Adrian King, Chief Editor at SmokeTastic

Somebody has to be accountable for what a review site says. On SmokeTastic, that’s me.

I’m Adrian King, Chief Editor at SmokeTastic. I decide what gets covered, I set the standard a review has to meet before it goes live, and my name is on it if we get something wrong.

Most people who land here are trying to answer a small, specific question. Which pod kit won’t leak in a coat pocket. Whether a 20mg salt is going to be too much. Whether the device they’ve been sent an ad for is any good, or just well marketed. My job is to make sure the answer they find on this site is the one we’d give a friend, and not the one that pays best.

What I actually do here

I run the editorial side. That means choosing what we cover and in what order, deciding what a review has to establish before it’s worth publishing, and holding the line on the things that make a review site useful instead of decorative.

The process itself is written down in how we test, including the parts we don’t do. Read it before you trust anything here — it says plainly that we don’t run a laboratory and don’t publish measurements we aren’t equipped to produce. A methodology page that only lists strengths isn’t a methodology page.

SmokeTastic has been reviewing vaping products since 2012. It’s independently owned — no manufacturer, distributor, retailer or publishing group behind it — which I mention only because plenty of vaping sites won’t tell you who is behind the recommendation you’re reading.

Anything on this site that touches your health rather than your wallet is a different job, and I don’t pretend otherwise. On those pages we cite published research and name the source rather than paraphrasing it. Nobody writing for this site is medically qualified and nothing on it is medical advice. I’d rather say that in plain sight than let a byline imply something it shouldn’t.

What I look for in a vape

The specs on the box are the least interesting thing about a device. Wattage ranges and battery numbers are easy to publish and easy to hit. The things that decide whether you’re still using a kit in three weeks are much duller:

• Whether the flavor holds up. Plenty of pods taste excellent for two days and then go flat, or start tasting scorched at 20% battery. A first-day impression tells you almost nothing.
• What it costs to keep running. A cheap device with expensive proprietary pods is not a cheap device. The twelve-month figure matters more than the shelf price.
• Whether it leaks. Specifically: in a pocket, in a bag, on a plane, and after the fourth refill rather than the first.
• Whether the draw suits a smoker. A tight mouth-to-lung draw is what most people coming off cigarettes actually want, and a lot of otherwise good hardware gets this wrong.
• Whether you can live with it. Refill mess, charging port position, whether the button is where your thumb already is, whether you can tell how much juice is left without holding it up to a window.

Things we deliberately don’t weight heavily: cloud size for its own sake, launch-day marketing language, and any claim a manufacturer makes about their own coil life.

What I won’t do

We turn down most guest post requests. Nearly all of them are backlink trades dressed up as contributions, and letting them through is the quickest way to make a site useless.

Advertisers do not touch editorial. We run some advertising and it’s clearly marked as advertising. No brand has ever been shown a review before publication, and none of them get to.

SmokeTastic earns affiliate commission on some of the links here. That’s how the site pays for itself, and it changes nothing about the ranking — the cheapest genuinely good option gets recommended as the cheapest genuinely good option, whether or not there’s a commission attached to it. If a product is bad, we say it’s bad and lose the sale. The rules I hold the site to are set out in full in our editorial policy.

Where I’m limited

Worth saying plainly, because most author pages skip this bit.

We can’t cover everything. The disposable market alone puts out more SKUs in a quarter than anyone could work through in a year, so there will always be a device you’re interested in that we haven’t got to yet.

Flavor is subjective and no reviewer is neutral about it. A verdict on a menthol or a dessert liquid is one informed opinion, not a measurement, and we try to describe what a flavor is rather than just whether we liked it.

And we get things wrong. Prices move, formulas get quietly reformulated, a coil batch turns out to be bad. If you think something on this site is out of date or simply incorrect, tell me and I’ll go and check it — that’s not a courtesy line, it’s genuinely how most of our corrections start.

Get in touch

Email me directly at adrian@smoketastic.com. I read everything, and I answer most things within a day or two.

Happy to comment for press on vaping hardware, on what actually separates a good beginner kit from a bad one, or on how the retail side of this industry really works. I’m on LinkedIn, or use the contact page.

Everything I’ve written for the site is collected on my author archive. Good places to start: the beginner kit guide if you’re switching from cigarettes, or the benefits of vaping if you’re still deciding whether it’s worth it.