Wow! You've been busy, and sorry I haven't been back for a couple of days.
10% - that sounds like an awful lot of menthol, I was only sticking one or two small crystals into a little 3.7ml JC sample bottle last time I was playing around with it. I'll have to try again and be braver from what you're saying. Glad the slow heat method for dissolving is working out for you, but suspect that temperature isn't all that critical - it is what you are trying to dissolve it INTO that really matters. The heat just helps it dissolve faster.
I'll confess that each time I've started 'developing' a new flavour I tend to start off with miniscule quantities - literally counting drops. 20 drops of this, 5 drops of that, 5 drops of something else. This does make it possible to 'scale up' for a whole bottleful but for some results it has been worth it. Doesn't waste much either in case it is 'orrible!
There's one thing I should mention though, one of my earliest posts as a newbie was "How many drops in a ml?" and the number of different answers we got for THAT one convinced me that among other things, size DOES matter! A small glass dropper will produce a lot more drops per ml than a large one. Never even got into trying counting drops with the plastic bottles, which I don't much like anyway.
We reckoned the viscosity of the liquid could affect drop size as well, so presumably the temperature could too. To compensate for that I'll use the same dropper size for experiments so at least the proportions should be roughly accurate if it works out to be one I want to mix up a whole batch of.
Very kind of you to check out the Mountain Rose shipping costs for me - I'd had a suspicion those might be a bit of a dealbreaker so it wasn't a huge shock. Fortunately I'm pretty well supplied with dropper bottles etc at present so not a problem.
10% - that sounds like an awful lot of menthol, I was only sticking one or two small crystals into a little 3.7ml JC sample bottle last time I was playing around with it. I'll have to try again and be braver from what you're saying. Glad the slow heat method for dissolving is working out for you, but suspect that temperature isn't all that critical - it is what you are trying to dissolve it INTO that really matters. The heat just helps it dissolve faster.
I'll confess that each time I've started 'developing' a new flavour I tend to start off with miniscule quantities - literally counting drops. 20 drops of this, 5 drops of that, 5 drops of something else. This does make it possible to 'scale up' for a whole bottleful but for some results it has been worth it. Doesn't waste much either in case it is 'orrible!
There's one thing I should mention though, one of my earliest posts as a newbie was "How many drops in a ml?" and the number of different answers we got for THAT one convinced me that among other things, size DOES matter! A small glass dropper will produce a lot more drops per ml than a large one. Never even got into trying counting drops with the plastic bottles, which I don't much like anyway.
We reckoned the viscosity of the liquid could affect drop size as well, so presumably the temperature could too. To compensate for that I'll use the same dropper size for experiments so at least the proportions should be roughly accurate if it works out to be one I want to mix up a whole batch of.
Very kind of you to check out the Mountain Rose shipping costs for me - I'd had a suspicion those might be a bit of a dealbreaker so it wasn't a huge shock. Fortunately I'm pretty well supplied with dropper bottles etc at present so not a problem.
