This is a review for people who like breakfast flavors. Maple Butter by Coastal Clouds is described as melted butter with sweet maple syrup. A few weeks before writing this I reviewed Peach Tea from the same company and loved it, so I wanted to see whether Maple Butter would land the same way.
The short version
I enjoyed Maple Butter, though not for the reason I expected. The taste is good, but the smell of the vapor is what won me over: warm maple syrup, thick and instantly recognizable. No dessert juice I have tried smelled this good. That makes a single score awkward, so I am giving two: 8 out of 10 for taste and a full 10 for the scent of the clouds. I never really found the butter, but the maple syrup is strong, pure and true to life. If breakfast juices are your thing and you want one to vape all day, try it.
How it vapes
Maple Butter belongs to the Sweets part of the Coastal Clouds range. The company describes it as sweet maple and creamy butter. Some sites add pancakes to that description, but the official one does not.
The first inhale was warm and lightly sweet, in line with most dessert juices. The exhale brought a thicker sweetness across the tongue that I found very satisfying. Maple and butter did not stand out right away, and before I could look for them the smell of the vapor took over.
That smell was the high point for me. Some juices smell better in the cloud than they taste, and this is one of them. The room smelled of pancakes soaked in maple syrup, to the point where I felt as if I were drinking the syrup and started wanting pancakes. I kept taking more puffs just to get the scent back.
At 3mg the nicotine was enough for me, with no sharp burn at the back of the throat. Certain dessert juices hit hot and get uncomfortable; this one stayed smooth on every draw. The flavor also held up. However often I vaped it, the sweetness did not fade or turn bland. I went through three tanks without getting tired of the taste or the smell.
Bottle and filling
The juice comes as a single 60mL bottle made of dark plastic. Dark bottles irritate me a little, since you cannot see how much is left or judge the color and thickness, but the tint is there to keep sunlight from breaking the liquid down and darkening it. The hard cap is child-proof and still came off without trouble. The fill tip is slim, and the tank was full in seconds. I tend to squeeze too hard and make a mess; this bottle is sturdy enough that nothing spilled.
In the tank the liquid looked slightly thin while keeping the usual body of a dessert juice. It was clear with a faint yellow tint from the nicotine, something like watered-down canola oil. Smelling the bottle gave me a strong, sticky sweetness, rich and thick, that made me think of fresh maple syrup.
Packaging
Coastal Clouds went through a rebrand in which a number of flavor names changed and the colors and logos were updated to comply with FDA regulations. The box you receive may therefore differ from the one described here. The flavor is the same in either case.
Maple Butter is one of thirty e-liquids in the lineup. The name spells out sticky maple syrup and creamy butter, yet the artwork shows neither. Instead there is an ornate jar with a maple leaf on the front, perhaps meant to suggest expensive syrup rather than a stack of buttered pancakes. The design is detailed and professional, and the label and box share a deep maple color that matches the leaf.
What the box tells you:
- Top: the company logo
- Sides: bottle size (60mL) and nicotine content (3mg)
- Front: the flavor name near the middle, and at the bottom a warning that the product contains nicotine and that nicotine is an addictive chemical
- Right side: the flavor profile and the 70/30 VG/PG ratio
- Back: the required warnings, ingredient list, age and sale restrictions, and manufacturing information
I like having the flavor profile printed on the box, because most companies only put it on their website. The bottle repeats nearly everything on the box except the flavor profile and the VG/PG ratio.
Tastes differ from person to person, and this review is as honest an account of Maple Butter as I can give. The next review in this series covers another Coastal Clouds breakfast and dessert flavor, Blueberry Banana Muffin.