QUICK TAKE
Black Flag Risen puts flue-cured Virginia tobacco in front and lets a nutty, faintly smoky finish follow. It is sweet without tasting sugared, it is easy on the throat, and it holds its character from 75 watts to past 100. An all-day tobacco for people who love tobacco. Castle Long Reserve Custard Edition opens on bourbon with a touch of tobacco and, on a slow exhale, finishes on custard; it feels like being handed a fine cigar without tasting like one. Pass on both if your vape has to taste like candy or fruit.
Five Pawns paid for this review and sent both bottles. The opinions are mine.
Most of the companies that were making e-liquid when I started writing about vaping are gone. Five Pawns is still here, and the two bottles on my desk explain why. I have not found better quality in American e-liquid. If you love tobacco, or that rare blend where good coffee meets good tobacco, you will not do better than this, and that care is the reason they have outlasted so much of the trouble this industry has been through.
Tobacco first, and that is the point
The first draw is tobacco. Not a hint of it under a dessert, not a cigarette impression painted on top of vanilla, but tobacco, out in front, before anything else arrives. Five Pawns describes Black Flag Risen as creamy cappuccino enhanced with flue-cured sweet Virginia tobacco, and on my bench the order runs the other way: the Virginia leads, and the coffee sits behind it.
What follows on the exhale is nutty and smoky. The nuttiness rounds the tobacco off, and the smoke is a suggestion, the way a good pipe tobacco smells in the tin before it is lit. It is sweet, but it is not a sweet e-liquid. The sweetness is there to carry the tobacco, and it stops before it gets cloying.
It is also gentle. There is no rasp on the throat at all, which matters more than it sounds for a tobacco blend, because that is where a lot of them fall down.
An all-day tobacco
The test for any tobacco e-liquid is the fourth hour, not the first puff. Plenty of them taste fine at nine in the morning and wear your palate out by lunch. Black Flag Risen does not. I vaped it through the day and it held, which is the highest compliment I can pay a tobacco flavour.
What is in the Black Flag Risen bottle
Black Flag Risen comes in 60 ml bottles at 50PG/50VG, in 0, 3, 6 and 12 mg strengths, for $20.99 on the Five Pawns site, and every strength was in stock when we checked. There is also a Black Flag Risen Limited at $24.99, which Five Pawns says adds velvety custard, truffle cream and mocha-dusted black walnut to the same cappuccino and Virginia base.
One more thing readers should know. Five Pawns’ current product pages for both of these blends say they contain metatine, a lab-made relative of nicotine, and carry the warning that it is addictive and habit forming. Read the label on the bottle you buy.
On the bench: 75 watts and beyond
I ran Black Flag Risen on a Lost Vape DNA75C mod with a SMOK TFV16 and a sub-ohm coil. At 75 watts it felt just right, with the tobacco full and the nutty finish intact. It will take more than that. If you like to push a tank past 100 watts, this blend can handle it.
Tobacco first, a nutty and smoky finish, and nothing in it that tastes like candy.
Castle Long Reserve, Custard Edition: an occasion you can vape all day
Castle Long is one of the blends Five Pawns built its name on (we marked its tenth-anniversary Reserve back in 2023), and the Reserve Custard Edition is a limited run that takes it somewhere richer. Five Pawns describes custard and graham over smooth bourbon, toasted coconut and roasted almond.
The first draw is bourbon, and right behind it comes a touch of tobacco. It is very smooth. The tobacco carries through the exhale, and if you let that exhale out slowly, the custard rises up on top of it. That slow exhale is where this bottle rewards you, so take your time with it.
On sweetness I would put it at six on a scale of ten, where ten is very sweet: enough to round it off, never enough to take over. And like Black Flag Risen, it is gentle on the throat, with no harshness at all.
The best way I can describe how it feels is this. It is like being handed a top-notch Cuban cigar. It does not taste like a cigar, and there is no cigar flavour in it anywhere, but it carries the same sense of occasion: the feeling that someone has given you something elegant and special. I ran it on the same Lost Vape DNA75C and SMOK TFV16, and the same 75 watts felt just as right.
Castle Long Reserve Custard Edition is $32.50 for 60 ml at 50PG/50VG, in 0, 3, 6 and 12 mg, and it was in stock when we checked. For a tobacco lover it is very much an all-day vape: the sense of occasion stays, and the flavour never wears out its welcome.
It does not taste like a cigar. It feels like being handed a very good one.
Who it’s for, and who should pass
Black Flag Risen is for tobacco lovers. It is for smokers who still love the taste of tobacco and want it without the smoke, and for vapers who gave up looking for a tobacco blend that tastes like tobacco and not like a candle. If your idea of a good e-liquid is candy, fruit, or something sweet enough to call dessert, this is not your bottle, and Five Pawns would probably tell you the same. Castle Long Reserve Custard Edition is for sophisticated vapers looking for the utmost quality in a custom tobacco mix, the bottle that makes an ordinary afternoon feel like an occasion, and one a tobacco lover can keep in the tank all day.
Five Pawns has made its name on blends like this one for a long time, and it is not hard to see why the people who find it tend to stay.
