Foreword
To be honest, it's been a long time since I've had a juice line that makes me excited to talk about it like this. I guess most vapers will share this feeling when tasting CORE - a new juice line launched by Dinner Lady. CORE was born late, most of its flavor components are no longer strange to everyone. However, what makes me interested in this juice line is that they are impressively complex. And as you know, to me, feeling vape juice is like flirting with a girl, the harder it is to conquer, the more interesting it is. CORE has all the elements that a vaper needs in a bottle of delicious juice: high-quality flavor, awakening taste, good sense of smell and sophistication in the way the juice components are mixed.
The price for this juice line is also very reasonable when talking about the capacity and quality brought to users. With 9 different flavors and bottled in 120ml, I think it will take you quite a while to experience this entire product line. So let me review each flavor of CORE in detail in this article. This article will be long, I will go into the notes of the flavor as well as how to fully feel each bottle of juice because CORE is very delicious and it would be unreasonable if I reviewed it briefly.
Detailed review
1. Strawberry Apple - Green apple, red apple and ripe strawberry
/Sweet 60%/Sour 15%/Cool 6%/
The green apple pre-taste is pungent and slightly sour. It will be difficult to feel the “smell” of green apple because this fruit is more on the palate than the aroma. The mid-taste is characterized by the smell of ripe strawberries, sweet but not too sweet. The aftertaste is not clear, but when you exhale the smoke through your nose, you will feel the lingering scent of red apple. You heard right, after finishing the vape, you can clearly smell the scent of red apple.
This is a juice that is almost not cold (cool: 6%) and quite sweet, so it is easy to get "diabetes" and tongue-tied if you spam the continuous smoke style. Its flavor is very stable and strong, so it is suitable for 1-core clapton coils, with an average air intake of 2.0 - 3.0mm. If you use a mesh occ, consider lowering the power a bit to avoid the tongue being exposed to sweet and hot vape smoke for a long time.
2. Honeydew Melonade - Fresh lemon juice, honeydew, cantaloupe
/Sweet 75%/Sour 55%/Cool 19%/
Melon + Lemonade = Melonade, easy to understand and very intuitive. Melonade is not strange to UK friends and sisters who are passionate about food. But to be honest, as someone who has only ever known black coffee with no sugar, I was quite surprised by this combination. Throughout the puff, the lemonade flavor explodes, cool and slightly sour. The melon and cantaloupe are a bit less ostentatious when only felt at the end of the puff. Overall, the juice bottle gives the user 2 flavors that are clearly separated in 2 stages of the puff so as not to cause boredom when used all day.
Easy to play and easy to win is what I can say about this juice. It doesn't need too much setup, if you smoke with a secret wind and small coil, you can clearly see the sour taste of lemon. It will be more interesting if you play with a big coil, maximum smoke, maximum flavor, just open the air hole and let Honeydew Melonade do the rest.
3. Tropic Thunder - Pineapple, mango, guava, red apple, orange, grapefruit, passion fruit
/Sweet 35%/Sour 5%/Cool 10%/
Listening to the brand's description of the flavors, there are many, up to 6 types of tropical fruits mixed into this juice bottle. No brand is great enough to separate all 6 flavors and Dinner Lady is the same. But that doesn't mean this bottle is bad, on the contrary, this is 1 of 2 bottles that I rate as the best in the CORE line. The first taste with ripe mango stands out, fragrant enough to awaken the senses but not too sweet to overshadow the next flavors. The middle taste includes grapefruit and orange, the orange here is not the red orange or yellow orange of Westerners with green eyes and long noses, this is the familiar orange of Vietnamese people, thorny and rough but very sweet. In the description, the company does not mention the aftertaste, but personally I feel the scent of pineapple and passion fruit wafting through my nose, very pleasant. Sadly, despite my best efforts, I couldn't find the guava hiding anywhere...
A bottle of juice with such explosive tropical fruit flavors, it would be a waste if you decide to smoke it on a secret wind. Dual coil, high wind, 810 drip tip will be the optimal choice to pull all the best essence into the puff.
4. Pink Lemonade - Lemonade with red berries
/Sweet 85%/Sour 70%/Cool 43%/
Since the 80s of the last century, Americans have "invented" the famous pink lemonade, which was present in most of the parties of teenagers at that time. Lemonade tastes good but has a strong smell because it is a citrus fruit and its color is quite boring, so they came up with a way to mix in berries such as blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, etc. to change the color as well as add flavor to the lemonade.
Back to CORE's Pink Lemonade, this is my favorite juice out of the 9 flavors. Throughout the inhale, there is a fragrant smell of blueberries and raspberries, other flavors like strawberries or raspberries are felt but not clearly. The sweetness comes early but not too strong. The sourness of the lemonade is felt deep in the throat. I don't know if it's my imagination or not, but I feel a little salty like salted lemon when I exhale, just a little but not too clearly.
Pink Lemonade is delicious in that it does not focus on the lemonade flavor but on the extremely special berry flavor. As for this bottle, I think you should figure out how to set it up yourself to smoke it, no matter what coil you use, it is still very delicious and worth a try.
5. Watermelon Chill - Watermelon, cantaloupe, cantaloupe
/Sweet 55%/Sour 41%/Cool 50%/
There’s not much to say about this bottle other than the 3 melons mixed together. In terms of taste, I can barely distinguish between the 3, after all, melons taste quite similar when put into juice. As for the smell, it’s not hard to guess that watermelon will take the spotlight in the fore-flavor. It’s near the end of the puff that you can feel the melon and cantaloupe blending together.
If you are a fan of watermelon, this is a good choice. It is difficult to detect the other two flavors when smoking on an RDA. If you are like me and like the watermelon flavor more prominent, smoke it with a 26-36 Ni80 clapton coil on an RTA with a relatively long chimney.
6. Grape Vine - Sparkling grape juice
/Sweet 46%/Sour 5%/Cool 19%/
Still grapes but something different and special. Although the company describes this bottle as a combination of 2 varieties of red and black grapes, I personally feel that it smells more like Black currant. Why do I say the grape flavor of this bottle is special? Because when eating or drinking juice, what you taste is not only the sweetness of the grape pulp but also the astringency and aroma of the grape skin. When it comes to grapes, the first thing that pops into our minds is the noble red wine bottles. So do you know what the criteria for choosing grapes to make excellent bottles of wine in the Bordeaux region of France are? They must be grapes harvested in the middle of the cold, snowy winter, when the flesh is sweeter and their skin is thicker and redder than in other seasons. I also feel that spirit in this bottle of juice from CORE, the only difference is that it does not have the spicy and pungent smell of wine like wine-flavored juice bottles. It must be added that many brands have tried to add the bitter taste of grape skins to their juices to increase the authenticity for the smoker, but this is the first time I have seen a brand do it as successfully as CORE. You can consider Grape Vine as a single-flavor juice. And it only needs one flavor for the brand to let the user understand how good their flavor quality is.
The juice has a moderate sweetness, cool enough to not get bored when smoking all day, so it won't be too difficult to choose a configuration to use it. You can smoke it lightly to feel the refreshment, but it's not a bad idea to play it on a mtl smoking configuration, when the complex grape flavor of the juice will be truly honored.
7. Tropic Mango Chill - Ripe mango smoothie
/Sweet 80%/Sour 41%/Cool 81%/
Simple but effective. This bottle is the one that gives me the most headache when writing about it. Because other than the word "delicious", there is nothing more to say about it. Tropic Mango Chill simulates a glass of ice blended with fresh ripe mango and sweet condensed milk. I myself am not a fan of highly sweet juices, but this bottle really does a great job of recreating the taste of fresh fruit, it is sweet but the natural sweetness of the fruit, not unpleasant or harsh like artificial sweeteners.
The coolness of this bottle is the highest in the line, however, for most vapers who are used to brain-chilling juices like SteamWorks, Tokyo,... the cool number: 80% is nothing. The juice has a high sweetness but is also cool enough to not get bored when smoking all day. After a journey of challenging yourself with many-layered flavored juices, this is truly a precious break. Trust me and try it, you will not be disappointed.
8. Vanilla Tobacco - Tobacco and vanilla
/Sweet 20%/Sour 0%/Cool 0%/
Vanilla tobacco, a flavor that is no longer unfamiliar to vapers. I really don’t want to write too much about this flavor. But this is one of the 9 flavors of the CORE line, so its quality is certainly not bad at all. For me, “vanilla tobacco” is a flavor with a special value. This is the first flavor I tried and fell in love with after a long time of only knowing vape through fruit juice. I’m sure those of you who are smoking “high end” juice when reading this article will have the same feeling as me.
Vanilla Tobacco has a vanilla-dominated flavor, with just a hint of tobacco wafting through the nostrils when exhaled. For smokers, that little bit of tobacco is not enough, of course, we need something “extremely bold” like Latakia. But for beginners, this is the perfect stepping stone to enter the world of tobacco juice.
My advice is to smoke this bottle on an MTL tank/pod to best experience its smoothness.
9. Vanilla Custard - Vanilla Custard
/Sweet 40%/Sour 0%/Cool 0%/
The warm taste of custard and caramel. The rich vanilla scent runs throughout the entire puff. Finally, when exhaling, there will be a bit of fatty fresh milk scent lingering on the palate. This is a flavor that anyone who loves rich juices has tried. CORE's Vanilla Custard is not much different from other brands, but it must be said that this is a juice from Dinner Lady, so the quality of the ingredients is of course always high. The juice does not turn black or change its smell after a long day of use. With other rich juices, I usually change the cotton after about 1 to 1.5 days of continuous smoking. However, with this bottle, I was quite surprised that the flavor quality was still the same even though the cotton had been smoked through 3-4 full tanks.
Vanilla Custard is quite rich and strong, so it may not be as good as MTL smoking. You can use Clapton or Fused Kanthal A1 coils to smoke, but you should close the air holes a bit to reduce the strength of the juice. Very suitable for smoking all day in the upcoming cold autumn days.
Summary
People who are used to fruit juices will not like the creaminess and conversely people who are used to creamy juices will often not care for fruit juices. CORE convinced me to try it and it is definitely worth a full review.
Familiar fruit flavors with new mixes will be your reliable companion in the coming days. Who knows, in this tense time of the epidemic, CORE might be a rare ray of joy in the anti-epidemic journey of vapers.
Try it out and let us know what you think of it in the comments. Stay safe, vape on!
Gia Bao
