Flavour Monks Mango
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: Flavor Monks Mango @ 4%, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 17 days.
Flavor Description: Ripe, fairly realistic mango. Flavor is a bit top heavy and dry. Really nice perfumey ripe mango notes without enough juicyness or flesh underneath.
Nothing much on the inhale, light sweetness. Flavor is mostly on the exhale. Relatively thin, and not quite sweet enough. Good balance of fruit and peel. Fruit tastes ripe-ish and the peel notes aren't overbearing or artificial. Mouthfeel has a bit of lingering stickiness. Some interesting buttery notes as the wick dries out.
Off-flavors: Top notes can get just a bit bitter with extended use.
Throat Hit: 0/10. A bit perfumey but not especially bright or harsh.
Uses: So frustratingly close to a single flavor mango. I'd use this with FLV Mango to make a fuller, sweeter, juicy mango. Good candidate for mixing with juicier fruits.
Pairings: Deeper juicy mango like CAP or FLV. Tropical fruits. Creams. May be a good mango for rich bakeries. Dark chocolate. Distinct perfume notes, so I'd avoid any other perfumey fruits.
Notes: At 2%, I'm getting even less of the ripe mango flavor, and just a muted perfume. 4% seems like a good starting point for mixing with other flavors, but it doesn't seem quite saturated. I'd feel comfortable taking that up farther to about 8% as a main note. This came to me as a premixed sample at 4%, so that's just an educated guess. Flavormonks recommends 10%, and that might be closer to the mark. The actual mango here seems pretty linear, and the perfume bitterness isn't scaling up as fast.
As a 'murican, this definitely isn't something I'd order specifically from europe. If you already have business on chef's flavours and are interested, it's probably worth checking out, although mixing at 10% would get expensive pretty fast.
Shoutout to /u/apexified for the sample.
Second Opinions:
Pretty damn sparse.
This review calls it bland, but then dumps a bunch of sweetener in and takes it up to 20%
One review on their belgian site, calling it realistic without off-flavors