I bought 5 packs of these shortly after they came out. Out of the 5 that I have tried, 2 worked well, and 3 had poorly-wound coils.
If your nasty taste is more like a 'dry hit' or 'burnt juice' taste than a 'burnt rubber' taste, I'd suspect that it may have a coil problem.
Of the 3 problematic ones I've had so far, one had the coil tightly wound and shoved to one side of the ceramic cup. I carefully spread the wires out with sharp tweezers, and it worked fine.
Two have had the last loop or two of the resistance wire too large in diameter on one side of the coil, so the wire arcs away from the wick instead of sitting against it as it should. That portion of the wire not in contact with the wick gets way too hot, because the boiling action of the fluid cannot limit the temperature if it's not touching the wick. I was able to manipulate one of these with tweezers so that it worked O.K., but the other I had to cut and strip the leads on both sides, unwind and re-coil, then twist back onto the leads again, being careful to avoid any short-circuits.
Even if it is a bit of a pain, it's cool that they can be fixed. Hopefully QC improves on these since that batch.