Killa Exclusive - Liquorice | 10 Cans

Killa Exclusive Liquorice: A Flavour That Does Not Try To Please You

Killa Exclusive Liquorice is semi-sweet black liquorice with a herbal edge and a faint menthol note running behind it. It holds 13.2mg of nicotine per pouch, the same as every Killa can. It is also the most divisive thing the brand makes, and one independent reviewer scored it 3.08 out of 5, which is a low mark for Killa and an honest one for a flavour this polarising.

None of that is a reason not to buy it. Liquorice has never been a flavour that courts approval, and the people who like it tend to like it a great deal. The point of this page is to make sure you know which liquorice you are getting, because there are at least three and most listings do not say.

This Is Not Salty Liquorice

Worth putting near the top, because searches for salty liquorice pouches are as common as searches for plain ones and buying the wrong one is a genuinely unpleasant surprise.

Salty liquorice, known across Scandinavia and the Netherlands as salmiak, gets its character from ammonium chloride rather than from salt in the ordinary sense. The sensation is sharp, mouth-drying and faintly ammoniac, closer to a chemical bite than to seasoning, and it is genuinely beloved in the Nordics and genuinely alarming to most British palates on first contact.

There is none of that here. Independent tasting notes for this can describe it as semi-sweet and slightly herbal, and no listing anywhere mentions salmiak. If salty liquorice is specifically what you came for, ZYN Black Licorice is the can that actually delivers it, at a very much lower nicotine strength.

Liquorice, Aniseed and Liquorice Root Are Three Different Things

Here is the bit almost nobody in this category explains, and it clears up a lot of confusion about why liquorice sweets taste the way they do.

The plant, liquorice root, contains glycyrrhizin, a compound roughly fifty times sweeter than sugar with a slow, spreading, faintly medicinal sweetness that arrives late and lingers. That is the sweetness, and it is unlike sugar in how it behaves on the tongue.

The smell you think of as liquorice is mostly not from the root at all. It is anethole, the compound that defines aniseed and star anise, and a great many liquorice confections lean on it heavily while containing very little actual root. That is why liquorice, aniseed balls, ouzo, pastis and fennel all share an unmistakable family resemblance despite coming from unrelated plants.

A pouch has to reconstruct both halves of that. This can leans aromatic, which means the anise side leads and the rooty, slow sweetness sits underneath rather than dominating. If you like aniseed, you will get on with it. If what you love is specifically the dense, chewy, root-forward character of a proper liquorice bar, expect something lighter than that.

The Session

The aroma from an opened can is unmistakable and slightly herbal, with the menthol note audible before the liquorice properly registers. Under the lip it opens in the first minute or two, which is faster than the coffee cans but slower than the fruit ones.

What arrives is described consistently across independent notes as not overpowering, which is either the best or the worst thing about it depending on what you wanted. This is a legible, moderate, semi-sweet liquorice rather than a punch in the mouth. The faint menthol keeps it from turning syrupy and gives it a little lift that a straight liquorice can would lack.

Longevity is where it earns its keep. Reviewers put it at 30 to 40 minutes and note that, as with most Killa cans, the flavour lasts for ages. Liquorice compounds are heavier and less volatile than fruit esters, so they release slowly and hang around, which is the same reason a liquorice sweet coats your mouth long after you have finished it.

Why One Reviewer Only Gave It Three Out of Five

Because scoring a divisive flavour on a single scale does not work very well.

The 3.08 out of 5 was not a complaint about the pouch construction, which was described as slim, moist, soft and a good mouthful, and it was not a complaint about longevity either. It reflects a reviewer working through a whole range and finding this one less immediately enjoyable than the mints and the berries. That is a reasonable thing for a general reviewer to conclude and a fairly useless signal for someone who already knows they like liquorice.

Treat the score as a warning about the flavour category rather than about the execution. If you buy liquorice sweets on purpose, ignore it.

Every Liquorice Pouch We Sell, By Strength

Liquorice has one of the widest strength spreads of any flavour on our shelves, from something a beginner can manage to something well into experienced territory. Exact per-pouch figures are given only for Killa and Pablo, where our own pages verify them, and everything else is a band because brands label differently.

The Pablo row is the interesting one. Both cans come out of NGP Empire's factory in Aalborg, so the pouch paper, the moisture level and the way it sits under your lip are shared, and the flavour brief is a close relative. What changes is the nicotine loading. If you want to find out whether liquorice works for you before committing to 30mg, this is the sensible place to do it. The strength guide covers the Pablo ladder in full.

Strength: What the 16.5mg Means

The lid number is a concentration, not a dose, and confusing the two is the most common mistake in the category. Exclusive is a flavour series rather than a strength tier, so this can is exactly as strong as every Original-line Killa. Full label decoding sits on the Killa Energy page and the brand overview on the Killa nicotine pouches hub.

Specification

Denmark rather than Sweden, whatever a number of UK listings say. Aalborg is also, as it happens, a city with a serious liquorice tradition of its own, which makes the flavour a rather more natural fit for this factory than it looks from a British shelf. The rest of the line sits in the Killa Exclusive range.

Why Every Pouch Brand Makes One and Almost No UK Shop Explains It

Liquorice turns up in nearly every serious pouch range and hardly ever gets more than a sentence of description. The reason is geographic. Pouches grew out of Scandinavian snus culture, and in Scandinavia liquorice is not a niche curiosity but an ordinary, mainstream, sold-everywhere flavour sitting alongside mint and coffee. A Danish or Swedish range without a liquorice can would look oddly incomplete.

British shelves inherited the product and the flavour list without inheriting the context, which is why UK listings tend to write two lines about liquorice and move on. The demand is real, including a steady stream of people specifically hunting the salty version, and the descriptions mostly are not there. That gap is the reason this page spends as long as it does on what kind of liquorice you are actually buying.

Who Should Skip It

Anyone who does not already like liquorice. This is the one flavour in the range where trying it to see is a poor plan, because liquorice is not a taste people warm to gradually. Anyone hoping for salmiak, for the reasons above. Anyone new to nicotine pouches, since 13.2mg is a serious dose. And anyone wanting a dense, chewy, root-forward liquorice bar in pouch form, because this leans aromatic and lighter than that.

Worth adding: liquorice is a difficult can to rotate with. It leaves a lingering aromatic trace that clashes with almost anything fruity you follow it with, so it works best either on its own or next to something equally dark like Cappuccino or Dark Cherry.

Getting the Best Out of It

Eat first, as with anything at this strength. Twenty to thirty minutes is the useful window and there is no great benefit in pushing much past forty. Keep the lid clicked shut, since the menthol note is the volatile part and goes first, leaving a flatter and sweeter liquorice behind. If the aromatic aftertaste bothers you, a glass of water rather than a coffee clears it fastest. Our guide to how many pouches a day makes sense is worth a read if you are stepping up from a milder brand.

Cans are sold in packs of ten, which is 200 pouches, and the per-can price steps down as you add packs: £3.50 a can at two packs, £3.33 at three and £2.99 at four. Mixing brands and flavours across packs is fine, and given how strongly people react to liquorice it is the sensible way to buy this one rather than committing your whole rotation. The single-pack rate is on the product panel above.

The Verdict

A properly made liquorice pouch that will be somebody's favourite can and somebody else's worst purchase of the year, and there is very little middle ground available. It is semi-sweet rather than salty, aromatic rather than rooty, long-lasting, and slightly more restrained than the flavour name suggests. The low review scores it collects say more about liquorice than about this pouch. If liquorice is your thing, this is the strongest version of it we sell short of moving to Pablo, and it is a great deal easier to live with.

Written and fact-checked by the NicotineBuzz product team against current UK listings and published independent reviews in August 2026. Strength figures come from the can and our own variant. Our previous description of this can as having a salty edge was not supported by any source and has been corrected. Updated August 2026.

A note on the numbers: Killa prints strength per gram of pouch material, so "16" means about 13mg of nicotine in each 0.8g pouch. Our snus vs nicotine pouches guide decodes per-gram labels across every brand we stock.