Flavour Art Cocoa
ConcreteRiver
Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.19 ohms. 60w power, 400F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: Fa Cocoa @ %1, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 18 days.
Flavor Description: Dutch process cocoa powder. Nice rich, dark chocolate, without that sour, citrusy note you get from natural cocoa powders like hershey's. Strong, accurate cocoa flavor with a drier powdery texture. It also has a terrible dark side, destroying coils with so much as a sideways glance.
Inhale is light and powdery. More mouthfeel than flavor. Exhale is pretty dead-on to cocoa powder. Dry cocoa base and not a a whole lot else. I'm not really getting anything sharp that stands out or any creaminess in the base. Not a particularly sweet flavor, and no actual cream to it, but it has a bit of a dry marshmallow kind of texture that's interesting.
Off-flavors: Solo, it's pretty solidly dry. It's fairly accurate for the profile, but it's really dry. Also, due to the coil wreckage, it tends to get muddy quickly after you vape for a while.
Throat Hit: Light, just from all that powdery dryness. Doesn't really show up mixed with anything creamy or juicy.
Uses & Pairings: FA Cocoa and either FW or TFA white chocolate makes a hell of a dark chocolate flavor. The white chocolate really just carries the flavor and you don't have the syrupy notes from a milk chocolate concentrate getting in the way.
Also useful for pairing with a more syrupy kind of flavor like INW Milk Chocolate to give a chocolate more of a realistic edge. HeadInClouds, of course, suggests FA Chocolate, but the net result is largely the same. Also, adding AP will apparently help a with a more realistic chocolate vape.
Pairs well with creams, custards, and Ice Creams for a darker chocolate flavor that something like TFA Double Chocolate Clear.
This is also dry enough to work well with nuts and tobacco mixes.
This concentrate does interesting things with fruits. Mixing it with a darker, syrupy fruits pulls off chocolate covered fruit or cordials pretty well.
Notes: S&V concentration testing, I've found that this stuff is pretty linear. the actual cocoa note doesn't change all that much. At .25 it's a light hint of cocoa. More of a instant hot chocolate taste. At .5% it's still a bit light, but it's tasting like a fancier dry hot chocolate mix. 1% reads distinctly like darker cocoa. Tastes a bit roasted with having any kind of burnt notes. 1.5% has an even darker chocolate, and you can start to really pick out that marshamllow-y note to the sweetness here. By 2% it's getting a bit bitter and honestly a bit much. I'd start low and work up with this, not because the flavor is bad, but you really want to put just the bare minimum of this stuff in your mixes.
I really like this flavor, but it's a pain in the ass to work with. It's a really good cocoa, but it just destroys your wicks. It's not really a crusty kind of coil gore that you'd get from sucralose, it just kind of turns an entire mix muddy and dulls out any kind of brighter flavors. Don't put this in tanks, it's just not worth it. I use it occasionally, but I'm well aware that I'm rewicking every 10ml and I'm usually using temp control. I haven't had issues with my actual coils after a quick dry burn and a rinse, but I'm mostly on just round wire macro builds. If you're on triple-zipper-hyper-mega-fused claptons or whatever, there's a pretty good chance you'll get build up that won't be nearly as easy to rinse off.
Second Opinions:
So yeah, this stuff will destroy your wicks. Pretty thourough post on coil wreckage.
And keep your temperatures fairly low... (Bonus: amber bottles revealed to be cause for dark concentrates.)