Flavor West Funnel Cake
ConcreteRiver
Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.14 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: FW Funnel Cake, 2 and 4%, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 10 days.
Flavor Description: French Toast Crunch. Nothing offense here, but it doesn't really remind me of funnel cake. No fried note here, a cereal grain instead of a bread or dough, and a more syrupy sweetness than powdered sugar. Sweetness seems to have a light maple twinge to it. Maybe just a hint of cinnamon and vanilla in here, but pretty mellow on any kind of spice notes overall. It's a fairly light and subtle flavor overall, I'd use this a primary note for that glazed cereal thing and accent it to really make it punch a bit harder. Seems to work best around 5-6%.
Inhale is sweet but kind of muddy. Sweetness seems to have a light maple to it. Less pronounced than the maple in TFA Bavarian Cream, but that same kind of taste. Seems like a syrup or glaze more than a powdered sugar. No real grain on the inhale, but a medium body. Exhale has some cereal grain to it. Not really a crisp grain texture, but more like the smelling a bowl of freshly poured cereal. Tastes like there is some sweeter, flatter corn cereal in there. Maybe a hint of vanilla and really light bakery cinnamon. Sweet sugar glaze, with that light maple in the top notes. Clean finish overall with some sugar lips, but this doesn't really do anything close to a funnel cake for me.
Off-flavors: Doesn't fit the profile at all, at least for me. The body here isn't aggressively flavored and has a lighter warm malt / corn note to it that can come across like those edible conrnstarch packing peanuts (I can't be the only one to have tried those.) Sweetness also seems to have a light, very commercial, maple note to it.
Throat Hit: Light.
Uses & Pairings: This doesn't do funnel cake for me. I wouldn't try to use this as a funnel cake.
I do think it tastes a lot like French Toast Crunch. Whatever grain / bready note they are using here tastes a lot like breakfast cereal. That and the maple from the sweetness, it's kind of odd. I think you can play with that quite a bit. I think if you added a bit of CAP Cereal 27 or maybe a tiny hit of straight Acetyl Pyrazine or FA Cookie you could reinforce that cereal note enough to hold up to milk. The maple isn't really overwhelming, so I could easily see this working as a corn-pops type cereal. I wouldn't call it straight corn flakes, but you may also be able to get close to that profile with a heavier hand with the AP.
Notes: Concentration testing, this seems pretty linear although that maple note to the sweetness seems to really come out at relatively higher percentages. At 2%, this still feels pretty underflavored. I taste mostly that light maple glaze sweetness, with a really weak cereal body. Like tossing those aforementioned edible packing peanuts in a bit of syrup. 4% has a stronger cereal body, still feels a bit weak but it's a bit more balanced with that sweetness. A bit more maple to it though. 6% has a firmer ceral texture but that maple has definitely come to the party. 8% doesn't seem to have a better cereal, but that maple is stronger. I'd mix around 6% as a primary note, I don't feel like this concentrate really hits hard enough to use an accent.
Second Opinions:
Nah, still new.
Here's the Flavorwest product page. No SDS yet.
Bonus video first taste of FW Funnel Cake, FW Glazed Donut, and FW Waffle Cone.