I know everything that is required to make your own ejuice and I know all the precautions for nicotine... but how can you make your organic or alcohol-based flavors for ejuice? Would I be able to make an ejuice flavor out of fresh strawberries for example?
Fruits are tricky because they contain sugar, which doesn't work in a vape juice. I've been researching a way for months to remove sugar from solutions and I have yet to find a method other than fermentation, which is less than ideal because it affects the flavour strongly and because getting all the sugar out that way is very difficult (but possible... natural wine extracts are available). /u/InertiaCreeping posted this which is how flavour artists do it, but of course it is not a natural flavour. You can buy natural flavour concentrates, but the fruity ones almost always contain sugar.
But there are lots of things you can make flavours out of. I've done it directly in PG, but VG or alcohol can be used as well.
Vanilla bean is pretty easy... two vanilla beans split down the middle leaving the ends intact in a test tube with 10ml - 20ml of PG, capped and left in a drawer (no light) for two weeks or more results in a very nice natural vanilla extract suitable for mixing in a e-juice. I have some that's been sitting for a couple of months, I mixed up a juice with it at 5% the other day and it completely overwelmed the other flavours... so next time I will go 1%.
Coffee is also easy. A heaping tablespoon of freshly ground coffee in 15ml - 25ml of PG mixed in a glass jar then heated in a simmering water bath for about 20 minutes, then filtered yields a very strong coffee extract. Mix about 2% - 10% in e-juice for a very fresh tasting coffee that doesn't taste burnt like many coffee flavourings.
Dry spices... I've done allspice, ginger, cloves, cinnamon (stick), nutmeg, corriander, cumin, cardamom, anise, tumeric. Take a look for my pumpkin pie recipe (and others) in the November recipe thread for my method on those.
I used some tamarind concentrate (the very dark stuff, with the consistency of bearing grease) mixed at 25% in PG for a tart fruity tamarind extract.
I haven't done citrus peel, but it's on my list to try... with that, and with some spices let the extract settle for a while so that oils will float to the surface and sediment to the bottom, decant to separate these (oils are not ideal for vape juice, inhaling some oils can contribute to respiratory problems).
Lemon and lime juice (fresh sqeezed) can be used at 1% or more to make an e-juice sour or to enhance fruity flavours. Citric acid works too... dissolve 1/4 teaspoon in 10ml PG, use at 1% or more.
Tobacco is supposed to work too, but I haven't tried it yet.
VG or alcohol ought to be able to be used instead of PG in all of these methods. I read of a method one fellow had of extracting tobacco by steeping it in alcohol with a bit of heat and time (days or a week) and then evaporating the alcohol until all that was left was solids, which he then dissolved in PG. If you do tobacco, make sure to use good stuff (not cigarettes, use a good quality cigar or raw tobacco) and be careful with your extract it will contain nicotine.
Don't ever boil PG or VG... they boil at a very high temperature (like oil) that will cause whatever you're extracting to combust. If heating to extract, always use a simmering water bath.
I really wish I could make a fresh strawberry or raspberry extract... I love these natural flavours, and the artificial ones always leave me wanting. But artificial flavours work, and some of them are actually pretty tasty. Flavour artists (like The Flavor Apprentice) really know what they're doing.
Good luck and welcome to /r/DIY_eJuice!
What about distilling the juice? A simple still could be made with a Pyrex flask, or the traditional copper method. I haven't tried yet but it's been on my mind lately.
There are methods for removing water, oil, alcohol... distilling works to remove water and alcohol, oil can be decanted (poured off the top after it settles). Sediments can be filtered out or decanted. If heat is a problem, evaporation or freeze-drying would have the same effect as distillation. But it would just concentrate the sugar with the flavour.
Sometimes with evaporation and cooling you can get sugars to crystalize, depending on the sugars. But some sugars (fructose, for example) doesn't really want to crystalize even if concentrated, plus there are compounds in fruits that act like antifreeze and work to prevent crystalization. If you can get crystalisation to happen, however, sometimes a physical process like straining or filtering can then get the crystals out.
Sugar refining is done by mixing raw ingredients (sugar cane, sugar beet) with water then filtering, sometimes with charcoal beds. The water can be removed afterward with the methods I discussed above. These processes are not for making flavours, however. I have tried to look into this... how do you get the flavours out of the charcoal or filters without damaging them? I have not found anything about people doing that, I don't know if it's even a possibility, certainly technology to do so isn't accessible to the home lab or kitchen.
Maybe there is some process that can chemically remove sugar. I haven't spoken to a chemist about this (if there is one reading this, please speak up) and my own knowledge of chemistry is from high school and first-year university courses many years ago, and from my experience as a cook.
I make jam and other goodies, I seek out wild fruits and tame ones and I would really love to be able to turn some of those flavours into vape sauce. I will keep looking for a solution... for example, maybe some kind of nanotech will eventually lead to a molecular sieve that can actually remove sugar and leave everything else behind. As of now, as far as I have been able to tell it is unobtanium.
by talking to /u/onions_can_be_sweet (he makes tonnes of extracts from herbs and spices- check out the december and november recipe threads in the sidebar)
AFAIK you can't make extracts easily from fruits as the sugar burns on coils.