NamVet, do you mind sharing your extraction process for cigars. Shot glass vs. slow cook? Volume and type of liquid and amount of tobacco used? Would you also use this method for PTE or change due to the wetter nature of pipe tobacco? I've kept up with most of the threads here but would like to know what your current thoughts are. Or any of the other pros here for that matter.
TIA
No problem: I've used both the shot glass method & the longer week-long steep method and the results were almost identical, so I just go with the "quick & dirty" shot glass method now because its so fast and easy.
The shot-glass method is quite simple, and there are no definite volumes of the various components involved. I'm an avid cigar smoker & I have literally hundreds of cigars in a number of humidors, but I like to make my extracts from the ones I really enjoy smoking the most. You get a tremendous amount of e-juice out of an average cigar after you dilute the extracts for vaping, so you might as well enjoy it. At about a 10% dilution, it's easy to get a couple of hundred mls of great-tasting e-juice out of a decent Corona-sized cigar.
In a nutshell; I take a heavy shot-glass, cut up about 1/4 to 1/3 of one of my cigars (depending on ring-gauge, or size of the particular cigar), slice & chop it up as finely as I can & dump it in the shot-glass (about 3/4 full). I then cover it with PG until it becomes "slushy" with a little extra liquid on top. I then pop it in the microwave for about 5 SECONDS, or just until it gets warm -
NOT BOILING!! You just want it to get warm enough to steep like you do tea, but if you bring it to a boil - it becomes acrid-tasting, so be careful. You can substitute VG instead & it works, but the flavors will tend to be more muted. Even though I prefer as much VG as I can in my juices, IMHO the PG extraction just works better.
I then let it cool to room temperature for about a half-hour and then spoon it into the back of a large syringe with a sterile cotton ball at the bottom & push it through with the plunger into a clean container to remove the bits of tobacco from the juice. I strain it one more time with a syringe filter into a storage bottle (either .45 um, or .2 um - both available on Amazon) and that's my extract. You can skip the final filtration step if you want - the cotton ball is normally enough, but I find my coils don't gunk up as fast if I run them through the syringe filter as a final step.
One shot-glass full will usually yield about 5-10 ml of pure extract. I use that as my base to make the final juice for vaping. I generally use about 10% extract, 5% Distilled water (to make it flow a little easier in my gennies) and the rest VG. I sometimes play with a few other concentrated flavors like Vanilla, Cocoa, or EM to sweeten it, and add them just to mix it up a bit, but I generally like them as-is. A little steeping time once the final juice is mixed always helps....they just get better with time.
That's what works for me... I can't take credit for it, I picked it up from some of the guys on the pipe tobacco / cigar extraction threads..... pipe tobacco extractions should be identical in every way. Pipe tobaccos tend to have more additives than cigars, but that really doesn't matter, the results should be the same - the flavors will end up in the extract.
Hope that helps....
I've made a home-brewed NET of a tea that sounded just like that and it literally tasted like mustard. So much so that I let a friend try it who doesn't vape without describing it to him and he asked why I was experimenting with mustard. I believe it's either the cardamom (which are the super pungent spicy things in Turkish coffee blends) or the clove. I would stick with a tea that has very few ingredients, and preferably just one.
