Capella Waffle
ConcreteRiver
Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.18 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: CAP Waffle @ 4%, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 21 days.
Flavor Description: It's not a great all-in-one waffle at 4%. The waffle itself is a bit weak and flat. What is there tastes a whole lot like your eggo-calibre frozen waffle. It's not a complex bakery taste, more just the odor of pale yellow eggos. Maple note is there, it's a pretty good recreation of artificial maple syrup with a bunch of melted butter in there. Maple isn't particulary sharp and the butter doesn't taste especially rich.
Inhale is thin, with an almost acrid maple note. A little sweetness and buttery richness shows up towards the end of the inhale. Eggo perfume on the beginning of the exhale. Maple is a lot more rounded and noticeably buttery here. Maple gets a bit bitter again as it lingers on the exhale. Thinner taste overall than you'd think. Moderately sweet, especially that maple note.
Off-flavors: Maple gets a bit weird, especially on the inhale. I'm going to stick with acrid. Slightly plastic-y until it gets fuller and evens out on the exhale. Sour note. Seems to be a running thing with me and savory capella flavors but I just find them to a bit sour solo. Not sure if anyone else picks up on this or it's a quirk of my taste buds or setup.
Throat Hit: 2/10. Just a bit harsh, but no one component stands out as being the harsh one.
Uses: Maybe a single flavor or the waffle base for a fruit. Could be used to add richness to a dryer waffle or pancake flavor.
Pairings: Just spitballing here, but I'm guessing it would work well with strawberries and blueberries. Something like CAP Vanilla Whipped Cream for the buttery smoothness. Maybe some chocolate or banana. VBIC or something similar would work as well.
Notes: This one is hard for me to recommend. I think at low percentages (2-3%), the flavor is really muddy. There is way too much going on to really be used as much but an rich accent for a very similar flavor that's a bit dry. As you increase the percentage, up to about 8%, the concentrate gets overwhelming sweet and the maple gets sticky and cloying. The actual waffle base stays pretty subtle. As a side note, this really needs time to come together. Flavor is a mess as a S&V.
Just from doing the prerequisite googling, it seems like TFA Belgian Waffle or INW Waffle is going to be a better option for most waffle applications. If you just want to throw this at a bunch of bright berries and cream, then you could probably do worse than this flavor though.
Second Opinions:
/u/onionscanbesweet/ is into it, in the comments
A couple of good notes on the ELR Page
Fair amount of older talk about the flavor on the ECF Forums here, and here. Those are some vintage percentages.