This is the way to do it. I couldn't believe how much easier, more convenient and cleaner it is. It seems particularly suited for small, experimental batches, but with a heavier duty scale I could see myself doing large batches this way too.
The best part, no more 1ml syringes for every flavour! Just going by drops and mixing in the bottle, on the scale, worked beautifully. For those times where I needed less than a drop to make up a fraction of a gram, I just let half a drop hang from the bottle and carefully let the drop touch the rim of the bottle briefly. This pulls in less than a full drop, and is usually enough to raise it by 0.02g if you want to.
I'm using a 0.01g scale, a cheap one off Ebay, and I'm sure it's not accurate in a pure scientific sense, but it seems very responsive to even a drop of flavouring.
It also has a tare function, which eliminates the need to have a total running in your head for total weight after each ingredient. The process goes like this: weigh the bottle, press Tare so it zeros out. Add your first ingredient to the weight required, and press Tare again to zero it out. Repeat for each ingredient. This way you're essentially measuring each ingredient individually, and can use your calculator values directly.
Anyway, no revelations here, but I thought I'd share as it was a really positive experience for me, and changed the way I mix. If anyone has tips to further improve the process, or if I'm making any mistakes, I'd appreciate a comment.
Newbie here who has not yet started mixing.. if a recipe calls for a certain percentage of flavor by volume, is the same percentage used when mixing by weight? Are there any important differences or disadantages when measuring by weight? I'm thinking about starting up soon and this definitely sounds more convenient.
Percentages don't change, but the weight per ml is not 1:1. Most of us use the weight of PG (1.036g/ml) for flavourings, since that's their primary carrier. They're of course a little heavier due to the other components of them, but the difference is trivial for our purposes. The important thing is that our recipes be reproducible.
Glycerine weighs in at 1.26g/ml which has more of an impact if it isn't compensated for.
The biggest advantage is being able to mix directly from the flavouring bottle to the mixing bottle, without having to use and clean a bunch of 1ml syringes. The next biggest advantage is higher precision. Syringes are not the most precise way of measuring. They work, but there's more room for error.
I can't think of a disadvantage to measuring by weight.
Thank you. So I assume in the end I would just use a recipe calculator, tell it my nic level, pg/vg ratio and flavoring percentages and it tells me the weight to add for each. I think I may order a scale instead of the box of 1ml syringes I was planning on.
I use this one from the sidebar. It's awesome, best one I've seen. You can catalog all your ingredients, nic solutions, everything and even track inventory amounts if you want to. It supports mixing by weight and volume.
The author of it is on ECF, and is actively developing it. I posted a very minor bug in it yesterday and it's fixed and out today.
Btw, order both, or at least a few syringes. 1ml syringes still come in handy, even if you don't need to dedicate them to flavours with this method.
You say without having to use and clean a bunch of syringes every time..
What are you using to move it from the bottle? I'm assuming pipettes?
I don't like the waste of throwing away all that plastic nor the cost of it ..
I've been trying to think of a better way to do it, but I just use 1ml syringes and rinse them out at the moment.
I've heard of people using 15ml TFA bottles with eye droppers or something..
I could probably get into that, but I don't want to pay for it. I order 4oz bottles because they're far cheaper in the long run. I'd need to buy 15 ml bottles (and overpay) and find and buy eye droppers that fit those bottles.
All of our flavors bottles in my shop use yorker spout caps
All my flavourings are in 10-30ml bottles like we use for juice, so I just used the usual tips to go by drops but tracking the weight instead of counting drops. I have some of these that I'll also use, and they fit on the regular 10-50ml bottles as well.
Are you using droppers/pouring directly from the bottle? Like the little dropper caps (like this) on each of your flavorings?
I have some of those, but didn't need them last night. The flavouring bottles all have similar dropper tips to our usual juice bottles, so I just used those. I also have a few of these which will probably come in handy for potent flavours.
I'm a big proponent of mixing by weight. A little extra initial investment (especially if you want to enable your recipes to be accurately reproduced) but the cleanup time savings and cutting out the syringe clutter is great.
If you want to be sure your scale isn't drifting over time and not spend the money on a set of standard weights, get a bottle and fill it with ballast until it reaches 100g or whatever. For my 200g scale I made 20g, 100g, and 200g to test over the range of the scale. Before a mixing session I'll just plop the 20g down and make sure the scale is reading as it should. My little $15 unit from American Weigh has never been off by more than .02g. Obviously this won't help to assure your weights are accurate, but it does assure consistency over time. If your scale should die and you replace it with another low-cost scale of questionable accuracy, you can use your homemade standard to ensure your recipes will be consistent after the change.
Does anyone who mixes by weight take into consideration the different densities of the fluids, or do you assume that they're close enough. Just curious, as I already have a 0.01g scale. I don't really mind syringes, but I'm open to try all methods...definitely those that don't cost me anything that I haven't already spent.
1.26g/ml for glycerine, 1.036g/ml for PG. Most people use the weight of PG for PG based flavourings too, in the "close enough" category. Nicotine solutions are close enough to their base ingredient, be that PG or VG. Nicotine itself as a pure substance weighs in at around 1.01g/ml.
Depending on what flavor company you're using, you can get the MSDS and those contain the specific gravity (grams per ml). If you use a juice calculator like recipe calculator you can store the specific gravities of all your flavors and it is SUPER easy.
Right on...the calculator I use, JuiceCalculator (by Rod Brown) does allow me to enter specific gravity; this is what lead me to ask my initial question. I'll try to track down the SG of stuff I already have and give it a whirl to see if I like better than syringes...at least there will be less cleanup! Thanks
Kudos! I'm so glad to hear someone has come off the syringes into the professional world of using weight, not volume to make liquids. I really should post a video of how fast you can churn out samples with this method. I can literally make a batch in under 1 min and have no mess to clean up.
Definitely post a video if you like making them. I'm sure it would be helpful to a lot of people here.
Only thing I'm not happy with is an easy fix, I need to get some dispensing tips for the larger bottles of PG and glycerine. Last night I just used a 10ml syringe for those, but I think until I can get tips I'll fill some 50ml bottles so I can use the standard dropper tips.
Thanks for all of the comments here - very insightful. What type of scale would you need if you wanted to do batches of let's say 240 ml at a time? Would it still need to be accurate to .001 gram?
I think 0.01 would be ideal, but you could settle for 0.1 and do a little rounding. Just be careful with rounding super potent flavours, like some of Inawera's.
According to my calc, 1% of 240ml is 2.486g of PG. I think for most flavours using 2.5g would probably be indistinguishable in the final mix, but this is a call to make based on what you're doing and your own preferences. It also depends if this is for production or your own use.
You could also measure something really sensitive on a finer scale and then add it to your larger mixture.
Ancient thread I'm replying to here and not sure if you're around but have a question about mixing much larger batch sizes. I obviously think it would be much simpler to mix large sizes in a flask or beaker of some form than mixing into 10 bottles at a time (looking to make 150-300ml batches in 15ml bottles end result).
How do you go about mixing the flavors, nic, pg, vg together if you mix in a flask/beaker before dispensing to their appropriate bottles?
I've seen a little about magnetic mixers and stuff, was just hoping their was a simpler effective way.
Well, if you're using a flask or larger bottle, you could stopper/cap it and shake it like crazy. That would be the simplest method. For our purposes I'd suggest skipping the glassware and sticking to larger bottles. They're much less prone to accidental damage.
The main issue with mixing by weight in large quantities is you will need a much more expensive scale, or a scale with a higher max weight but less precision. Granted, you don't need quite as much precision when mixing large quantities, but either way you need to shop for a scale with this in mind.