The Flavor Apprentice Huckleberry
ConcreteRiver
Setup: Recoil w/ flavor barrel, Dual 15 wrap 26g 3mm Nifethal 70 coils @.16 ohms. 60w power, 450F temp limit. Full Cotton Wicks.
Testing: TPA Huckleberry@ .5%, 60/40 VG/PG, Steeped 20 days.
Flavor Description: Cherries, raspberries, benzene, and playdough. A sweet, jammy red fruit body buried under a bunch of weirdness from off notes. Super strong, but not strong in the same way as something like blackberry where you're fighting a floral note the entire time. This has some lighter floral character, but I think the llmiting factor in a mix is going to be the weirdness off that cherry right up front and the phenol edge on the back end.
Inhale has some good, deeper red berry flavor. Hard to pick anything out in particular, but I definitely get some deeper cherry and raspberry in there. Moderately dense, with a pretty heavy sweetness. Inhale actually is quite a bit more pleasant than the exhale. Exhale is all dense artificial cherry up front. Suffers from a pretty solid hit of that weird benzene, plastic off-gassing off note. Some tannic, grassy top notes pushing towards raspberry or a green strawberry. Not overwhelmingly floral at a low percentage, but it's really exaggerated by all the weirdness from that cherry note. Still a solid sweetness here, somewhere between syrupy and jammy. Definite sugar lips, but between that plastic and the grassy notes, the lingering effect is something like that phenolic playdough note that shows up in Cap Glazed Donut.
Off Flavors: Quite a bit. It's an odd flavor. There's the cheap plastic off-gas note from the cherry in this along with some perfume and a bit of that weird phenolic playdough note.
Throat Hit: Moderate, all from those off-notes.
Uses & Pairings: Eh... use at your own peril basically. I really do think there is a good jammy red berry sweetness in here, but those off notes are killer. Maybe use this at .25% as a backup from a primary Raspberry or Cherry when you want some thicker body. A dilution might be the key here. I don't see a ton of use for this as a primary note in a mix.
Notes:
S&V concentration testing, this is definitely in the sub 1% range. At .25%, I'm getting some jammy, sweet red berry body and the off-notes, while present, are decently under control. At .5%, I'm getting a strong fake cherry plastic off-note. Good body underneath it, but even at .5% I find it pretty distracting. At 1% that phenol playdough thing is coming to the forefront and the concentrate is getting really floral.
TPA warns us on their website: "This is a very strong, fruity flavor. Be warned: some people absolutely love it, and some hate it!!" and they seem to be dead on. It's strong, and fairly weird. Personally a pass for me, but keep it low if you do use it.
Second Opinions:
The infamous deleted user calls it some strong voodoo on a short thread about using tfa huckleberry.