If you’re looking to start mixing your own liquid, there’s a few things you need to know, then a few things you need to do.
The things to know
First off, a little list.
1. Your mixes aren’t always going to be good. You best start with small testers, 10/15/20ml.
2. You might think you’ll not like some flavours and you’ll be wrong. And vice versa..
3. You will have to invest some money, I’d say keep in mind that you’ll be through $100 (or €100) in no time. You will save money in time, loads of it if you keep it relatively simple.
4. One-shots are pre-mixed flavours where you’ll only need to add base and nicotine.
5. Recipes need concentrates (flavouring), multiple concentrates, sometimes up to 10! (And base and nicotine.)
6. Coming up with your own recipes is hard, advanced stuff. Might not want to start there just yet.
7. Steeping is leaving the mix be for a while in a dark and not too warm place. The time you’ll need them leave be can go from ‘shake and vape’ to >12 weeks, depending on what you’ve mixed.
Bases, or: PG, VG and AVG
There are three different base liquids.
PG, or Propylene Glycol has almost the viscosity and weight of water. It carries flavours very well, but gives quite a bit of throat-hit. Some people have allergic reactions to PG, if you are one of them, you should know already as it is widely used in the food industry.
VG, or Vegetable Glycerin has less viscosity (thus is much heavier then water and) then PG. It carries flavours less well and is quite sweet off itself, it produces far more vapour then PG and gives less throat-hit.
AVG, or Aqueous Vegetable Glycerin is essentially VG mixed with distilled water. It carries flavours a little better then VG, is a little less sweet and produces a little less vapour then VG. But biggest advantage is that gives almost no throat-hit at all, sometimes it is called ‘Velvet’ because of this.
Flavours or concentrates
There are many producers of concentrates, the most well known being Capella (CAP), Flavour Art (FA), Flavour West (FW), The Flavour Apprentice (TFA or TPA). LorAnn (LA) and Inawera (IN or INW).
Nearly all of the concentrates are PG-based as PG carries flavours really well.
Savoury flavours: avoid these like the plague. It’s just not something that’s done well at this point, apart from some dairy and tobacco maybe.
Sweet is what we’re looking for, and there is much to choose from:
* Drinks: soda, energy drinks, tea, coffee, chocolate-milk, alcoholic beverages..
* Fruits: oh so many fruits, from strawberry to acaii berries, to peach to grape, banana, so many.
* Cream: whipped cream, custards, butter and many more
* Desserts: from gelato’s to milk-shake there’s much to choose from
* Breakfast: cereals and milks, yoghurt et cetera
* Pies: apple, red velvet, even batter-flavours!
* Sweets like candy, sugars, caramel, marshmallows, honey, butterscotch, liquorice
* Nuts including pistachio, almonds, coconut
* So much more to choose from
Things to know about mixing
There’s three ways to mix:
* By volume, where we work with milliliters
* By weight, where we work with milligrams
* By guesstimating, where we take serious risks and at least will lay our tastebuds to die, maybe more.
Volume or weight it is then
Buying labware
You will probably need to buy measuring and mixing labware. Let’s start with the basics:
1.a Bottles and containers for storage
Okay I’ll be blunt here to save valuable letters: buy glass. Just get some pharmaceutical grade glassware. Buy 100ml bottles and 1000ml bottles to start with. At a later point you might want 250 and 500ml ones to, but you don’t really need them right away.
If you’re in Europe: Praxisdienst is great, iBottles is good, there’s always Amazon if you’re lucky (not in my country!). Just google “100ml glass bottle lab” and you’ll have a great start. One little piece of advice: boil the bottles before use, you want clean bottles.
1.b Bottles and containers for mixing
You will be mixing, so you’ll need bottles to put the mixes into. There’s two ways to go: plastics or glass.
Plastics with the obvious side-effect that they’re not really meant to last and they’re not exactly friendly for the environment. They can be harder to clean and there are certain concentrates that could possibly deteriorate the bottle. Also: I’d only use LDPE and HDPE as used in the baby-industry, we’re not fabricating soda’s so no PET.
Glass has the side-effect that they can break -though not easily-, they are easier to clean, but are often more expensive and need a pipette-dripper-thing (as driptops often don’t really work well with glass bottles). Also: you can buy some really classy bottles, looking good is part of the experience ;-)
Looking at sizes of available bottles there’s a lot to choose from. I recommend buying a lot of 30ml bottles, you’ll be mixing and steeping in these in the beginning. So it’s very possible you will have a batch of bottles you won’t be able to use for weeks.
Once you’ve found a couple recipes you really like you can either mix them in the bottle you want to use to fill your tank with, or in a container bottle. I’ll leave that up to you as some don’t want a bulky 60/120ml bottle and others don’t want anything smaller then 120ml. Some want a bottle that can hold a pipette, others don’t.
1.c Bekers, flasks, graduated cylinders, funnels and the likes
It doesn’t matter if you’ve chosen to go volume or weight for the two basic necessities: funnels and either a measuring beaker, graduated cylinder or griffin beaker. The funnels you will need to pour from the relatively large containers you get your base (and maybe nicotine) in: especially VG is hard to pour.
Now in the beginning I wouldn’t buy much more then that, unless your budget allows and you’re planning on big bottles of mixes.
2.a Mixing by volume
Allright, you’ve chosen to be mixing by volume. So what to buy to be able to do so? Depending on the budget and the volumes, you will either buy disposable pipettes or syringes. Always buy multiple sizes as you will work with multiple quantities of concentrates, buy multiple of each as you don’t want to mix your concentrates (or nicotine) with each other.
If you buy syringes, you might want to buy some blunt-tip needles with them as you’ll be pulling liquid from the concentrate-bottles.
2.b Mixing by weight
Might seem a little more advanced, but has certain advantages.
1. You will need a seriously good scale, like the American Weigh Scales LB-501 Digital Kitchen Scale (about $40 on Amazon). It needs to weigh with a 0.01 resolution, in grams, with tare-function and no auto turn-off.
2. You will need a couple of funnels.
3. You will probably not need syringes, needles or anything making cleanup easy as pie.
4. This is more accurate then by volume, especially if you’re mixing (very) large bottles.
5. If you’re going large bottles, you can weigh the concentrates and nicotine in an Erlenmeyer or Griffin beaker on your scale before putting it into a bottle and adding base to the mix. (500 grams, even including a flask will make for big bottles!) Also: every concentrate has it’s own unique weight, you might need to take that into account.
6. If budget allows, buy pyrex glasswork.
Tips for when you are mixing
1. Use gloves!
2. Take your time
3. Make notes (Shake and vape a bottle, take notes and let it steep.)
4. Use labels on your bottles (name of the recipe, date of mixing, amount of nicotine if any)
5. Your workplace can not be clean enough, neither can your tools
Recipes
Recipes can be found in Facebook groups, on e-liquid-recipes.com, alltheflavors.com and sites alike. Be sure to sort by rating, you will want to have a good recipe that’s been tried and found good by others. Sites like these let you search in the recipes, you’ll need to as you probably wouldn’t have guessed that “Flawless - Aftermath” contains Berry cereal, blueberry, glazed doughnut and vanilla ice cream concentrates..
Okay fine, where do I buy all of this?
Well I’m located in The Netherlands so where I buy is probably very different from say someone in the US or Australia. I’m afraid you will have to google a bit to find a reputable and affordable supplier, and you’ll probably need multiple suppliers.
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