juice is exceptional. Don't walk, run to the House of Liquid website and order some El Toro Cigarrillos 12 (Naturales) for yourself. You won't be disappointed.
Update 7th May 2013: This is now my all-day vape. It's that good.
