Falkor

Ginger, Pear, Tobacco

If you decide to try this or it inspires you to mix something similar, please thank @ChemicalBurnVictim. He was one of the sources of inspiration and it was his suggestion to switch from using FLV Virginia Tobacco to FLV Oriental Tobacco that gave it that Turkish pipe tobacco vibe that I was looking for.

This all started with wanting to “fix” INW Falcon Eye to be more like a combination of what INW told me it would be, what CBV told me it tasted like to him, and what I tasted. CBV said it mostly tasted like ginger to him; my theory is that his constant vaping of tobaccos makes it easy for him to pick out anything in a tobacco flavor that isn’t tobacco. When I tried Falcon Eye, I got a sweet cigarette tobacco with a solid hit of spice, but while that spice tasted more like ginger than any other spice I could identify, it wasn’t clearly ginger to me. It was weird, but nice.

Oddly, INW calls Falcon Eye “tobacco with a hint of pear,” with no mention of ginger or spice. Fucking Poland. It did not taste like pear to me, but it did have a strong hint of that sort of earthy skin note that some pear flavors have, without the rest of the pear’s pomaceous body and juicy sweetness.

All this just made me really want a ginger-pear-bacco, so I made one, and it turned out pretty great. I used NF Ginger to pull that odd gingery-spice in a distinctly ginger direction. There’s a good reason why this is one of only two of the whole Nature Flavors’ line you can buy at BCF. It’s super solid as a ginger flavor, very spicy, super accurate. Not nearly as sharp and wet as the very fresh-tasting Vape Train Ginger Root, so probably a bit more versatile than that one. But, still more along the lines of raw ginger rather than dried ginger spice powder, ginger ale syrup, or candied ginger. Very slightly earthy, not floral at all, some thick body to it but not syrupy or creamy. As much as I enjoy FLV Ginger and CAP Gingerbread, if I could only have one ginger, it would be this one.

I used MB Shape Up Pear to fill in the missing pear. This is easily the best single-flavor pear out there. It’s everything you could want in a pear and would otherwise have to mix different concentrates together to get. It’s bold and sweet and juicy and crisp, with a lot of apple-like texture and body, and just a little earthy realism, all well-balanced, smooth, with no off notes for me. Just a perfect pear. If I could only have one pear flavor it would be FA because it’s so useful in sweetening and juicifying a plethora of other fruits, but if I want to really vape a PEAR, this is the one.

And then there were the tobaccos, meant to take the mild, malleable tobacco in Falcon Eye and give it some definition as a robust but lighter pipe tobacco that could complement pear and ginger. I wanted to avoid darkness, cocoa, coffee, caramel, and nutty accents that the pipe-like tobaccos have, but still have a pipe tobacco. I wanted to walk into a weird boutique tobacco shop and see some light brown leaf, be told it’s “ginger pear pipe tobacco,” and have Falkor be a deep nose-full of what that smelled like. Users of FLV Virginia Tobacco can maybe tell why I went with a Kentucky + Virginia first? It was a mistake, though. The result was roll-your-own cigarette ginger pear tobacco. CBV came to the rescue by suggesting Oriental instead of Virginia, which until now was an underused flavor for me, and keeping the little bit of that subtly spicy and darker Kentucky Blend in the mix.

Steep Time: This is actually great after sitting overnight. The ginger will taste strong at first, but after a few hits I get used to it. Still, it’s more of a GINGER pear tobacco. Shortly afterward, the FLV tobaccos seem to fade a bit and more pear comes out more, making a ginger PEAR tobacco. After a couple of weeks, they come back, the ginger settles down, and the mix stays relatively stable. In the end, the pear is no longer as prominent as I originally intended it to be, but the juice has that elusive, perfect wet/dry balance between the pear and tobaccos, which, together with the spice keeping things interesting, makes it hard to put down and worth putting out.