After dinking around with a few pipe tobacco NETs, I decided to try to do it right. So I uses some of my favorite pipe tobacco, Hearth & Home Classic Burley Kake.
I added the broken-up cake to the bottom of a coffee mug, about 1/2 full. Covered in VG and mixed into a nice slurry. Then added a little more VG as I didn't want things to get too thick to work with. Next I used the slow cooker that we used to use as a bottle warmer for the kids. It's got a "keep warm" setting that settles in, I'm guessing the 130-140 range. Did basically 8 hours on, 8 off over the course of two days, with frequent stirring and pressing.
I filtered the mix overnight, and gently squeezed what was left. Did two unbleached coffee filter passes, then two cotton-ball-in-syringe passes, and finally two more coffee filter passes.
Let it sit a couple of days, then mixed at 15% with PG (since the extraction was VG and fairly thick). Wow ... some serious tobacco/smokey flavor. Dialed it back to 10% and it's really quite nice. Tastes quite close to the real thing, though it lacks a bit of the natural sweetness on the back of the tongue. I might try adding just a drop or two of sweetener to soften things a bit. Also thinking this might mix well with a caramel or toffee flavor. Might have to play around some. I certainly have enough to experiment.
Thanks to everyone here for the tips and inspiration. I think extraction could be lot of fun. Got my mad scientist groove on a little.
I added the broken-up cake to the bottom of a coffee mug, about 1/2 full. Covered in VG and mixed into a nice slurry. Then added a little more VG as I didn't want things to get too thick to work with. Next I used the slow cooker that we used to use as a bottle warmer for the kids. It's got a "keep warm" setting that settles in, I'm guessing the 130-140 range. Did basically 8 hours on, 8 off over the course of two days, with frequent stirring and pressing.
I filtered the mix overnight, and gently squeezed what was left. Did two unbleached coffee filter passes, then two cotton-ball-in-syringe passes, and finally two more coffee filter passes.
Let it sit a couple of days, then mixed at 15% with PG (since the extraction was VG and fairly thick). Wow ... some serious tobacco/smokey flavor. Dialed it back to 10% and it's really quite nice. Tastes quite close to the real thing, though it lacks a bit of the natural sweetness on the back of the tongue. I might try adding just a drop or two of sweetener to soften things a bit. Also thinking this might mix well with a caramel or toffee flavor. Might have to play around some. I certainly have enough to experiment.
Thanks to everyone here for the tips and inspiration. I think extraction could be lot of fun. Got my mad scientist groove on a little.
