Flavour Art Fig
ConcreteRiver
Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.17 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: FA Fig @ 2%, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 12 days.
Flavor Description: This is interesting. Sort of a non-descript, juicy, fruit flavor. I get mostly yellow peach and passionfruit, with some juicier pear notes. Really hard to pin down and it changes a bit everytime I pick it up. Strong natural sweetness and moderate density.
Inhale is very sweet and a bit dark. Tastes a lot like the syrup in canned pears. Warm with some harshness, hard to take really deep lung hits. Exhale starts with a warm and dense juicy yellow canned peach flavor. Some high perfumey green notes, not really defined enough for a peel. More of a indistinct harshness. Back half ends up tasting quite a bit like a Passionfruit syrup, as some bright red fruit notes creep in. Still sweet bordering on syrupy. Clean finish, even that pronounced sweetness fades out pretty quickly.
Off-flavors: Slight green note, not sure what the hell else should or should not be here but everything else tastes pretty cohesive and solid. Sweetness level is pretty distracting in general.
Throat Hit: Moderate on the inhale, light on the exhale. Nothing too major, especially considering most of the fruits that share some of the same flavor components tend to be pretty harsh.
Uses & Pairings: Just spitballing, but I can't really think of a fruit this won't end up blending with. The juicyness here will help to soften some of the brighter fruit flavors like strawberries and kiwi, mellow out citrus, complement tropical fruits, and bring some sweetness and brightness to darker berry mixes. I'd avoid anything too syrupy just to keep the overall sweetness of a mix in check, but otherwise go crazy with it. This is going to bump the throat hit up a notch, so if your mix is turning out a bit harsh try scaling it back.
Harder to recommend for bakeries, that juicy note is going to be distracting if you want to keep defined edges and layers in your flavor. I don't think it'll taste bad per se, but it's going to be like pouring a fruit syrup straight on top of you nice fluffy or crispy pastry.
This is not a dark fig for mixing with tobaccos or nutty mixes. Again, the textural issues are going to show up pretty quickly and the sweetness is a bit intense.
Notes:
S&V concentration testing, 1% gives you a more perfumey peach. At 1.5% that sweetness starts to come in and feels pretty saturated by 2%. The passionfruit shows up big, and just keeps getting juicier up until about 3.5%. Sort of comes back around to floral at 3% and that syrup character is pretty overwhelming. I'd mix with this starting at 1.5% and work up until you hit your desired sweetness level, watching for that throat hit and the green perfume notes turning things a bit bitter.
So far as I can tell, there is only one Flavour Art fig flavor. Flavour Art's website only has the one fig, billed as Fig Fresh. Sold as just "Fig" on BCF and "Fresh Fig" on ECX. If I'm wrong, then please correct me.
Another instance in which I don't have a fantastic frame of reference for actual figs. I've found some notes saying that this close to a realistic fresh fig, but I'll have to take that on faith. Nothing I'd expect from a darker, richer version of a "fig," but a great sweetener for fruit mixes. Watch your throat hit, though.
Second Opinions:
HIC Notes: "Sweet, fresh figs. Fig tastes “riper” when accented with FA Apple (not Fuji) or FA Amber. At amounts under 1%, Fig makes a bright sweetener for bold fruit flavors."
So, in an older FOTW for pear /u/dbbldz123/ drops a comment that says that FA Fig smells like pear and goes great with pear flavor. It's a quick mention, but it's spot on. That's what helped me place this flavor and start thinking about stuff like TFA Quince. So thanks to /u/dbbldz123/. FWIW, I got a lot of pear and apple out of this before it really saturated my palate.
Flavour Arts website copy for this is interesting: "Sweet and Juicy." Same two words I'd use to describe this. A sort of muddled, indistinct sweet and juicy fruit flavor.