American Blend

Strengths shown in the selector change with stock. No single number fits everyone, and a higher number is not a better choice. If you smoked full-flavor cigarettes, 6 mg in 50VG/50PG is a common first bottle, or 20 mg salt in a pod. If you smoked lights, start at 3 mg. Move one step at a time from there.

For 50/50 and salt, use a mouth-to-lung pod or tank with a coil of 0.8Ω or higher at modest wattage. For 70/30, use a sub-ohm tank or pod mod with mesh coils. The paired device options above are the ones we stock, so choose from there, or let the Vape Quiz match you.

A plain word on coils, because it is the most common question in our reviews. American Blend is a rich, full natural extract, and rich extracts leave more on a coil than a light blend does. Expect to change coils sooner than you would with Special Blend, which gets an extra purification step for exactly that reason. There are no sweeteners in American Blend, which is the part that matters most for coil life; what builds up is tobacco, not sugar. Customers who stay with American Blend say the fuller taste is worth the extra coil.

The propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin are USP and Kosher certified.

American Blend contains no artificial flavors, added sweeteners, diacetyl, acetyl propionyl, acetoin, characterizing flavors, dyes, or synthetic nicotine. The ≈0 mg/ml option contains trace naturally occurring nicotine from tobacco extract. Do not choose it if you need a nicotine-free product. What you taste is the three tobaccos, not a flavoring built to imitate a cigarette.

We steep real tobacco leaf in a cold maceration for six to eight weeks, then filter and blend it in small batches. American Blend is three leaves, three curing methods, and one blend, and it moves through the same nine steps as every Black Note blend; from field to bottle the full process can take up to three years. That time, plus small-batch extraction from real leaf, is the product difference behind the price.

Read the full 9-step process

Most full-flavor cigarettes sold in the United States since have been some version of it. Ours takes the same three tobaccos and naturally extracts them from the leaf, so what you get is the blend itself, with nothing burned and nothing added.

Black Note added American Blend to the collection in 2022, after the single-leaf blends and Cigar Blend. Several of its first reviewers said they had been mixing Virginia, Burley, and Kentucky themselves to get closer to a cigarette; this was the bottle that ended the mixing. It is the only blend in the line named for a recipe rather than a leaf.