Greetings, DIYers! Long-time lurker here. I've done my research, and have found limited help for what I'm trying to do. Mostly, I surmise, due to trying to protect recipes.
I'll be starting a project here in AZ in the next few months, so I'm currently in flavor development stages. My goal is to distill or extract my own flavorings for the majority of my flavors.
To my understanding, non-sweetened organic compounds such as vanilla beans of coffee beans can simply be steeped and strained in VG. Easy peasey.
The difficulty comes with fruits. One cannot simply soak raspberry chunks in VG, strain it, vape it, and have it taste like raspberries. Sugars are pulled through into the finished product, which when vaped, turn into bitter earthy dirt-like tasting flavors. And yes, I have done this personally. Coffee beans work well, strawberries, not so much.
I'm almost positive that juice companies like Ripe Vapes for example do not use store-bought extract, instead, make their own. Anyone care to comment? Would love to hear your guy's opinions on this.
SO, it basically boils down (no pun intended) to distilling, or steam distilling these sweet flavors, if I'm not mistaken. If I am, please correct me. Does anyone have any experience with distilling fruits to make your own flavor concentrates? If so, could you please direct me to relevant information on this process? I can't seem to find anything relating to these specific ingredients. Any and all relevant information is extremely helpful! My goal is to have 5 flavors by the end of the year.
Thank you
Ripe Vapes' website says "with natural and artificial flavoring."
So they're just buying concentrates.
Careful with coffee beans in VG -- there are oils in coffee that can definitely give you a tight chest.
Fruit flavor oils are complicated. If you take an orange, you get 0.3% orange flavor oil based on the weight of the fruit. It's extremely inefficient and time consuming to steam distill that little.
The best way to do an extract is supercritical CO2 -- which will get ALL the flavor volatiles out without sugar, salt and proteins.
Look up Natural Extracts Using Supercritical Carbon Dioxide by Mamata Mukhopadhyay on Google Book Search for some great info on steam versus CO2 distillation.
If you want pure natural flavor extract, www.medicineflower.com -- they do a CO2 supercritical extract of real fruits.
I have done the types of extractions you're referring to. I used a piece of labware known as a soxhlet extractor. For some materials you can get away with using distilled water as your solvent, but I only ever used dry ethanol. In my case I was able to mix the ethanol containing fragrant oils into my medium (PG) and heat it to 75 (c) to drive off the ethanol. Be careful what parts of the plant you use for extractions too. Ethanol will extract everything including the chlorophyll, which to get rid of requires washing with other, more flammable solvents like ether and other lab equipment you may or may not be comfortable using. Also, some common plants can be very toxic in high concentrations, do your research well before handling any of these things.