The Official E-Cigarette of SXSW Tastes Like Crap

I spent the afternoon in Austin puffing on the Vuse, the official e-cigarette of SXSW this year, brought to you by Big Tobacco. Have I had worse? Yes, a really gross disposable e-cig that came from a convenience store in Miami. Have I had better? Oh yeah.

Vuse is made by the second-biggest US tobacco company, RJ Reynolds, which is trying to cash in on the growing vape scene/nascent multibillion-dollar industry. It launched in July and the company went on a marketing blitz, with a big push at CES and now in Austin as the "official e-cigarette sponsor," as noted in a company release.

The other tobacco giants are jumping on the digital bandwagon too. Lorillard, the number three tobacco company (of Newport cigarettes fame) acquired Blu e-cigs in 2012 and poured money into advertising. And the biggest of Big Tobacco, Altria, of Marlboro fame, is now playing catch-up with its MarkTen device.

Vuse's selling point is that it's a "smart" device—a microprocessor in the cartridge tracks your puffs and a blinking LED light warns you when it’s about to run out of liquid. Each cartridge lasts 200 puffs, or roughly the equivalent of a pack of "combustible" or "burn-down" cigs, to use the industry parlance.

The Reynolds rep I talked to, Richard Smith, told me this is meant to solve what they found to be consumers’ biggest complaint about e-cigs: inconsistency. "The first puff can be very satisfying, the second puff less so and then so on until by the time it's over the adult tobacco consumer thinks, 'Well I'll just go back to my regular smokes,'" he said.

But consistency isn't going to help much if it doesn't taste great to begin with, and this left something to be desired. It actually tasted like nothing at all, until that quintessential e-cig machine-y aftertaste. Smith told me Reynolds' tobacco experts worked to create a "flavor profile" that customers wanted.

Yet it doesn't taste like tobacco, and doesn't have a full mouth feel that I've tasted in other brands. Other e-cigs I've tasted have a more robust pull, for one, whereas the Vuse requires a pretty powerful suck to get any real vapor. Others also have more flavor options, including ones that more closely mimic the tobacco taste of traditional smokes. The Vuse is just weak.

The Vuse comes in two flavors, regular and menthol, with e-juice included so you can’t refill it yourself—Big Tobacco can’t risk people hacking the cigarettes and filling them even less socially acceptable substances. Independent e-cig companies, like Henley for one, at whose New York vaporium I spent an afternoon sampling dozens of flavors, don't have the same limitations. They may not have the money or the marketing power of Reynolds and co., but they were delicious.