fforest,
One of our posters here on the thread---emberl is her screen name, and she's Dutch---personally knows Ludo, the owner of Janty and the creator of the "original" RY4 recipe (Ludo also gave the juice its name: Ruyan-4---shortened to RY4---since Ruyan is Chinese slang for "fake cigarette," and the juice that he and the chemist came up with was their fourth version that day).
By ECF rules, however, Ludo can't post on this user thread, because he's a registered supplier. When people began discussing in this thread the original RY4, emberl PM'd Ludo about it, and he instructed her to tell us that the RY4 Janty sells today is the original RY4. So, that's been verified: The Janty Classic RY4 sample that seantex sent me, which I then reviewed (and ranked in the middle of the Top 10) is, in fact, the original RY4, and might be the same recipe as the bottle of RY4 that was just found in a drawer.
The unresolved question is whether the original RY4 that Ludo created is the same formula as the "Holy Grail RY4,"---meaning the now-mythic "lost RY4" that Dekang was manufacturing but stopped selling in May of 2010 because their chemist absconded with the secret recipe. (We have learned that this Chinese chemist was subsequenly arrested and jailed for industrial theft).
There are hundreds of posts in the ECF archives from the summer of 2010 and later from members insisting---sometimes angrily---that Dekang must have suddenly changed the formula (they did, of course, because they had to make up a new recipe, since the old one had been stolen), and that the "new" RY4 wasn't nearly as good as the "old" RY4 (many people in those posts called it the "original" RY4).
My guess is that the two juices---Janty's true original and Dekang's lost RY4---are almost certainly not the same recipe. Why do I think this? Because too many people who vaped the lost Dekang juice and loved it continue to swear to this day that it wasn't the same as any RY4 available today---including the RY4 that Janty is selling now.
So, even though we've rediscovered the original RY4 (Janty), we still have a mystery surrounding the fabled lost RY4 (Dekang). Seantex hasn't yet clarified the source (Janty or Dekang) of the 2009 RY4 he's waiting to receive a sample from in the mail from another ECF member who found it in a drawer. Until we know who made it or sold that bottle of RY4, it's uncertain what we have here. Right now, what makes it special is that it's two years old. Beyond that, we'll have to wait and see what seantex tells us.
