Bar salts explained: bar-style flavour in a 10ml bottle

Bar salt is a name for a style rather than a brand. These liquids recreate the bold, sweet, often icy flavour profiles made famous by bar-style disposables: blue razz lemonade, watermelon ice, strawberry kiwi, cherry cola and dozens more. They are almost always 50/50 nic salts in 10ml bottles.

Some come from the device makers themselves, such as Elf Bar's Elfliq and Lost Mary's Maryliq. Others come from e-liquid brands that specialise in the style, such as Bar Juice 5000. The whole category lives under bar salts, and it has become one of the busiest shelves in UK vaping.

The UK banned single-use vapes from 1 June 2025. Millions of people who loved bar flavours needed somewhere to go, and refillable pods plus bar salts gave them the same taste in a reusable kit. The flavours had already won people over; only the hardware changed.

Cost helped too. A refillable pod and a few 10ml bottles work out far cheaper per ml than prefilled pods, and bottles can be recycled with less fuss than a sealed device. If you are making the switch, our guide to choosing liquid for a pod kit covers the hardware side.

Here is the maths using our own shelf prices. A 10ml Elfliq Blue Razz Lemonade costs £2.99, which is about 30p per ml. A 600-puff bar-style pod kit holds 2ml and costs around £4.99, which is roughly £2.50 per ml.

That means one 10ml bottle holds the same liquid as five of those 2ml kits, for well under the price of one and a half. Add the occasional replacement pod or coil and refillables still win comfortably for anyone who vapes daily. Use the calculator in our 10ml bottle guide to run your own figures.

Most bar-style kits ran at 20mg, so a 20mg bar salt gives the closest match in feel. If you vaped bars constantly, 10mg can suit you better in a refillable pod, because it is easy to puff more often on a device you never have to throw away. Nicotine is addictive, so pick the lowest strength that satisfies you.

For hardware, choose an MTL pod with a coil around 0.8 to 1.2 ohm and an auto-draw option if you liked the feel of bars. Bar salts are thin and sweet, so they wick fast in small coils, though the sweetness means you will change coils a little more often than with a menthol or tobacco.

Because bar salts sit between two worlds, people tend to bring assumptions from both. Some expect them to be weaker than a bar, others think they are a completely different product, and a few worry they will not work in anything but a specific brand of pod.

Flip the cards for the reality. The main thing to know is that a bar salt is simply a nic salt with a particular flavour style, so anything that suits nic salts suits bar salts too. Our full explainer on nic salts covers the chemistry if you are curious.

A good place to start is with the flavour you liked most in a bar-style kit, then add one contrasting flavour for rotation. Blue razz, watermelon ice and mixed berry flavours are consistent bestsellers, while sour apple, cherry cola and pink lemonade have loyal fans.

Bar salt ranges are generally sold in 5mg, 10mg and 20mg, though a few skip 5mg. All of them are 10ml bottles with child-resistant caps, so check strength carefully when ordering and keep them stored safely. The products below pull straight from our shelves, and every one is a 10ml bottle that drops straight into a standard refillable pod.

Your favourite bar-style flavour was a 20mg watermelon ice, and now that single-use vapes are gone you have bought a refillable MTL pod kit with a 0.8 ohm coil. You want the experience to feel as close as possible to what you had, without paying prefilled pod prices for every 2ml.

Which bottle should go in the basket alongside the kit? Pick an answer and see whether you have matched both the feel and the hardware. Two of the options look tempting for different reasons, but only one gets the flavour, the strength and the ratio right together.