Flavorah Sun Cookie
ConcreteRiver
This is a pre-release flavor, which was provided to me solely for the purposes of review.
Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.14 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: FLV Sun Cookie, .25, 1, and 3%, others noted, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 9 days.
Flavor Description: A pretty solid, slightly nutty cookie base with prominent lemon.
The actual cookie here is pretty solid. It's a medium cooked kind of cookie, not blonde like CAP Sugar Cookie and not really dark and crispy like FA Cookie. It tastes like theirs something going on beyond just a normal cookie taste though. It has just a bit of nuttiness and a slight green earthiness to it. It's almost like a cookie base with sunflower seeds or some other kind of greener nut baked in, which doesn't sound promising but it works strangely well.
This actually has a bit more texture to it then most of the flavorah bakeries. I wouldn't call it gritty by any means, but it sidesteps the fluffier thing that most of their bakeries have. I think this probably has enough texture that it doesn't really need any additional AP, but additional nuts would work well with the cookie and the extra texture probably wouldn't hurt.
There's quite a bit of lemon in here. I don't think it's like an overwhelming lemon sicily type of sweet lemon flavor, but it's more of a tart bright lemon, almost like a realistic lemon curd without some of the body. There's a lot of tartness to this concentrate, and I do pick up a bit of zest in there somewhere. I wouldn't say it's FA bakery levels of weird lemon-anise, but I kind of feel some anise creeping in on the back end of this with prolonged vaping.
Sweetness level is actually pretty nice. It's cookie sweet, but not too sugary or cloying.
Off-flavors: The profile here is an Isolani style cookie. As far as I can tell, that means it's a similar profile to the juice produced by five pawns. I haven't had the actual juice to compare, but based on their given profile of "Glazed lemon zest sugar cookie," this is pretty close to the profile. There's a bit of green, earthy note here, especially at higher percentages. The lemon is a little intense, and that small peek of anise is a bit spooky.
Throat Hit: Light, but that tartness gets a bit aggressive with prolonged vaping.
Percentage testing: At .25% this feels a bit undeveloped and I'm not getting much texture. That lemon is definitely there, and you get most of the cookie taste but none of the texture.
At 1%, there's a pretty solid cookie underneath some lemon tartness. I get some of that baked nuance from the normal cookie thing, and the nuttiness is working as a good compliment. Those earthy notes are really subtle and kind of blends into the nutty notes. Pretty decent texture too.
At 3%, I feel like I'm getting too much lemon out of this. It isn't bad, but it's blowing out the cookie underneath and just leaving some nuttier, greener accents.
Based on these tests, this seems a bit complex to try to use an accent flavor. I'd probably use it as a primary flavor between 1.5 and 2%.
Uses & Pairings: I'm going back and forth on the amount of lemon here, because it seems to be getting a bit more prominent while I've been doing this review. It's lemony to the point where I don't think you can really mix around it.
Using that lemon note, I think this could be a decent base for something like a lemon bar or lemon meringue pie. The cookie note here is going to work as a base for your crust, and I don't think the nutty or greener flavors are really going to stick out if you come back in with another bakery to fill it out.
I could also see this working as a lemon frosted cooking if you mixed it with some frosting. Some additional FA Cookie would give you a crispier cookie base, and some CAP Sugar Cookie would work as a softer cookie.
It's also pretty solid as a single flavor. It's interesting and fairly well balanced by itself.
META: And that's it. All 27 pre-release flavors and a bonus review of the re-release of Apple. Shoutout to Flavorah for tossing these out to the community before they went live.