For my birthday my very sneaky wife and a couple of very sneaky friends got together and collaborated on what I had previously marked as "nice to have but not necessary for mixing", a heated magnetic stir plate.
They got me the one off of Amazon with the analog dials and sensor bar (similar to this one), and so there were already a few things that I had to learn how to do that the digital model does for you.
First Lesson: Figuring out where a desired temperature setting is on an unlabeled rheostat is a pain in the butt. The lesson here is mirrored throughout vaping; start low, work upwards in small increments, wait for your previous changes to stabilize before making new ones. End Result: I have marks on the dial for 45, 50, and 55 degrees Celsius.
Second Lesson: Aromatic molecules are released by applying heat, and if you don't have a way to capture/contain them you are gonna have a bad time. My first experiment was with a rootbeer e-liquid that has a minimum steep of 4 days just to become vapeable. Any sooner than that the RB flavoring is too chemical, tasting more of those cheap bottle-cap candies than an actual rootbeer. 2 hours on the hotplate and all of those chemical overtones were gone, but then again so was all of the flavor. I had to dial the temp on my vape up into the "we're gonna burn the cotton" range just to get anything remotely near rootbeer flavor e-liquid, and I was glad when those 30ml were gone. End Result: No more vape-based air fresheners. Mix in sealed containers, burp once, let sit overnight for full effect.
Third Lesson: Don't overdo it. By my estimation (using my own palate and previous tasting notes for a naturally aged batch of rootbeer) every 15-20 minutes at 50C corresponds to ~1 day of aging (wherein you shake liberally in the morning, open the container and blow out the old air in the afternoon, and shake once again before going to bed). Tasting every 30 minutes found the liquid a bit raw, then good, then better, then great, then less great, then not quite good, then 'meh'. If a recipe says "great after 3 days" I wouldn't put it in for any more than an hour. Great after a week = 2 hours. I can't think of a reason to put one in for any more than 3 hours, but I'm sure that there are some custards out there that will benefit (time will tell). End Result: It's better to under-cook than over-cook, you can always let it sit for the balance and age naturally if it is underdone.
Fourth Lesson: The device really isn't necessary. Yeah, I'm loving the fact that I can whip up a batch of e-liquid and get a "finished" taste in hours instead of days, but I have so much juice steeping right now that it's kind of a moot point. This will come in really handy for refining batches once the first round is done, but if you don't know how long it has to age in the first place, learned by actually aging it at least once, you aren't going to know how long to cook it for. End Result: This thing makes churning out finished juices a breeze, but I'm still going to have to experiment/invent the old fashioned way.
If you have any tips, tricks, or your own lessons learned, I would love to hear them. Bonus content, my ultra-simple A&W-style Root Beer recipe.
TFA Root Beer - 8%
TFA Wintergreen - 2%
TFA VBIC - 2%
Hey, you stole my air freshener line! But since you found that candy for me, we're even. :)
I did, it captured the effects perfectly and had to be included in the write up.
I do have to admit that even though it's a pain to get the stir bar out, mixing in 120ml boston rounds appears to be the way to go for what I'm doing today. I just can't lose the magnets I use to coax the magic bean out.
Maybe a stir bar retriever, while you're at it. http://amzn.com/B00TX30N4I
Okay I give up. What is VBIC? I looked in common abbreviations and also on the TFA site and could not find anything that matched that.
Vanilla bean ice cream
Thank you so much. I am going to have to try this recipe. I don't understand the wintergreen. What does it do to root beer?
I've never understood why capping the bottle during heat steeping would make a difference. You figure if the aroma molecules evaporate with heat, then wouldn't they just sit in the air gap of the sealed bottle, only to be released when opened? In other words, if heat is what's causing these molecules to come out of suspension, then why would being sealed have any impact?
Volatiles in a closed container do evaporate - until the air becomes saturated with vapor, at which point the vapor condenses back into the liquid at the same rate as it evaporates.
With an open container, the volume of air is infinite, and evaporation can continue indefinitely.
Someone with more science than I have may need to chime in on this. If I had to make an uneducated guess I'd say that capping it reduces the volume of air that the liquid is exposed to, or perhaps there's some re-integration that takes place as the liquid cools. I'm not entirely sure why it works (some of this stuff is still a cross between voodoo and black magic to me).
I do know that my results have shown me that if I replicate the same settings (recipe, temperature, agitation speed, duration) the open air mix had subjectively 1/2 the flavor as the sealed unit.
> capping it reduces the volume of air that the liquid is exposed to
I think this is probably it, or close to it. I'm assuming that people aren't mixing 20mls in a 1L container and that the air is a small fraction of the total. I also believe that air is like liquid and has a saturation point.
When mixing with an open container, that air is allowed to mix with the outside air and being replaced with new air, with heat accelerating this. When the container is closed, this transfer of air isn't happening and you reach saturation, preventing you from losing any more.
With a little experimentation, you could figure out how much you need to bump up the flavorings and not worry about the Angels taking their share. :P
That intel is very much appreciated Rev. Been on the cusp of pulling the trigger for quite sometime, but your extremely detailed analysis has not fallen on deaf ears here, Time is the master (bonus points if you can complete this reggae lyric).
btw....the root beer flavor was the best in the Bottlecaps when I was a youngster.
Thanks for the report Jay
I'm curious what does the Wintergreen do for the flavor of root beer? I can see koolaid but why wintergreen?
Root beer is almost entirely wintergreen, plus a tiny amount of accent and body, and caramel color. That's what the flavor is.
Wintergreen is a common additive to root beer, but root beers primary flavor comes from sassafras.
To my mind, wintergreen with other notes (vanilla, cinnamon, sassafras, ginger or burdock) would be root beer, and anything sassafras heavy would be a sarspararilla.
I see that that may be a northeast thing, where wintergreen and birch (a bit wintergreeny too) are abundant and sassafras is light on the ground, since the Internet agrees with you solidly. :)
What TFA root beer are you using? The regular one or the one with triacetin?
I'm using the regular one. I've also just received a bottle of FW's version to compare/contrast/mix, but I haven't had a chance to sample it.
Right on, thanks. Root beer has been on my short list to tackle, but I just haven't yet. I'll throw a 15ml bottle in my TFA order and give this one a shot. Thanks a ton for posting the recipe.
Also...thanks for posting your experiences with heated stirrer. That was one of those things that I wanted for a minute. My friend got one, but then his juices didn't taste quite right. He's not on Reddit, but I'm going to direct him to your post. I've tried all of the different steeping methods, but I've found that nothing beats time.
Just curious, if they just bought it for you on amazon why couldn't you provide us with the link to the actual product?
The linked one is from my wish list, but it's not the exact one that I have on my desk. I also had the digital Scilogex on there too (which I kind of wish they had gone with, but beggers/choosers/etc).
The packaging doesn't have anything on it other than this is a 5"x5" Magnetic Stirrer with Heater, and the faceplate has an American Scientific logo (Elephant holding a beaker in its trunk).
At this point I am assuming that they got it from Amazon, but I haven't had a reason to confirm the purchase source with the gift givers. I was personally a tiny bit embarrassed that my friends spent as much money on me as they did, and aside from telling them how much I'm enjoying it we haven't spoken all that much about it.