i taste raisins in the smiths barns sticks. do you taste raisins?
for me, i taste much more vanilla than i do caramel in the aphrodite. very tasty nonetheless. turns out a 50/50 mix of the smithsbarns and the aphrodite is damn tasty too. reminds me of puresmoker's silverleaf
tobacco.
i dunno what it is about the hummingbird wine (besides the nicotine of course...), but that stuff is quite addictive. not my usual cup of tea at all, but i havent' been able to put it down
venkman,
You could well be right about Aphrodite having more vanilla than caramel. I'm not always able to separate those two, since they're often intertwined. Caramel flavor usually has vanilla in it, right? I mean, "caramel" is not just caramelized sugar. So, caramels come in a range of variation from more "straight" vanilla to more "burnt" sugar flavor, yes? (I'm asking more than stating...)
As for raisin in the Barn Sticks, I didn't identify that initially, but after atty dripping a little more right now, I see what you mean.
Personally, I find "blind" tasting to be quite difficult. My brain is not sufficiently well-trained to easily separate and identify all the component flavors. If someone tells me that a certain flavor is in a
juice, my brain can "look for it," so to speak, and it often pops right up. I'm not sure, however, where to draw the line between actually tasting something and imagining it, because the power of suggestion is so seductive and twisty. Sometimes it's obvious, other times not. In one thread, a poster insisted that Bounty Hunter contains menthol. My reaction was, "Sorry, you're just imagining that. Bounty Hunter does NOT contain menthol. Period. End of story." With Smith Barn Sticks, though, raisin is a possibility. Paul would tell us what it is, whether raisin or something else.
When I first sampled these sweet juices, I wasn't expecting tobacco, and it took me ten minutes to figure out that Smith Barn Sticks is a tobacco blend---despite what should have been the dead giveaway of that Tobacco Absolute color and oiliness. Only after the Google discovery about what barn sticks were did I realize "Oh, well DUH! It's a tobacco juice!" Then suddenly I could taste the tobacco. LOL.
On occasion I'm a very smart Sherlock Holmes with juices. Often, I can manage only a bumbling but good-natured Dr. Watson. And sometimes, I'm as clueless as Inspector Lestrade.
