HealthCabin has recently become one of my go-to vendors. HC sells essentially the same lines of products offered by USA vendors (the stereotype of lower quality
vaping products coming from China may be true on occasion---especially with regard to “imitation”
mods, such as the new Lavatube VV, which is effectively the poor man’s ProVari---but mostly I regard that opinion as a tiresome xenophobic bias.
The main difference I note between HealthCabin and American internet vendors is this: because HC is based in China, their pricing is significantly cheaper than American vendors can offer. On large orders, the high costs of fast EMS shipping from China are usually outweighed by the inherent savings, and---assuming one can wait 2-3 weeks---the slower and much cheaper air mail shipping option works fine for smaller orders. For essentials like drip tips and cartos, HealthCabin is a godsend. (It’s downright sickening to see an identical drip tip that HC sells for a buck hawked by some American vendors for $4.50 and more. That’s just highway robbery, as far as I’m concerned.) So, thumbs up for HealthCabin as a vendor.
I had built up quite a bit of anticipation concerning the long-awaited return of HealthCabin’s house-brand RY4 after an absence of many months. I wanted to buy some when I started the
Big RY4 Roundup thread in June 2011, but---lo and behold!---it had vanished and was no longer available, along with all of HealthCabin's tobacco flavoring concentrates. Bummer! Well, recently the house-brand RY4 and flavoring returned for HC’s ongoing holiday sale, so I snagged a 30ml bottle of juice and 10mls of the flavoring concentrate as well (I got the flavoring for free). This review concerns mainly the pre-mix RY4, although the note at the end expands that into the flavoring concentrate as a mad scientist footnote.
test specs: 24mg nic, PG base (it's also sold in a VG-base), golden colored liquid, atty-dripped first in an IKV 1.6 ohm LR306, then vaped in a 2.3 ohm Micromizer X7 powered by a Madvapes VV box set at 4.5 volts, for a power output of 8.8 watts.
HealthCabin house-brand RY4 (as opposed to
Dekang RY4, which HC also sells) is fairly characteristic of all the Chinese RY4s. That means that it’s a well-made and very well-blended juice that stays in the ballpark of the now-typical overall signature flavor of Chinese-made RY4s. Every element is unified into a single end result, with no ingredient standing out. I taste only one flavor, and it’s what everyone with any experience recognizes as RY4.
That said, HC RY4 does skew the balance a bit. While providing very good performance---great throat hit at 24mg and nice vapor production for PG---and letting the vaper know that this is a tobacco-based flavor, the tobacco doesn’t stand out. It’s an aura more than a flavor. In addition, the caramel and vanilla are similarly indistinct. That’s curious and rather unusual. I did get some nuttiness, but it was similarly unfocused. Instead, what comes through is sweetness. This is definitely a dessert vape, although not nearly as in-your-face sweet as some of the more extreme dessert RY4s. I'd call it subtly sweet.
What’s strange is that the sweetness has no flavor (at least no flavor that my palate can identify). It’s just sweet. I guess sweet is a taste (sweet-sour being one of the basic scales to describe taste sensation), but darned if I can place it into a particular flavor or combination of flavors. I don’t mean to be overly harsh in this assessment---HC RY4 is a decent and non-offensive vape---but I found my taste buds searching forlornly for caramel and vanilla, to no avail. Oh, I'd imagine they’re present---RY4 doesn’t taste like RY4 without them---but I can’t seem to pinpoint any sensory evidence.
I am left with the impression of HC RY4 being a very odd juice, one that provides ample impact and sufficient taste, but with all the particular component flavors in the background, shrouded as it were. This is a case, I think, of taking otherwise superb blending one step too far. As a result, I can’t give HC RY4 a high or even middling ranking. It has to be buried somewhere in the bottom third of the Big List. While a perfectly acceptable vape, it’s simply too nondescript to win any prizes, given the strong competition.
[Note: I did a little DIY experiment by taking 2ml of HC RY4 and adding 20% more flavor(.4ml), since I have a bottle of the flavoring concentrate. The result when atty-dripped? The caramel begins to peek through the fog while the nuttiness fades away, but the sweetness became ever-so-slightly acrid from the higher (30-40%) concentration of flavoring. All in all, I feel that the doctored juice is better, but still not the solution I was hoping for.]
HealthCabin house-brand RY4 ranking:
#49
Category Groups:
Dessert (more sweet), Nutty, Balanced/Blended, So-So (undistinguished)
Link:
Healthcabin E-Liquids, including HC RY4 in PG or VG
