Are they worth picking up?
Gloop’s selection of e-liquids is fantastic. With four well-executed flavors on offer for a more than reasonable price of £14.99 (plus the cost of your nicotine shot) for a 50 ml short-fill bottle, they’re well worth testing out.
The focus of the mixer means if you’re not into sweeter flavors, it might not be for you, but if donuts, cakes, caramel-infused coffees and nutty cookies are the sort of thing you like to vape, these are four e-liquids you don’t want to miss.
Full review
Short fill e-liquids are proof that regulations can easily be subverted. When the EU instituted the tobacco products directive, they banned e-liquid bottles over 10 ml and nicotine levels over 20 mg/ml. But enterprising companies quickly found a solution: nicotine-free liquids weren’t subject to the TPD, so selling bigger bottles is possible as long as you don’t include nicotine as standard. For vapers in Europe using lower-strength e-liquids, the availability of short fills makes it much easier to continue vaping as before, and to enjoy the often boutique, dripper-friendly brands you’d get through 10 ml of too quickly.
Gloop is exactly the sort of company that short-fills are perfect for. With a line-up of four dessert flavors, their juices are intended for vapers who want something sweet and delicious even if it means paying a little bit more for each bottle. The four flavor options include Blueberry Donut, Caramel Latte, Hazelnut Cookie and Sticky Strawberry Cake. They all sound amazing, and at the price of £14.99 each, they aren’t too expensive either. But are they worth it?
Our Gloop e-liquid review taste-tests the juices to find out.
Packaging and Design
The Gloop e-liquids come in 60 ml capacity gorilla bottles, and all have eye-catching and colorful labels. The gorilla bottles are squeezable plastic, with a long spout underneath a child-proof cap that strikes a nice balance between safety and ease of opening. These bottles are becoming standard in the industry, and it’s easy to see why. The only downside for the short-fill nature of the liquid is that it’s difficult to get the spout section out so you can fill up with e-liquid, but the companies very much have their hands tied by the law.
The label design is really good. Every flavor has a unique color for its backdrop – for example, Blueberry Donut is blue and Sticky Strawberry Cake is pink – but all have the same pattern of multicolored sprinkles. “Gloop” is written across the front in a graffiti like font, animated so it looks like the letters have been formed out of icing-and-sprinkle covered donuts. The name of the flavor is written below, and you get the usual array of ingredients and warnings in the small print at the back.
In short, the bottles themselves are great and the label design is eye-catching and effective.
Mixing Options
Because they’re short-fill e-liquids, you don’t really get a choice when it comes to nicotine level. The bottle come filled to 50 ml, with 10 ml spare in the bottle so you can easily fill up with a nicotine shot or nicotine base. The downside is that in the EU you can only buy up to 20 mg/ml nicotine shots (and in practice, 18 mg/ml is usually what you’ll get), so it’s hard to make the juice anything other than 3 mg/ml after adding the shot. If you can find a stronger nicotine base (purchasing from outside the EU or if you live in the US, for instance), then this isn’t an issue.
The PG/VG ratio of the juices is also fixed, with 70% VG and 30% PG in the mix. This is very much the standard PG/VG ratio these days, because it provides a great mix of clouds and a bit of a punch from the PG portion of the throat hit. You can use it comfortably in most tanks on the market, unless you’re still using an older design, in which case you might have issues.
Gloop E-Liquid Review: The Flavors
Blueberry Donut – Rating 4.5/5
Accuracy: Blueberry Donut is described as a donut stuffed with blueberry jam, and the juice very much hits the main aspects of this. The donut backdrop is quite well captured, with a sugary glaze taste and a subtle doughy flavor behind it. The blueberry could easily have dominated the milder underpinning flavors, but it’s quite understated and generally well-executed. It hits you with a mouth-watering, gently sweet flavor throughout your draw. The juice might taste like a dessert-y blueberry e-juice rather than necessarily a donut, but you definitely get what you’re looking for.
Overall: This is a really delicious e-juice. It has just the right level of heavier sweetness from the donut and lighter, fruitier sugars from the blueberry to make every puff a delight without pushing things too far. It isn’t a heavy, over-sweet dessert: it’s refined and nicely-balanced so you can keep coming back to it. I’m not usually a huge fan of blueberry but this is really good.
Caramel Latte – Rating 4.5/5
Accuracy: This is a pretty self-explanatory flavor, aiming for a coffee-and-caramel combination like you might get at a not-quite-named chain coffee outlet. The coffee is the main event of this flavor, and it comes through really clearly from the start of your draw. It’s realistically-captured, and the caramel shots do a great job of softening the flavor a bit and making it more like a caramel lattle than a more generic sweet coffee flavor. It does taste like something you’d get at Starbucks rather than something you’d whip up at home with instant coffee granules.
Overall: Like Blueberry Donut, Caramel Latte is quite an understated flavor, but that really works to its advantage. Again, the core flavors are well-captured and hard to miss, but Gloop hasn’t pushed anything too far. This is another juice you can happily vape throughout most of the day without it getting too sickly or losing its appeal. They’ve balanced the caramel with the coffee well enough that neither is overpowering, and it makes for a very delicious juice.
Hazelnut Cookie – Rating 5/5
Accuracy: This is another flavor that needs little introduction: a hazelnut-infused cookie described as being “fresh from the oven.” The result here is astounding. The cookie is beautifully-captured, with a rich, warm sweetness serving as a base for the flavor and immediately evoking memories of a soft, freshly-baked cookie. The hazelnut also comes through straight away, adding character to the cookie base with its impressively realistic flavor. They combine beautifully, too: neither dominates the taste and you get exactly what you’re looking for from the juice.
Overall: Hazelnut Cookie is ideal for anybody who likes dessert flavors. Both elements are perfectly-captured and the execution makes for a truly mouth-watering e-juice. The hazelnut takes it away from a “standard” cookie flavor and makes the whole thing more unique, but even without this element it would be delicious. The cookie itself reminds me a lot of G2 Vapor’s Mr. Cookie, which is an amazing e-liquid in its own right. I can’t really praise this juice enough; it’s definitely my favorite from the four and one I’d highly recommend picking up.
Sticky Strawberry Cake – Rating 4/5
Accuracy: This is described as a moist strawberry cake that’s heavy on the icing, and the combination makes for a pretty tempting-sounding vape. The execution is great: the strawberry comes through immediately, especially on the nose, but the subtle sweetness of the cake makes up the bulk of the flavor. The strawberry is well-captured but doesn’t completely overwhelm the e-liquid, and it’s the main aftertaste you’re left with after you’ve taken a puff.
Overall: This is an excellent all-day-vape e-liquid for lovers of strawberry. The subtlety of the flavor is it’s real saving grace; everything is light and gentle enough to avoid overkill but still delicious enough to keep you coming back for more. This means it isn’t as in-your-face tasty as some of the others in the line-up, but it’s very enjoyable none-the-less and one you won’t regret picking up a bottle of.