Rock tumbler overnight seems to have accelerated aging of my DIY juice

[Mr.Mann]

ErineKim, can you please go into a little detail about a few things?

1) What was your recipe (percentages) used?
2) What were the names of the flavors you used and from what manufacturer?
3) Was that your first bottle of DIY?
4) If this was not your first batch, have you experienced a liquid for two weeks stay "cloudy/milky in appearance"?

 

[Exchaner]

I remember from Physics 101 that soldiers are told never to march in unison when crossing a bridge. Each bridge or structure has a natural frequency at which if shaken, will cause collapse. Therefore if the soldiers happen to march at THAT particular frequency .... then goodbye bridge - and soldiers as well. Any other frequency will have little or no effect on the bridge. Perhaps that is what the OP is referring to when he says the UC must shake the liquid at a specific frequency to be of any use. But then again that is only one aspect of the process. There might be other factors involved that make the UC effective in the eyes of so many people. I have never tried one myself, but if the UC creates air bubbles, that could be one of the factors.

 

[WillyZee]

I thought I was the only one questioning the cost and sensibility of using a clothes dryer to steep .50 cents in ejuice.

 

[Exchaner]

I thought I was the only one questioning the cost and sensibility of using a clothes dryer to steep .50 cents in ejuice.

It's an experiment - not a recommendation to try a clothes dryer. Too much skepticism on this and other threads when someone questions the conventional wisdom. I thought the purpose of the ECF was to exchange ideas - not to dismiss them out of hand.

 

[Mrdaputer]

ErineKim,
With all your schooling and your contacts and equipment maybe even a slide rule or two. You forgot One of the top rules for vaping Taste is subjective. I say what ever keeps you off the cigs is called winning

 

[Maurice Pudlo]

Newbie here.

I'm making: equal parts of cinnamon/raspberry/sweetener in VG base. I've steeped it up to two weeks but it has always remained cloudy/milky in appearance. Heating it to 150 makes it clear but as it cools it goes back to milky appearance.

Suprisingly, after 12 hours rotating (end to end to get better agitation) in a rock tumbler, it's totally clear! It's also "smoother" in flavor; the chemical taste is gone, more subtle.

can anyone tell me if this has accelerated aging, is it just mixed better?

Thanks,

Erniekim

The milky appearance is coming from the interaction between cinnamon and VG.

So long as you do not alter the ingredients in any way the liquid will always return to that cloudy state at normal temperatures.

No length of steeping or method of mixing will change this. Period. Cinnamon and VG do not play well together. An actual change to the properties of the flavoring would need to happen, and I presume that is something you wish to avoid.

If clarity of your e-liquid is important (I'm not sure why it would be as the visual aspect of an e-liquid does not effect taste) you will find great success by use of the following information;

A mixture of PG and VG, 70:30 will allow for a clear Cinnamon e-liquid at just about any reasonable flavoring percentage you might use. The less Cinnamon you use the lower you can go with the PG content. Without more information to the exact measurements of all ingredients you are using and such, we aren't going to be able to advise you to any degree of accuracy beyond this.

Cinnamon in it's many forms of flavoring is a very powerful flavor, it will typically dominate a mixture if used in equal portion with other flavors.

I like to make some Cinnamon flavored e-liquids, however I'm not exactly fond of how PG limits potential vapor production, so I make some milky looking e-liquid every now and again. Why does the look of the e-liquid matter to you at all? It would seem more a matter of determining if the flavoring had evenly dispersed throughout the carrier, which is simply a matter of looking for consistent taste.

As for the other methods of steeping and mixing and what not, if a change in the structure of the flavoring is happening with any of the methods we are hoping only that that change is consistent from batch to batch. Every method will induce a change that ultimately effects the flavor, smoothness, or look of the e-liquid.

Maurice

 

[ErnieKim]

Ex & Maurice,
Thanks for the info on the Cinnamon. I've gotten it to cloudy rather than milky with four hours agitation and 100 degree temperature; good enough. Using that info, I'm moving to a rig similar to the internals of an orbital sander. The motor heat will deliver 110 degrees; a little over my 98 degree ceiling but I can always make it a bit cooler. I'm sure that it will be fast enough.
Erniekim

 

[Mr.Mann]

The milky appearance is coming from the interaction between cinnamon and VG.

So long as you do not alter the ingredients in any way the liquid will always return to that cloudy state at normal temperatures.

No length of steeping or method of mixing will change this. Period. Cinnamon and VG do not play well together. An actual change to the properties of the flavoring would need to happen, and I presume that is something you wish to avoid.

If clarity of your e-liquid is important (I'm not sure why it would be as the visual aspect of an e-liquid does not effect taste) you will find great success by use of the following information;

A mixture of PG and VG, 70:30 will allow for a clear Cinnamon e-liquid at just about any reasonable flavoring percentage you might use. The less Cinnamon you use the lower you can go with the PG content. Without more information to the exact measurements of all ingredients you are using and such, we aren't going to be able to advise you to any degree of accuracy beyond this.

Cinnamon in it's many forms of flavoring is a very powerful flavor, it will typically dominate a mixture if used in equal portion with other flavors.

I like to make some Cinnamon flavored e-liquids, however I'm not exactly fond of how PG limits potential vapor production, so I make some milky looking e-liquid every now and again. Why does the look of the e-liquid matter to you at all? It would seem more a matter of determining if the flavoring had evenly dispersed throughout the carrier, which is simply a matter of looking for consistent taste.

As for the other methods of steeping and mixing and what not, if a change in the structure of the flavoring is happening with any of the methods we are hoping only that that change is consistent from batch to batch. Every method will induce a change that ultimately effects the flavor, smoothness, or look of the e-liquid.

Maurice

If concerned about the milky appearance, I think it also depends on the cinnamon you use and at what percentage. I mixed two bottles of 20% flavoring in max VG of Cinnamon Ceylon from FlavourArt and Cinnamon Spice from TFA. After mixing and letting settle, the Cinnamon Ceylon (my go-to cinnamon) is clear as can be, but the Cinnamon Spice is immediately Cloudy. Now, when I normally use Cinnamon Spice, even in all VG, this never happened to me before, but my percentages were always really low. But as we've both said, there needs to be more information, becasue as of now we don't have a clue about where these flavorings were from that he used, nor do we know how much he used.

 

[Maurice Pudlo]

Ex & Maurice,
Thanks for the info on the Cinnamon. I've gotten it to cloudy rather than milky with four hours agitation and 100 degree temperature; good enough. Using that info, I'm moving to a rig similar to the internals of an orbital sander. The motor heat will deliver 110 degrees; a little over my 98 degree ceiling but I can always make it a bit cooler. I'm sure that it will be fast enough.
Erniekim

Why not add a food safe thermostat to the juice container, set the thermostat at your desired temperature and allow it to control when the device runs and shuts down based on the temperature of the liquid you are treating to this ... method of mixing?

Similarly, a blender will warm it's contents easily to 98F or higher due to friction if allowed to run for an extended period, however if power is interrupted in a controlled manner the liquids temperature can be maintained at any point you like.

While I am not a fluid dynamics kind of guy, I am aware that rapid blending does bring air into the mixture, so if oxidization is of any concern to you you might consider doing so in an inert atmosphere (nitrogen purging would be easy to accomplish with a bit of creativity, or blending in a vacuum.

For what it is worth, time is the most cost effective method of blending, mix up your blend of flavors and put them on a shelf. Come back in a few weeks to a month or two and enjoy the fruits of your inaction. You may not like the results of each blend you create, however, for some the cost of other methods is not nearly as fruitful and for many not possible.

I am mildly curious how you plan to determine the effectiveness of your treatments to the e-liquids you have created regarding their safety. For me, I simply look at how I feel. The lack of science in my method is profoundly obvious, but I do awaken each day feeling far better than I did the day I smoked my last Marlboro ... for me that is science enough. I have observed the effects of smoking for many years, and the effects of vaping for a bit over a year, the change is quite clear.

If concerned about the milky appearance, I think it also depends on the cinnamon you use and at what percentage. I mixed two bottles of 20% flavoring in max VG of Cinnamon Ceylon from FlavourArt and Cinnamon Spice from TFA. After mixing and letting settle, the Cinnamon Ceylon (my go-to cinnamon) is clear as can be, but the Cinnamon Spice is immediately Cloudy. Now, when I normally use Cinnamon Spice, even in all VG, this never happened to me before, but my percentages were always really low. But as we've both said, there needs to be more information, becasue as of now we don't have a clue about where these flavorings were from that he used, nor do we know how much he used.

TFA Cinnamon Red Hot is pretty much cinnamaldehyde and eugenol in a carrier of PG (formerly alcohol). It works for me in the mixes I make up, and is about as basic as it comes to stripping the active ingredients from any of the trees within the Cinnamomum genus.

You make a valid point, maybe unknowingly, that two flavoring companies may not include the same quantity of active flavoring in their XX oz. bottle of flavor. This may well account for the clarity of the FA offering, if the two use the same ingredients to come to the cinnamon flavor we seek. All bets are off if the active flavoring components are different.

I'd like to point out that no sane company is going to provide the exact formula of their food flavorings. That is protected by law (in the US at least), and makes the application of a scientific mixing method based on the chemical composition of an e-liquid ... problematic at best. A method that focuses on the properties of say mixing eugenol may not fit that which works best for cinnamaldehyde or the particular sweetener in use or whatever combination of stuff that is raspberry flavoring.

We are somewhat in the same position as the first folks that witnessed the creation of alcohol, the mastery of e-liquid creation is as much a shot in the dark as it was the mastery of making safe and wonderful alcohol, or for you non drinkers we could as easily use cheese. At the moment it (mixing flavors that are wonderful) is more art than science, the science is catching up or at least making an attempt to catch up with our desire to replace smoking with something better.

I think few, if any of us, argue that vaping is better than a breath of unflavored cleanroom quality air. Our benchmark is an improvement over that which we so eagerly inhaled as smokers to deliver the nicotine. To that we have undoubtedly excelled in our efforts.

Maurice

 

[servolos]

i have been mixing my own juice for a while and i have not used anything in mixing other than putting it in essentially a ketchup bottle i bought from walmart and shaking the ingredients together. to me the flavor stays pretty much the same from when i mix it to when i parse it out into smaller bottles later (i usually mix 200 300 mls of juice in the bottle and will mix up 4 or 5 blends at once). maybe it is my volume but it tastes great and the same from one session to the next. my main vape is a wintergreen menthol (2 percent wintergreen, 1/20th ml of liquid menthol 50/50 pg/vg) and it has tasted the same every time. At that low of a percentage i can still taste the wintergreen and the menthol adds a bit of minty taste to the tincture. everything else i blend is usually in the 5 percent range with some stuff reaching 10 percent at times.

 

[ErnieKim]

I'll provide specifics on the flavoring and the results of my last batch when I get home this evening. Do y'all have preference for cinnamon flavor manufacturers wrt the quality of ingredients and least irritant? I only ask because I'm going to be spending a fair amount of time working with the flavoring and I'd like to start with a worthwhile candidate. I've got what I think is a fairly consistent steeping method worked out now; since y'all told me that my expectations for clarity were off when using VG.
Thanks for your invaluable comments, so little out there.
Kim

 

[Mr.Mann]

I'll provide specifics on the flavoring and the results of my last batch when I get home this evening. Do y'all have preference for cinnamon flavor manufacturers wrt the quality of ingredients and least irritant? I only ask because I'm going to be spending a fair amount of time working with the flavoring and I'd like to start with a worthwhile candidate. I've got what I think is a fairly consistent steeping method worked out now; since y'all told me that my expectations for clarity were off when using VG.
Thanks for your invaluable comments, so little out there.
Kim

Simple, use FlavourArt Cinnamon Ceylon. You can get by with using as little as 0.1-.25% and it still shinning though. I am curious about the flavors you used.

 

[purelyscientific]

To the OP; We are at the forefront of this particular field of study. These things have never been done before. We are all experimenting and finding out what works best. That being said NO idea is silly and should be dismissed without trying it at least once. Save truly silly ideas such as duct taping a bottle to your head and listening to heavy metal....

Without the constrictions of knowing that an ultrasound cleaner does not produce the correct frequency to agitate the chemicals in our juices and simply dismissing it because it does not, some of us have tried it and found that it actually does work to some degree. It would seem that in this case the lack of that constriction of knowing that fact has proven to be serendipitous. I think what is happening in a UC is more oxidization as opposed to physical mixing.

Personally I like my ADV juice to be steeped between 2-7 days. After that it gets too dark and starts to gunk up my coils. After around 2 weeks it starts to get an 'off' aftertaste. Would I would really like to see is some reversal of this darkening of my juice while still keeping that steeped flavor taste. If anyone finds a way to undo this let me know please. haha

 

[zoiDman]

I started this thread because research has shown (the most recent summit) that potentially harmful changes can occur in flavoring chemistry when exposed to excessive temperature and/or physical influences. ...

Maybe I Missed it?

But what Exactly are supposed to be these "potentially harmful changes" that can occur when I person uses an Ultrasonic Cleaner with the wrong "Wave Modality"?

 

[Mr.Mann]

Over 24 hrs later and you can see what I have. On the left (red cap) we have FlavourArt Cinnamon Ceylon at 20% in max VG (80%). On the right (blue cap) we have TFA Cinnamon Spice at 20% in max VG (80%). Both bottles got a simple shake before I took the photo and you can see the Sharpie logo through the FA but the TFA looks cloudy and you can't see hardly anything through it. Funny thing though, the FA Cinnamon Ceylon is incredibly more strong than the TFA Cinnamon Spice though they are both at the same added-percentage, but the TFA is cloudy and the FA is just as clear as it can be.

p.s. I did absolutely nothing to make the FA liquid look clear.

 

[ErnieKim]

Maybe I Missed it?

But what Exactly are supposed to be these "potentially harmful changes" that can occur when I person uses an Ultrasonic Cleaner with the wrong "Wave Modality"?

Mr. Zoidman,
There was a sidebar during a panel discussion at the most recent summit and "lack of research funding" was given as a reason for not having more specific details on the potential effects. Sure, this is typical jockeying to get funding and the likes of Phillip Morris will probably fund it if the results give them leverage in some way. Ultrasonic processing is commonly used in chemistry to modify chemical structures. It's extremely complicated, uses expensive predictive modeling, specially designed chambers to avoid wave mode conversions, and on and on. When done and done correctly, efficiencies result that allow faster processing but an incredible volume of "product" is needed to justify the expense. If not done correctly, a lot of damage can be done to a lot of "product" very quickly. The specifics of the damage aren't usually investigated because of cost, at this point, they usually revert back to simple mixing procedures.
I've probably strayed from your question but they probably wouldn't be referring to specific damage that they have physically measured, more likely they are referring to potential chemical changes of unknown degree from friction/temperature "hot-spots" that can occur if procedures aren't correct. There are many different kinds of wave modes bouncing around in the chamber/tank, it would take all night for me to describe half of them. It's Very complicated and since cleaners are not built for this purpose, no precautions/design considerations have been done.
My point was that the simple solutions are usually the best, unless one has a lot of money to throw around. Using something like a jigsaw to shake a bottle is one thing, but ultrasonic generators have the potential to do some pretty MAJOR physical disruption.

 

[Mr.Mann]

Since you are back, I was wondering what flavors you used. Do you have time to type out the names/manufacturers of the flavors?

 

[dannyv45]

"lack of research funding" for not having more specific details on the potential effects.

It's extremely complicated, uses expensive predictive modeling, and on and on.

an incredible volume of "product" is needed to justify the expense.

If not done correctly, a lot of damage can be done to a lot of "product" very quickly. The specifics of the damage aren't usually investigated because of cost

they probably wouldn't be referring to specific damage that they have physically measured or wouldn't be referring to specific damage that they have physically measured.

more likely they are referring to potential chemical changes of unknown degree from friction/temperature "hot-spots" that can occur if procedures aren't correct.

There are many different kinds of wave modes bouncing around in the chamber/tank, it would take all night for me to describe half of them.

It's Very complicated and since cleaners are not built for this purpose, no precautions/design considerations have been done.

And my favorite

My point was that the simple solutions are usually the best, unless one has a lot of money to throw around. Using something like a jigsaw to shake a bottle is one thing, but ultrasonic generators have the potential to do some pretty MAJOR physical disruption.
.

You said a lot but give no concrete proof of any of this and my favorite

"My point was that the simple solutions are usually the best, unless one has a lot of money to throw around. Using something like a jigsaw to shake a bottle is one thing, but ultrasonic generators have the potential to do some pretty MAJOR physical disruption"

What does that even mean?

So many of us are seeing results but yet you say it don't work and give what sounds like scientific double talk which make no sense. You state it's inconclusive potential effects and the specifics of the damage aren't usually investigated because of cost or It's extremely complicated, using expensive predictive modeling, If not done correctly, a lot of damage can be done to a lot of "product" and on and on.

Where's the hard evidence to back up your statements and how are we damaging our product? I never herd some one say so much which means so little.

All intelligence aside try to explain this in layman’s terms.

 

[ErnieKim]

Since you are back, I was wondering what flavors you used. Do you have time to type out the names/manufacturers of the flavors?

Mr Mann,

Sorry for the delay. I buy my flavoring from a local store and wanted verification from him on the manufacturer. It is NicVape. I'm using equal parts cinnamon, sweetner and raspberry to make up 20 percent and 80 percent kosher VG. Mine looks like your bottle on the right. Doesn't get clear. I guess that's OK though, it tastes good.
He's getting me some Lorann raspberry to try next.
Only problem is I'm getting a lot of dry hits with my kayfun. I'm considering adding some PG for this reason.
Thanks!
Kim

 

[ErnieKim]

Danny,

As I said before, producing hard evidence would require that I get together with a chemistry expert and do a controlled study. Otherwise I would just be speculating and I won't do that. Ive already tried to explain that ultrasonic waves can be very powerful. They are used as weapons and in welding of plastics. What exactly are you asking for? I'm happy to explain more.