Inawera Mocca
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: INW Mocha @ %2, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 14 days.
Flavor Description: Pretty dead-on to something like a McDonald's mocha. Chocolate forward, without being overwhelmingly chalky. Really good coffee note, if a bit light. This tastes more like a really good hot chocolate concentrate to me, but I like my coffee pretty punchy. Maybe a tiny bit of a dairy note, but mostly just a thick creaminess. Sweetness is subtle, letting the more nuanced parts of the chocolate here shine through.
Inhale is moderately dense, without a lot of sweetness. Flavor on the inhale is a bit weird and hard to place. Almost a drier, chalky, sharp tobacco flavor. Exhale is a lot better, with a hot chocolate base and some higher coffee top notes. Those coffee notes taste a little weak but super warm, like drinking weak drip coffee. Smooths out a bit and I get maybe just a hint of a thinner cream in the back end of the exhale. Finishes relatively clean, with just a bit of lingering dark chocolate bitterness.
Off-flavors: Not really, and that's awesome.
Throat Hit: Light. Not exactly silky smooth, but good for a coffee.
Uses & Pairings: So this stuff is probably more remarkable for how it doesn't taste. It doesn't have a lot of the off-flavors that I associate with both chocolates and coffees. I doesn't really have that chalky tootsie-roll kind of chocolate note (at least on the exhale), and it doesn't have that darker, buttery, burnt note you can get with most coffee flavors. Really mellow actually, and it should be a great mixer.
I think this would be a great component in a tiramisu kind of bakery. No particular part of this too sharp or prominent and it will work well with a cake base. Should blend really well with custards, creams, and even ice creams.
I'd also put if forward for tobacco mixes. I talk it about it a lot, but FLV Red Burley seems like a natural fit. I don't know enough tobaccos to recommend much outside of that, but warmer tobaccos with nutty or cocoa notes are going to go really well with this.
I wouldn't have necessarily thought of mixing fruit and mocca, but /u/RuntDastardly does this to good effect in their Fig Lebowski recipe. So, this is probably a good coffee base to work from if you want to bring in darker, sweeter fruits.
Notes: S&V concentration testing, this is a bit weaker than you'd expect from Inawera. At .25% and .5% I get mostly a faint hint of chocolate. 1% is actually pretty good, as that coffee is still in the background, but you get more chocolate up front. Actually tastes a lot like hot chocolate here. 1.5% is bringing more of that coffee note and increasing flavor density quite a bit. 2% has a solid coffee note and some of that warming in creeping in. Kind of hits you in the chest like warm coffee will. Chocolate is still present and pretty well balanced. By 3% I'm getting more coffee than chocolate, and the coffee note that is here is getting closer to that traditional esspresso kind of concentrate. That buttery roast / burnt note is still pretty subtle though. By 4% this is tasting too roasted for me and that's kind of detracting from the overall experience. I'd start with this at 1% for a more chocolately accent, 2% for a bakery or cream mix, and maybe 3% if you really want to push the coffee forward here in a recipe and you can deal with full chocolate flavor.
Also, FWIW, doesn't seem to be a super obvious coil-gunker, so that's a plus.
Second Opinions:
Notes from Botboy's Master testing list:
"This is a nice light and creamy coffee/chocolate flavor. The chocolate/cocoa aspect doesn't taste fake or plastic-like, it's smooth and silky, and the coffee is perfectly blended in making this an extremely smooth vape. I'd recommend this to anyone that likes coffee vapes, while it may not stand alone as a coffee flavor for extreme coffee lovers, it would still be a great mixer to add into your existing coffee recipes, or create new chocolate/coffee type mixes starting with this as your base."
Couple of reccomendations from this thread on coffee vapes:
baphomet says: "I've been enjoying, off and on, Mocca (INW) in the 2% range, with a touch (.25-.5%) of cream (Cap/TFA Bavarian Cream or HS Italian Cream; FA Vienna Cream would work well, I imagine, too)... Really balanced, mildly sweet chocolate cream with hints of coffee, nothing bitter or heavy like like what you've mentioned."
burritoclock follows up: "INW Mocca is the only thing I found to be close to ok."
Good talk on the FOTW Thread about this being chocolate heavy.