Flavorah Lychee
ConcreteRiver
Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.15 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: FLV Lychee @ 1% and 1 drop per 10 ml (about .25%), 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 7 days.
Flavor Description: Sweet lychee with a pretty intense, bright floral edge. Floral note here tastes pretty solid, not really thin and perfumey. The base is fairly accurate to canned lychee, which somewhere between tarter rosehips and the grapes out of fruit cocktail. Syrupy sweet, and a bit of a bully. I'd recommend mixing this sub .25% up to .5% and use it as a sweet, tropical base.
Inhale is sweet and moderately dense. Full, tart elderflower florals and a syrupy white grape kind of base. There's almost a red berry kind of vibe to that the grape base, but it doesn't really taste like red grapes at all, if that makes any kind of sense. Exhale is sweet and full, with that canned lychee picking up some tarter rosehip kind of character. Florals in the top notes, but they are quite a bit more solid than the lighter perfumey notes you get off most other fruits. Really reminds me of FLV Elderflower, where it's a more solid, substantial floral note with some leafy green body to it. Syrupy sweetness with just a hint of a darker caramel to it, that sticks to your mouth a bit. Not a lot of harshness, but it definitely has a throat hit to it. Lingering florals and sticky sweet mouthfeel.
Off-flavors: This has pretty heavy floral punch to it. The florals here aren't really offensive, and don't really have the thinness to taste perfumey. It's a tarter, green, slightly more solid kind of floral. I also think overall the concentrate can come off a bit soapy, especially when it's up too high in mix or mixed with something that has some earthniess to it. Shout out to Tootall for saying it kind of tastes like fresh laundry smells, because that's an excellent way of describing it.
Throat Hit: Light, it's not harsh as much as those florals are pretty intense and tart and it's pretty sweet overall.
Uses & Pairings: A tricky flavor to mix. The florals here tend to stick out in mixes, So i'd focusing mostly on brighter fruits and candy profiles. It's pretty intensely sweet, so at a lower percentage you'll get some good sweetness without a ton of that floral edge. The florals here seem to work well with that entire tropical thing, guava, grapes, cherries, and citrus in general.
Not a ton of use in the cream or bakery department, but if you want to go in that direction keep it really light. This doesn't play well at all with any kind of buttery or eggy notes. Something like marshamllow or vanilla swirl is about "creamy" as i'd get with this, and the selective muting in those flavors should help mellow out the florals here a bit.
Notes: This is really strong stuff. I get the full dose of those floral top notes at .25%. The base is definitely sweet, but it doesn't quite cross the line into syrupy and there's a nice tartness to it. .5% is much more syrupy, and some of the bite of the florals is balanced out by that deeper sweetness. 1% is pretty overwhelmingly sweet for me, and it's getting a bit darker and caramelized. Florals aren't necessarily stronger, but they do seem to picking up a bit of that fresh laundry vibe. At 3%, this is surprisingly un-terrible. Really heavy and sweet, and the florals don't really get perfumey so much as they get really green and leafy. It does get really plastic-y for me this high though, so I probably wouldn't recommend trying to roll over the odometer on this and making it work again higher.
Quick comparison to the other Lychees I've tried, this is probably my favorite of the bunch. CAP Sweet Lychee is okay, and may be quite a bit easier to mix with. It's much less floral than this, and it's a pretty decent candy lychee if a bit boring. FA Lychee isn't quite as sweet, and the florals there come across more chemical and have a bit of hairspray to them. FA Lychee has a sticky mouthfeel too, but it's more a weird grape jelly sticky as opposed to the heavier syrup of the FLV. And before /u/ID10-T chimes in here, FE Lychee is apparently awesome. He said as much in the comments for my review of FA Lychee, and this post would seem to confirm that.
Second Opinions:
Here's an older FOTW covering Lychee. Lots of good info on FLV Lychee in there.