Flavour Art Ozone
ConcreteRiver
Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.16 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: FA Ozone, 1 and 2.5%, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 9 days.
Flavor Description: This is weird, even for flavourart. Their description is just "A full bodied background that blends well with delicate floreal top notes. Light on vape but with personality," but they have it in their tobacco flavor category. Solo, it mostly just tastes like wet hay smells, with a heavy sweetness at higher percentages. It's not quite "grassy" per se. It's a bit hard to describe but it's unmistakably hay. It's not quite floral, but it has that hay top note, and nothing much beneath it but a slightly dry mouthfeel and a deep sweetness. The sweetness itself is fairly hard to describe, because it's sweet in a way that doesn't really correlate to any kind of sugar or sweetener taste. It's sweeter in the way that lukewarm water tastes sweeter than cold water although it takes on a light caramel or maple tinge up at 2.5%. I taste zero tobacco in here. Through the power of bad inductive reasoning and reading reviews, this seems like a dead ringer for coumarin.
Off-flavors: I don't even know where to start.
Throat Hit: Moderate. Kind of weirdly harsh and dry on the throat while still having that watery sweetness.
Additive Testing: Because this seems like pretty much an additive, I've done some super scientific testing with it mixed with a couple of other flavors. These samples have been steeped for 3 days.
FLV Sweet Cigarette 2%, FA Ozone 1%- This is actually making the sweet cigarette flavor distressingly accurate. It's giving it a drier and smoother body and really pushing up the ashy note here and adding some sweetness. The wet hay flavor folds itself almost seamlessly into the bitter tobacco leaf note here. This may have some serious use to increase realism in tobacco vapes without having to go straight to ashtray additives like INW Dirty Neutral Base.
FLV Pineapple 2%, FA 1%- This is definitely doing something here, beyond just putting another flavor into the mix. I'm just not sure it's wholly pleasant. This has taken the juicier FLV Pineapple, and made it taste a whole lot like you're actually scraping chunks of pineapple flesh off the peel with your teeth. It's dried out the pineapple substantially and given the entire thing a greenness that actually does a peel note here pretty admirably. Small detail that you don't actually eat pineapple peels, but its at least technically impressive. It may help lend some realism to brighter, syrupy fruit flavors. I could see it doing a mango peel really well.
Notes: Based on the additive testing, I'd say this is mostly a tobacco enhancer and 1% seems way too high. I'd probably aim for something closer to .5% there. Use outside of that is going to be really niche and primarily with fruits. I'd start crazy low there, like .1% and work up until it gets too weird. Coumarin is also a direct precursor to coumadin which, along with medical uses as a blood thinner, is a pretty traditional rat poison. So you can probably also use this as a training device to recognize when someone is trying to poison you.
Second Opinions:
The research on this got incredibly weird. It all started off innocuously enough with the sole review on BCF. An unknown user posted: "This stuff tastes like coumarin, with hints of a few other ingredients. Good enhancer for pipe or hand-rolling tobacco flavors. Also surprisingly good with fruits." Sounded like a good starting point, so I googled. Entertainingly, the second result for "coumarin tobacco" is a tripod webpage that's either designed by someone woke AF about southerners trying to poison the north after the civil war, or a complete crazy person. But, on the wikipedia page for coumarin it does say that courmarin "has a sweet odor, readily recognised as the scent of newly-mown hay... Coumarin has been used as an aroma enhancer in pipe tobaccos." So it seems to fit. This probably tastes like coumarin. Thanks "unknown"!
I don't feel so bad about ripping off those downloadable HIC notes for this: "The distinct aroma and flavor of dried celery seeds(!)
Shoutout to /u/ID10-T for suggesting this for review.