Flavorah Lovage
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: FLV Lovage @ .5%, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 23 days.
Flavor Description: This is more of a flavor additive than stand alone. The review on the Flavorah website states that it "tones" flavors, and that seems as good a description as any. It seems to round out and give volume to green flavors, for better or worse. It also works a lot like a better version of ethyl maltol on citrus and seems to really define the edges of the flavors in tobaccos.
Again, not really a single flavor but just for the proverbial lulz... Inhale is sweet and dense, with a straight green note that has no kind of corresponding vegetal body. Exhale is dense with an earthier sweetness. The green note kind of vanishes but it leaves a space on the tongue where I can kind of just feel like my tastebuds for sour and bitter have been lit up. Like something here is just priming those taste buds. Just out of curiousity, I vaped a bunch of this and took a sip of a lime mineral water (shoutout to Trader Joe's) and the lime was especially bright and effervescent without tasting sour. It's definitely strange. I've also tried this all the way at 3% solo and it bears an uncanny resemblance to the filling from sweet potato pie. Definite marshmallow sweetness and an earthy caramel taste. Not bad, but weird as all hell.
Off-flavors: Hard to tell what to call an off-flavor here. The earthyness solo definitely has just a hint of wet wool but I've never noticed that in a mix.
Throat Hit: Light but there. Good deal of tightness in my throat vaping this solo.
Uses & Pairings: So, this is where it gets useful. This is a flavor toner all the way.
This does some really interesting things to green notes in fruits and fruit-like concentrates. INW Rhubarb is my personal favorite. It definitely gives the green, astringent note there some major depth and definition. At .5% Rhubarb and .25% Lovage it gives you something that tastes a whole lot like lightly cooked rhubarb. I tried this at .25% Lovage and 1% JF Honey Peach and it just pushed the green notes there into some really unpleasant territory. It doesn't add to the perfume aspect of the flavor but it does make the green notes a lot grassier and prominent. Tested with FA Raspberry, FW Huckleberry, and FA Blackcurrant and it does largely the same thing. It pushes fruits into a weird green area that is a little too realistic to underripe fruit to make it pleasant.
Citrus actually works surprisingly well, it seems to keep the brighter parts of those flavors while adding some volume and rounding off the harsher edges. Tested with FW Ruby Red Grapefruit, HS Green Orange, and FA Bergamot and the overall net effect was pretty damn positive. I'd say this deserves serious consideration as a citrus additive or alternative to Ethyl Maltol to make those harsher citruses more palatable.
I also had a tester of FLV Native Tobacco lying around and ended up with about .5% Lovage and 3% Native Tobacco. It definitely gives some added dimension to the Tobacco and pushes the entire thing into a denser but still leafier and more defined taste. Going further and adding in 2% FA Hypnotic Mist I got a really interesting, slightly sour, but still robust and defined tobacco mix.
Notes:
Use sparingly. Like really sparingly. This is an additive at heart, so treat as such. I'd use this at .25% with something like rhubarb or citrus. Tobaccos are a bit more robust and so I'd bump it up to .5% in those applications.
Worth noting, this concentrate doesn't blend worth a damn. It's extremely thick and tends to just clump up when added, so amp that shaking up quite a bit to get it into suspension. It's also impossible, as far as I can tell, to get a small drop of it with a dropper bottle. The surface tension here gives you .05g drops at a minimum so bust out the pipettes to hit a low percentage.
I still don't feel like I've cracked the case on this one. The flavor, and even the consistency of the concentrate is confusing in a relatively good way. Lots of potential for the person who nails down the usage here.
Second Opinions:
Not a whole bunch, somewhat understandably.