So this question has probably been asked before but i found a lot of contradicting answers so forgive me asking...
How long do flavorings last ? I want to buy a lot of them but I'm afraid they will go bad before i get a chance to use them all.
Also what would be the best way to store them? In the refrigerator or freezer or just a dark place at room temperature?
Hi I store my nicotine glass flask in a small desk refrigerator which also has a heat function. Somehow it went from cooling to heating and the flask went pretty hot. I do not know exactly for how long it had been standing heating but i assume several hours. My question is, is my nicotine flask bad, is it a risk to use it in upcoming batches? Thanks for your reply, sincerely an unlucky DIY beginner.
So I recently got into DIY juice and made some Unicorn Milk with some modifications, and after two weeks, it was incredible compared to store bought.
So I was bored last weekend and decided to make some for my brother and myself, and a guy at the vape shop told him to steep it in the refrigerator.
I have tried to find any relevant information on backing up having cold steeped juice, but I can't find a single bit of reliable information, most of it claiming what I had originally thought, where it is going to take forever to steep.
Since the fat guy that told him to do it works for a vape shop, he's taking his word over mine but he's pissing me off defending this advice.
Is there anything I can show him to get him to get the juice I made out of the refrigerator and just in a cabinet drawer? It's getting under my skin a bit.
In an effort to put an end to the continuous storage (storing) question threads, I decided to try to consolidate the storage best practices all into one thread. These have been talked about to death, and personally, I'm too lazy to search about to find answers to link to for people so I'll just add all the best practices here. I'm hoping this thread will work as a reference in the future, there's not a lot of new content here, but my hope is that if someone searches "storage", "storing", "how to store", "nicotine", "flavors", "propylene glycol (pg)", "vegetable glycerin" in the search bar, this will pop up.
Please note that all of the steps and options I am outlining below are BEST PRACTICES, not requirements. All products (nicotine, flavors, PG and VG) maintain a shelf life of roughly 12 months if stored in a dark location at room temperature without excessive exposure to oxygen.
Original Post Slightly Modified - Ok, now you have received your order of nicotine, you have tested it to be accurate, it's clear and clean and ready for use. If you ordered more than a 30 day supply, follow the best practice below to ensure you maintain the highest quality.
Nicotine is primarily degraded by heat, light, and oxygen. Eliminating any of these 3 is good, but eliminating all of them is even better. If you follow the nicotine storage instructions below, you can expect your nicotine to last 5+ years (my longest bottle is now just over 4 years old and is perfect).
First things first, you want to break down your order of nicotine into two categories. The amount of nicotine you will consume over the next 30 days, and all the rest. Some will also advocate diluting your nicotine at this stage (to something under 60mg/ml) which I have no argument with as it should slow the degradation of nicotine, however, I personally, don't believe it matters much if you follow ALL of the steps below.
Whatever you are consuming in the next 30 days, place in an amber glass bottle, dropper top discouraged but can be used. Place this container in a cool dark place, kitchen cabinets work great, if you tend not to run A/C in hot summers, consider placing it in your fridge instead. LABEL THIS BOTTLE AS TOXIC/POISON/NICOTINE so that you don't have any mishaps with drunk friends...
Place the rest of your nicotine solution in amber glass bottles in 30 day supply sizes. IE, don't put it in 250ml bottles if you only use 30ml a month. We want to minimize the exposure to oxygen as much as possible and this means we don't want to be opening and closing the same bottle. Once you have that quantity broken down into amber glass bottles, label them all with the date received and vendor received from (batch if desired), once again, label as poison/toxic/nicotine etc.
You want to fill these bottles as high as possible to allow for a minimum amount of oxygen in the bottle once sealed. If you aren't filling to the brim you can use an argon wine preserver like this one in order to eliminate the excess oxygen in the bottle. Follow the instructions on the bottle.
Seal your nicotine bottles for storage (just caps or caps + argon), place in a brown paper bag, and place them in the freezer. Remove one bottle at a time as needed. Try not to place them on the door or near the ice maker to avoid excess agitation. Polycone caps are preferred for all long term nicotine storage.
Nude Nicotine offers Nude Armor nicotine that is already prepped for long term frozen storage. I have no first hand knowledge of this product.
Store your flavors in a cool (room temp or slightly below) dark place. Refrigeration is an option but some compounds can crystallize if stored around or below ~40F. If you do chose to store your flavors in the refrigerator be sure to let them come to room temperature and then mix thoroughly before use. Standard best practice is to store them in a cabinet/box, or anywhere outside of exposure to excessive light. Do not store in the freezer.
Same storage recommendations as flavors, however, if you are truly looking to stock up on VG (no idea why as it will always be available) you can store in the freezer using similar methods as nicotine for maximum shelf life.
Same storage recommendations as Vegetable Glycerin (VG).
So, to be safe, I'm stocking up on a few mods and juices that I like... And stocking up on diy stuff to hold me over the next couple years, just in case.
I've ran through the search function a bit... And I've deduced that nicotine base should be PG and should be stored in freezer. But, should I immediately transfer the nic into smaller (30ml Amber glass) bottles then freeze, instead of one large bottle and reopening every time I need to get some? And should I keep the bottle I'm working with in the fridge? Can I get 2+ years storing this way?
Also, should pg and vg bases be frozen/refrigerated in the same manor? Is amber glass bottles necessary for just the bases? I don't go through much ejuice on a daily basis... Maybe 3-5ml a day. So I think a gallon would last a good long while. Plus, I'm not in control of the air conditioning in my household... So I don't think I trust room temp in summer.
Nextly, flavor concentrates... I just read conflicting things. Room temp can be fine, refrigerating can be fine. But the refrigerator might crystallize some concentrates like ethyl maltol? I'm probably going to be getting quite a bit of flavors on my first order because I'm worried about the Flavors getting FDA'd or getting sold out due to people resorting to diy... So, freeze? Refrigerate? Room temp for specific ones, refrigerate the rest? Amber glass bottles? Can I get a 2+ years of good flavor concentrates storing properly?
Lastly, specific juices I buy right now that I like....if I'm stocking up to have last an extended amount of time, should I get it without nicotine? And freeze or refrigerate the majority till needed? Adding the nicotine myself as I go? Anything else I can do specifically to make these premixed 0mg nic juices last as long as possible?
---I realize these questions have been asked a lot, and will probably be getting asked a lot more in the coming months... But I have so many and after searching the sub... I just want some verification before I start buying everything. Thanks in advance and sorry for pissing off those of you who will be bothered by my questions.
I'm getting ready to place an order for some VG. How long will that last before it "spoils" if its stored in a refrigerator? I've got a mini fridge that I'm planning on using bc its empty as shit. I'm not planning on keeping in there for years, but a month, two at the most, is about how long I plan on keeping some of it. I'm getting a killer deal on the VG I'm getting, and just wanna make sure that it's gonna be ok if its kept in said mini fridge for a few months.
I'm getting ready to place an order for some VG. How long will that last before it "spoils" if its stored in a refrigerator? I've got a mini fridge that I'm planning on using bc its empty as shit. I'm not planning on keeping in there for years, but a month, two at the most, is about how long I plan on keeping some of it. I'm getting a killer deal on the VG I'm getting, and just wanna make sure that it's gonna be ok if its kept in said mini fridge for a few months.
Recommended or not so much? My house doesn't really have any spots that are cool to keep my juice in while steeping. Whats a good recommended temperature for it?
I started at google with a search for 'ambrosia recipe which yielded the recipe from Alton Brown and 2 suggested searches yielded these:
What is ambrosia:
Ambrosia is a variation on the traditional fruit salad. Most ambrosia recipes contain fresh or sweetened pineapple, mandarin oranges or fresh orange sections, miniature marshmallows, and coconut. Other ingredients can include maraschino cherries, bananas, strawberries, peeled grapes, or crushed pecans.
How to make ambrosia:
Add the sour cream and whisk to combine. Add the marshmallows, orange, pineapple, coconut, pecans and cherries and stir to combine. Transfer to a glass serving bowl, cover and place in the refrigerator for 2 hours before serving.
Recipe from Alton Brown
I converted this all to cups here;
Flavor Selection
Heavy Cream and Sugar would obviously translate into Sweet Cream (or maybe VBIC)
Sour Cream is a little more difficult. After looking through popular creams I thought of Butter Cream, but when looking into pecan flavors I Think that I'll use butter pecan (FW) and get the richness of sour cream with the pecan flavor together. It may be good to involve some butter or another rich cream that I don't know about.
The lack of toasted pecan flavoring leads me to choose Toasted Marshmallow to get the toasted touch.
With orange my gut says Mandarin, just personal preference and the ambrosia that I grew up with. I see that Orange Mandarin(TPA) is popular.
Pineapple makes me think sweet almost like candy and I recall reading that golden pineapple is that kind of flavor so I'll pick CAP Golden Pineapple.
Coconut Candy(TPA) is in the top 5 most used, and sounds good to me (and I've seen ambrosia recipes that use it)
Marashcino Cherry(TPA) is the #3 most used in cherry flavors and it's in the recipe.
Now I have seen some people use Pina Colada in Ambrosia recipes and I think that it'll help to bring the flavors together. I still plan on using the individual flavors to accent the pina colada as well, this flavor will just be a bit of glue to hold things together (TPA) is popular and seems to fit the overall pattern so we'll pick that one.
I had originally set out to be cloning THRST - Ambition liquid before deciding that a great Ambrosia would suffice, so I think that I will use some yogurt. Yogurt may be able to give me the bit of what I may be otherwise missing in the sour cream bit, especially a greek yogurt. We will decide on Greek Yogurt (TPA) as the butter pecan will bring it back to sweet.
So now I have this list: PLEASE SUGGEST ANY RECOMMENDED CHANGES
the only one of these flavors that I have used is the toasted marshmallow
The next bit that's important is finding the percentages that are most common (as a jumping off point) for each flavor both as a single flavor and in a mix. After getting these we will scale these values by the food recipe.
Food recipe will be adopted like this
The next part I used an Excel spreadsheet to run some numbers. In addition to the calculations listed, I also found the sum total of each column to eyeball a decent overall flavor percentage.
I find the sum total of food ingredients and then divide each ingredient amount by the total to get the % of total flavor. This us going to be used as a method of judging/scaling from the ELR percentages
I then get the Mean and median values for each flavor used as a single flavor and as a mix. I averaged the mean and median to get a better (in my opinion) ball park for each. Then I also got minimum and maximum values for using in a mix. I made columns using the scaling factor from above (gotten from food recipe) and the values from ELR. My gut said to use the meanscale values for single flavor, but those give a flavor total of 7.486% so I just look across the totals for each column and find 3 that seem to have potential. the Medianscaling for single flavor has 8.763 % total. The minimum amount (for a mix, from elr) of each flavor gives a 16.7% total and the average of mean and median (for a mix from ELR) gives a total of 27.35%. Initially I think that the 16.7 sounds best to me but I don't want to discredit the 8.763 total as I believe that these flavors are going to be pretty powerful together (just my gut here)
Thre are now 3 recipes to try
The 8.76 % Total (basesd on median single flavor value and scaling factor)
The 16.7% recipe (based on minimum value in a mix)
and lastly the 27.35% total from average of mean and median used in a mix
TL;DR: I went ADD on creating a clone recipe that I haven't tried yet. I will work on putting these three on ELR at lunch and I will link them here.
I've been thinking about this a lot in the past couple days. I extracted some espresso through the method in the sidebar, and the flavor is incredible... But upon further investigation it seems like there's too many lipids left in the base for a safe vape.
So last night I scoured the web for information about lipids, how they dissolve/absorb into liquids of differing polarities, which brewing methods extract most/less lipids and this is what I've come up with.
Standard drip brewing relies on gravity to extract flavor from the bean and exposes only those flavor oils just under the surface of the grounds to the brewing water. Espresso brewing forces water in to the interior cell wall of the tightly packed grounds, extracting by pressure what gravity alone can’t: emulsified oils, sugars and lipids that give espresso the intense and complex flavor profile for which it is renowned.
If this is true, then a standard drip brew/pour over with no pressurization would probably be the best method of extracting flavor molecules from the coffee grounds without getting the same level of lipids as soak and shake/aeropress/ect. Taking this one step further, coffee brews that are filtered through filter paper have been found to contain less than 7mg of lipids per 150ml of brew - this is compared to 60-160mg/150ml of nonfiltered or espresso style brews.
Since lipids dissolve/extract MUCH easier in solvents of lower polarity, I believe we could use something like methanol or ethanol (still polar, but is much closer to non-polarity than water, propylene glycol, and vegetable glycerin - methanol would extract the lipids more efficiently, but I would feel better about using ethanol because of methanol's toxicity) to pour through the coffee beans before we do the extraction to try to extract out as much of the lipids as possible. Using some sort of alcohol is preferable too, since it will be very easy to evaporate any lingering molecules from our flavor brew once we're finished. Combine all of this with the fact that lipids turn from a liquid oil to a solid fat based on temperature (the colder, the more solid), I believe we can get almost all of our lipid content out of our flavor.
Here's how my method would work - keep in mind I have yet to actually test this. First, we would take a medium-fine grind, scoop out 1tbs per 30ml of our desired flavor base (VG would technically be better for avoiding lipids based on its polarity, but PG would work much better with the paper filters). Then we would rinse the paper filter with water to rinse away paper artifacts, add the grinds, and pour cold ethanol through them, making sure to soak every bit of grinds thoroughly. The colder the better, because we don't want the ethanol extracting our flavor out before we get to it. Then we would heat our flavor base to ~196-200 degrees F, and perform a pourover coffee brew with our PG/VG. Once it has strained out (it will take a while), we can use a refrigerator or freezer to get the brew as cold as possible. Once it's cold, and whatever lipids are left are nice and solid, we run it through a paper filter a second time, then use a hair dryer or heat gun or something in a well ventilated area to dissolve off any remnants of ethanol that might remain (you'll definitely be able to smell the alcohol if there's any left).
I'm hoping this pourover method will be enough to extract enough flavoring from the coffee grounds to be useable. If not, I believe we could do a hybrid of this extraction method and the one on the sidebar - as in the mason jar, hot water bath with grounds, shake it up method - only at the beginning run ethanol through the grounds and at the end filter through a paper filter, refrigerate and filter out through a paper filter again to still achieve the same goal - however this pourover method would in theory leave us with less lipids.
Can I get some critique on this? Am I missing anything?
I just mixed up a bottle of my Fruity Pebbles juice, and it's making my mouth numb. I thought it was the nicotine, but I only put 3mL(24mg/mL, 30mL bottle.) I've used all these flavors before, and haven't had this issue. I always double check my nic, because I've jolted myself before with way too much and it was terrible.
Could the nicotine have gone bad? I keep it in the refrigerator when I'm not using it, but it's 100%VG (first time DIYing, I didn't know better lol)
I'm going to be moving and I want to mix in a certain room where there will be a small refrigerator. I only keep nicotine for about four months before all of it gets used. Would refrigeration be good enough for that amount of time or does it always have to be in the freezer regardless of time gone by?
Just wondering what your opinion is on refrigerating flavor bottles. I live in a climate where the winters are quite cold (it's pretty darn cold now and will reach about -10C soon) and the summers can be insanely hot (up to 38 C, with 85% humidity).
I currently have all of my flavorings, PG and VG in my small home office, which doubles as my mixing room. I have no air conditioning in the room.
I think the flavorings and ingredients are fine right now, as it's quite cool, but I am worried about when summer hits. The room will get pretty hot and open windows during that time will not help at all.
Is it safe to keep my ingredients out in the open room when temps hit that high? Should I start thinking of investing in a refrigerator? I guess the actual cost of the unit needs to be considered, but also the monthly electrical cost...
Thanks for any advice.
I'm new...just waiting on my shipments to get started and I read through "things you won't know you missed until you need them," and I'm just wondering what everyone would add to that list.
I'm sure if you had thousands of dollars burning a hole in your pocket you would invest in some electronic pipettes...but beyond that what has been useful to DIY'ers? Maybe things you couldn't live without now and use them all the time? Supplies or equipment etc?
I'm personally looking at the e-liquid/paint/nail polish shakers for my bottles.
One of my local B&M's had nic that was going bad and I don't want to experience that peppery taste ever again so I went ahead and got a mini-fridge that was normally 150 but on sale for 99 during Black Friday. I also have a niece and nephew so I got a fridge lock coming: http://www.amazon.com/Refrigerator-Door-Lock-Padlock-White/dp/B00722OIJI/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1417295599&sr=8-3
