Here's some of what we've learned over the past 15 months on
http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/fo...views/193327-really-big-ry4-roundup-long.html:
RY4 was the first RY ever. It was created almost on a whim one afternoon in 2007 by one of the owners of Janty (Ludo) and a company flavor chemist in a Chinese juice production facility (presumably Dekang). They decided to whip up a new juice together and started out with a general idea (tobacco, caramel, and vanilla), then tweaked the recipe (meaning the flavoring ingredients and mix ratios) over a couple of hours and multiple versions. When they got a formula and taste they both liked a lot, they named it "RY" (for "Ruyan," which is Chinese slang for "like a cigarette") and added "4" because that was the fourth version Ludo and the chemist made that day (think Chanel #5). Voilà! RY4 was born.
Janty still sells that original 2007 version of RY4 today in their Classic and Elixir lines of juices. The Vataya series RY4 is supposedly slightly different from the original, however.
Dekang subsequently altered the recipe and began selling an RY4 under their own Dekang label that became immensely popular among vapers back in 2008-2009. That "secret" formula was stolen by a disgruntled flavor chemist who was leaving Dekang to form his own juice company. He was later arrested and charged with industrial theft, tried, convicted, and (as of late 2011) was still serving a prison term in China. The now-mythic "lost" Dekang RY4 formula has never been recovered (at least not yet...).
The lower-numbered versions (RY1, RY2, etc.) were reverse-engineered much later by Dekang and other Chinese manufacturers (Hangsen, for instance). The higher-numbered versions (RY5, RY6, etc.) are generally custom formulations made specifically for or by certain individual vendors, either manufactured according to their specifications or produced in-house by a given vendor.
None of the hundreds of RY juices available in the retail marketplace share any particular consistency of flavor profile or ingredient mix, except for the most basic level of flavorings---tobacco, caramel, and vanilla (and sometimes nuts)---but some retail juices carrying the RY
something label even mess with that. That's why in
The Really Big RY4 Roundup thread, we divide RY4s into two classes:
Classic RY4s (based generally on the Janty/Dekang flavor profile common to most Chinese versions of RY4) and
Custom RY4s (more typical of USA-made RY4s, where pretty much anything goes, and the flavor profiles vary widely and sometimes wildly).
In fact, think I'll just buy up a few RY4 samples from different vendors and see if any are similar. The only other one I've tried is My Freedom Smokes RY4, and it is a MUCH darker juice, which tastes nothing like Altsmokes.
