Flebo Reports: Two from Dekang

Nice reviews. I agree with most of your opinions.

My take on this issue is that, with notable exceptions---DK-TAB and RY4 come to mind---Dekang Tobacco flavors are largely ignored as material for juice reviews. There are, I think, a number of reasons for this apparent snub. A major factor is xenophobia, the stereotypical American backlash against all things foreign (meaning non-European in lineage). According to the stereotype, Chinese products are badly designed and cheaply made with shoddy ingredients and lousy quality control, to the point that they are inconsistent in quality, often impure, and sometimes downright dangerous.

As a musician and former collector of guitars, I think back in history. From the 1950's through the 1980s, Japanese guitars were considered (by American musicians) to be cheap knock-offs of American "quality" guitars. And that was probably true in the initial decades after WWII, but the Japanese caught on fast and were making quality instruments long before the stereotype gave way. When we here finally woke up enough to acknowledge in the 1990s the Japanese ability to build very fine guitars, did the stereotype fade? No, it simply shifted targets. Suddenly, Japanese guitars were "good," but the newer factories in Korea/Indonesia producing cheaper guitars became the target of our need to feel superior.

That shifted again around 2000, when the Chinese (who have been building instruments by hand for thousands of years) entered the mass-production guitar market in a huge way. At that point, Japanese guitars were no longer just good, but great, with many of the older ones becoming highly esteemed by musicians and collectors. Meanwhile, Korean and Indonesian (and Mexican) guitars moved up from being judged as vile to now being thought of as pretty darned good, all things considered, and great value for the money. All the while, American factory-built guitars got more and more expensive, even though their quality didn't improve, and in some ways even deteriorated.

Now it's 2011. China produces millions of guitars every year---more than all other countries combined, and some of those Chinese instruments are damned good, too, as well as amazingly inexpensive. Huge bang for the buck. And yet, the xenophobic bias continues---even today, Chinese guitars are still considered by many American musicians to be unacceptably low-quality, even though American factory-built guitars have skyrocketed in price, not to mention the unbelievable, out-of-sight prices of very high-end artisan luthier hand-built guitars in America and Canada. A hand-made Olson guitar built in Minnesota costs $12,000. Is it 15 times better than a Walden built in China by four luthiers? I think not. Also, every major American name-brand guitar company---Fender, Martin, Guild, etc.---has their own "economy" lines of guitars manufactured in China or Mexico to their specs, but sold for half the price of their Made-in-USA lines. Are their Chinese lines only half as good? Not by a long shot.

In vaping---whether we're talking about hardware or juice---the same negative bias exists. It's even worse than with guitars (or cars, or whatever), because the Chinese invented vaping and have a head start on the cottage industry mod-makers and juice-makers in America, so the stereotype is even more perverse. Could Chinese products be better in terms of quality? Of course they could, but the same criticism applies to American-made vaping supplies, from mods to juices.

A second reason we don't see as many reviews of Dekang juices is that Dekang is the standard against which all other juices are measured. Their juice provides the baseline, and everyone else tries to aim higher, whether or not the challengers succeed. Further, Dekang has a very extensive line of many, many tobacco flavors, but it suffers from the formulaic nature of those juices. All of them are variations on a theme. Take just a few bases (synthetic, essence, and extract), then add or subtract different flavoring ingredients, and voila! DK-TAB becomes Cuban Cigar becomes French Pipe. But in fairness, the same could be said about Italian FlavourArt---all their flavor concentrates are, in fact, just formulaic variations.

Apologies for the lengthy post, but that's my two cents' on a very complex topic.

 

those Chinese Guild guitars are pretty great... even Richie Havens would approve...
though it would be nice to see our labor force more engaged...

Dekang French Pipe is a classic flavor - one of the best all time!

 

LT,

I could never decide between the Epiphone Masterworks 12-fret slope-shoulder and an all-mahogany Guild Gad. I ended up with five Waldens and a venetian cutaway Morgan handmade by luthier David Iannone from Vancouver. The Chinese Waldens are really quite nice---all-solid with lovely tone woods, pre-war X-bracing, and very fast necks. And don't get me started on electric basses.