El Diablo Mambo, Calavera Catrina, St Louis

El Diablo's latest three juices - St Louis, Calavera Catrina and the newest addition to the range, Mambo, are given the taste-test by dw1986.

by Dave Junglist
May 28, 2015

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EL Diablo Mambo, Calavera Catrina, St Louis

El Diablo Juices launched at the end of 2014 with an initial offering of four juices, which quickly became extremely popular owing to the smooth, excellent flavour found within them, along with great customer service and pricing. The owner, Vik, states on the website:

“I've always loved cooking and especially baking cakes. My dad is an incredible chef and he gave me a real love for experimenting with food. He taught me from a young age about, not only using the best ingredients, but the importance of putting a little bit of love into each meal.

For me personally, I wanted to create juices that gave vapours the same kind of sensory enjoyment as one may get from eating a freshly baked, buttercream laden cupcake. The mmmmm factor. Taste is obviously important here but so is the texture or "mouth feel" when you get when vaping.

We create handmade, premium e-liquid, using high quality, vape safe ingredients from only the best UK and US suppliers.

All our juices are VG 50/50 PG and are packaged in child proof plastic bottles”

The original four juices, Sweet Voodoo, Beelzebub, Lime Cream Cupcake and Passion Bomb, from the initial launch were reviewed to great acclaim by OccultScientist, which you can find here.

I got my hands on Sweet Voodoo and Lime Cream Cupcake previously and I thought they were absolutely excellent juices, they instantly became overnight favourites of mine. Since that review, El Diablo were also awarded Vendor of the Month by Planet of the Vapes for March 2015, voted for by the forum members, and deservedly so as Vik’s customer service is excellent to go along with her brilliant juices.

Vik has been busy coming up with new ideas for tasty juices to add to the El Diablo stable, and the latest three are St Louis, Calavera Catrina and the newest addition to the range, Mambo. After being hugely impressed with my previous purchases from El Diablo, I was eagerly anticipating the opportunity to try these out!

All juices were provided with a mix ratio of 50/50 PG/VG and 3mg nicotine. All juices are available from www.eldiablojuices.co.uk in the following nicotine strengths- 0mg, 3mg, 6mg, 12mg and 18mg.

St Louis

“St Louis is the home of New Orleans Voodoo and the resting place of the Louisiana Voodoo Queen, Marie Leveau. Louie is also the name of my eldest boy and the inspriation behind this mouthwatering blend of juicy pineapple and sweet peach, topped off perfectly with a tangy raspberry twist. This juice is a fruit lovers dream”.

The fruity smell emanating from my bottle of St Louis was absolutely amazing, it really got my mouth watering. There was a pleasing waft of fresh fruit that sent my senses into overload! The taste of St Louis did not disappoint, there is a wonderful blend I detect of passionfruit, pineapple and mixed berries, a different one coming to the fore as I varied the power levels through my mod. This was perfect for me at 25 watts, but even going higher didn’t ruin the vape for me, I have found a lot of fruit blends can have a nasty almost chemical taste at high watts, and can also become too sweet and overpowering, but I am pleased to say that St Louis definitely does not. It’s a true fruit taste, rather than an artificial or candied fruit, and one of the few fruit liquids I could actually vape all day without it becoming too sickly.

I know the phrase ‘perfect vape for summer’ gets banded around a lot, but St Louis really is the perfect summer vape. A fantastical cocktail of fruit you can really enjoy in the sun, or to be honest in any weather climate, and it absolutely is a fruit lovers dream!

Calavera Catrina

“A delightfully light and creamy custard with a swirl of sweet strawberry and vanilla sponge cake.

If you like our Sweet Voodoo, you will love this custard version

La Calavera Catrina is an icon of The Mexican Dia de los Muertos (day of the dead) and is depicted as a beautiful lady with a sugar skull face”

Calavera Catrina is a strawberry custard based liquid, with vanilla sponge cake thrown into the mix. The strawberry comes from the original Sweet Voodoo, which was already one of the best strawberry based liquids out there in my opinion, and you can really tell as the strawberry is a lovely sugary sweet candied strawberry, with creamy custard blended into it. The custard is very realistic, I can detect it being very close to the original thing at over 40 watts. It’s totally chock full of flavour, without being too overpowering, and it is so smooth I found it really hard to put down. It’s definitely one best served warm! This is a brilliant custard based liquid, and can definitely hold its own in the crowded custard market, in my opinion its one of the best custard liquids out there.

As a strawberry and a custard lover, the blend of these two together in Calavera Catrina is absolutely perfect for me.

This is the best of the best when it comes to Strawberry Custards…

Mambo

“Mambo is the Vodou High Priestess. During the Day of the Dead celebrations, living relatives prepare bread and puddings as offerings to loved ones who have passed. The recipe is inspired by the Mexican flan that is a favourite offering.

Ripe bananas drizzled with sweet cream and warm caramel lie atop a beautifully light and fluffy sponge base”

The latest addition to the El Diablo range, and oh my, what an addition to the range this is. Now, as I have mentioned in previous reviews, I am not a particularly big fan of banana e-liquid, despite loving the real thing, and that is down to my dislike of banana foam sweet flavouring, which is too artificial for my tastes. None of that here I am pleased to say!

I cannot stress enough here that this is one of the very rare E-Liquids I have tried that contains fresh banana flavouring rather than the artificial foam sweet banana that I am really not a fan of. The fresh banana is just so realistic you could close your eyes and imagine you are eating the real thing! There is no chemical aftertaste at all that you get with the foam sweet flavouring.

Fresh banana is the most predominant flavour here, with caramel and the cheekiest hint of fresh cream in the background. This has just been mixed to absolute perfection, it is absolutely delicious. The smoothness of this liquid really helps to carry the flavours to your palate without being overwhelming. Mambo is ambitious, but my god is it good. It’s very, very good!

I found that Mambo really shines in my Freakshow Mini at 42-45w, this provided the perfect balance of banana on the inhale rounded off with cream and caramel. I much prefer it as a warm vape.

It’s a juice that really deserves an atty with a flavour build in to savour, it really is something special. Put it this way, my whole 10ml bottle was gone in a matter of a couple of hours, it was that moreish I had to go and order more!

Conclusion

These are three superb additions to an already fantastic range. Vik definitely deserves a pat on the back for what she has achieved here, a stunning, rounded range of juices that rival anything that is available out there! Even the labels are brilliant; they definitely get my award for having the best E-Liquid labels on the market, let alone the fact that they are right up there with the best in terms of flavour too in my eyes! Vapour production is outstanding for a 50/50 juice, this is up there with 60/40 or even 70/30 juices when it comes to clouds. The flavour is just outstanding from all three juices here, as OccultScientist has previously mentioned in his review you can definitely taste the care and the love in these juices, as well as the attention to detail in getting the flavours to blend perfectly. All of the juices I have tried from El Diablo I could quite happily award All Day Vape status too.

It was genuinely an absolute pleasure to have the opportunity to review Mambo, Calavera Catrina and St Louis, it was an immensely enjoyable experience, and I would go as far as saying these are definitely up there with my favourite juices of 2015, in fact they are up there with my favourite juices of all time. I went straight back on the site and re ordered some, they were that good.

I can’t pick a favourite out of the three, but what I will say is that they are three liquids I will be coming back to time and time again. El Diablo are definitely a go to vendor of mine. The three new releases here slot into the range perfectly, I cannot recommend them highly enough! Brilliant stuff.

El Diablo have kindly put up two sets of the whole range of their juices - to be in with a change of winning one bottle of each flavour in the range (7 x 10ml) just enter the competition here.

Dave Junglist

Reviewer at POTV

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Dave Junglist is co-owner of Planet of the Vapes and has been vaping since 2015. He spent his early years with his head in a bass bin and was a very committed and experienced smoker. He had his first cigarette at the age of 13 and just knew it was for him. He did stop briefly with the aid of patches but reverted quickly and became a ‘secret’ smoker, working hard to keep his weak will from the attention of his family. Vaping made an honest man of him and for this he is forever thankful. He has been involved in websites since completing a degree in Environmental Science in the late nineties. At that time there was pretty much no contact with computers but on joining the regular workforce and deciding that the world-wide-web was the future he blagged his first job as a web designer and never looked back. As you would expect from a junglist, Dave likes his beats and is most comfortable when the bass is wobbly.