I'm tempted too by their RY1-3 mixes, especially the 2 since I've never tired this version of the Ryan recipe.
I'll throw this out there, have any of you, fellow Ry4 Vapers tried the previous numbered variants before the 4? It seems many vendors don't stock them, but vapour world seems to have all versions (save for FSUA's RY5 a juice I didn't much care for). They even have a juice labelled as 'Ryan' which I presume is straight up tobacco and likely the tobacco in all of their RY mixes.
According to Ludo---one of the owners of Janty who claims to be the creator of the original-no-kidding-first-ever-version of RY4---he was visiting a major eliquid production facility in China back in 2007 (I assume it was a Dekang factory, but Ludo didn't say, so we don't know for sure). Ludo and the flavor lab chemist got together sort of
ad hoc and decided on the spur of the moment to create a new juice blend together. They started with some basic ingredient flavors---tobacco, caramel, and vanilla presumably---and, after numerous changes, additions, and refinements, came up with something unique that both men really liked. Since it was their fourth version that day, the chemist suggested that they name it
Ruyan #4, which was subsequently shortened to
RY4. "Ruyan" is supposedly the Chinese slang word for "cigarette-like" or "resembling a cigarette."
The RY4 that Ludo and the chemist created that day is---or so Ludo and Janty swear---
exactly the same recipe that Janty still sells today in their Classic and Elixir Lines.
But back to 2007, where the story then gets cloudy. The Dekang chemist may have further altered the formula afterwards (without Ludo) to produce the proprietary RY4 that Dekang sold under its own label until May 2010. That's the juice some people still call (incorrectly) the "original" RY4, since it was actually an altered recipe (with some flavors jacked up and others muted) based on the Janty original.
In May 2010, this flavor chemist left Dekang (to begin an eliquid company with new partners) and absconded with the "secret" Dekang RY4 formula. He was subsequently arrested, tried, and sent to prison in China for industrial theft, but the missing formula he stole has never re-surfaced or been recovered. I'd speculate that whenever this chemist gets out of prison, that legendary formula may magically re-appear under a new label. Or maybe not. Who knows? All we can conclude is that the original-recipe RY4 is still available from Janty, but the altered-recipe Dekang RY4 that so many ECF posters write of with great praise and profound longing is, indeed, lost.
There are some other twists and contradictions in this story that I've been told privately, but I'm not at liberty to share that information publicly. I have no way of verifying it anyway.
The
point of the story is
this: From what I've been told, the lower-numbered versions of RY---
RY1, RY2, and
RY3---all came
after RY4,
not before. So, RY4 didn't "evolve." Instead, the other versions were reverse-engineered backwards. Heck, I don't even know if the versions of RY1, 2, and 3 sold by numerous vendors are the same or different, either individually or as a group.