This is more of a rant, I thought this would be the best place to post without being attacked by vape bros.
I generally only vape my own juice anymore but I was running late the other day and didn't have time to run home and mix a bottle. I went into a B&M and picked up a bottle of Pebble's Donut. It's not bad, tons of sweetener, typical for "Premium" flavors. I hadn't been in a shop for a while, but when I was in the shop I noticed a lot of brands were labelling max VG on their bottles, including the bottle I picked up.
Later on that night I was vaping the juice I picked up and looking at the juice, trying to guess at a recipe. No success, but I did notice that the juice was pretty thin, 60% VG at most, nothing wrong with that but it brought the "max vg" thought back to my head. Max VG seems like a gimmick to sell juice to cloud chasers, making them think it's 80-90%+ VG when in reality it could be less than 50%.
The thought came to my head again today, I was mixing up a clone of Betty by pinup vapors for a friend, 10% forest mix (FA), and a whopping 15% sweetener. On top of that she vapes 12mg, I use 36mg 100% PG nic, so there's 10 ml right there. After all of that I can fit 12.5ml of VG in a 30ml bottle, so roughly 41-42% VG. THAT is technically max VG for this bottle for what I have, and even without nicotine the max VG I can do with this recipe is 75%, which is admittedly closer to what cloud chasers want but not the 90% that they think they're getting.
Maybe it's just me bitching about things that don't matter, but doesn't this annoy somebody else besides me?
End rant.
Also I haven't been around in a while, mods please let me know if I need to flair this or something.
Max VG normally means that the only PG is from the nicotine/flavors, rather than mixing in PG directly
This. Also, I'd say that if you are putting that much flavor in the recipe and 12mg nic, maybe use vg nic? You can't hit very many ratios with that much flavor and nicotine in pg.
Just get a higher concentration of nic .. 36 mg/ml is super low.
Yup. Just list your actual VG.
Everything I make currently is 70vg.
http://i.imgur.com/JrAf0Bd.gifv
15% sweetener?
I would imagine that is like using your coils to make caramel...
Haha it kills the coils quick. The clone is spot on though, just goes to show how much sweetener some of the "premium" juice makers use.
I feel bad when I use sweetener and I use between 1-3 drops per 30ml hahaha
Unpopular opinion time: I wouldn't feel bad about it, it's a viable ingredient although it does mute flavors and when used excessively it straight up kills flavors after a bit of time. All things in moderation.
I'd like to do an experiment at some point, make a few bottles of the same recipe with 0, 1, 5, and 10% sweetener and see how fast and how badly the flavors mute.
Lately it seems every recipe posted here has sweetener in it. Personally I will never add sweeteners to my liquids as in most cases it is unneeded and is used to cover up a bad mix.
I've got a bottle of Betty by Pinup vapors next to me, and yes, I completely understand why he needs 15% sweetener for the clone. You can smell it a foot away. It's a great liquid, and it's not really that sweet on the actual vape, but you can tell it is definitely sweetened.
Definitely did not think it would take this much sweetener, I did have a wtf moment when I saw the recipe the first time but tried it and it's dead on. The coworker of mine that has me make it for her loves it and couldn't tell a difference when trying both clone and original side by side.
people get so hung up on VG PG. It's so weird. Usually the first question a vape bro asks me about my mixes is, "what vg you mix at?". Nothing about my flavor profiles. So fucking dumb.
Yeah no kidding. I got stopped by a vape bro while I was in the shop and 2 minutes into conversation he feels the need to tell me that he doesn't vape below 80% VG, even though he is flat our wrong about that. Then again he also didn't know ohms law and thought he was pushing 200W through his mech when it was really ~85W tops. Vape bros these days.
Most good companies out there when listing things as max VG you're going to get at least 30/70 mix. Sometimes more depending on the amount of flavoring going in to the mix obviously. Most list it as Max VG meaning that they only add VG after putting in the nic and flavorings and especially after starting DIY myself I can understand why they would list it like that instead of a specific PG/VG ratio. If I know the exact PG/VG ratio of your juice and can vape it and pick out each individual flavor in the juice then I already know a flavorings percentage and can more easily clone it. So I get that they would just list it as Max VG. Also, to note that if they have choices for PG/VG mix and 30/70 is one of the choices then chances are a Max VG juice is going to be somewhere above that. Unfortunately however there are plenty of shady juice companies coming out of the wood works trying to make a quick buck on a rapidly growing industry and most of them could give a shit about their customers and only care about making that $$. So with that they make up some shitty juice full of sweetener and claim it as Max VG when in reality that's not what Max VG was originally intended for.
I can see the whole guarding your recipe thing, but out of the juice selection I saw yesterday I didn't see choices of PG/VG ratios, possibly because that particular shop didn't want to stock a flavor with multiple ratios. For the juices that don't offer a choice it still feels like a gimmick to pull in cloud chasing vape bros. Why put max vg if that's just how you make your juice?
I completely agree with you here and it's a really shady way of them doing business. I think this is more of a problem with B&M's where they just stock whatever they can and not so much with most online vendors and buying the juice straight from the maker. B&M's also have to cater to their customer base so if their customer base is mostly cloud bros then most likely they're going to have stock like what you've encountered. That's the best part about DIY though we can just tailor it to exactly how we want it :)
You are 100% correct about the "max VG" being targeted to cloud blowers , the thing that really outraged me was when first becoming popular a ton of vendors charged considerably more for max VG.
Thats total BS . Vendors might not realize it but the ones only offering max VG are losing out on a lot of business, i get asked questions constantly by vapors about where they can get non max VG juice these days.
I think most vendors who say max VG do give you max VG , i have not come across any that say that but fail to deliver on it.
Wow I didn't know certain vendors were charging more for max vg, considering the loose interpretations possible that's pretty dirty.
Max VG might seem misleading for the common folk, and probably is, but the term itself is not truly deceptive/wrong. The only misconception anybody could have is whether a PG or VG nicotine base is used. Max VG merely means that after nicotine and flavor base is added, the juice is filled out for the recipe with only VG and no added PG.
I use 100% VG base for my nicotine. It's a bit harder to work with, but I prefer only having only enough PG to dissolve the flavors, and usually letting a juice sit a bit longer will fix any mixing problems even if you were to make a 100% VG juice (some people have PG allergies and this is a thing, albeit rare).
The juice I make can go from 70-90% VG usually, with the lower end being made for tank juices and the higher being too hard to wick that it only works with drip tips.
The thing you have to remember is that Max VG is max VG for the recipe. DIY vapers are far rarer than the average E-cig user, and so buying a juice they enjoy at Max VG is as close as they can get to those higher limits.
It seems deceptive when you know too much due to DIY experience, but truly it isn't.
How's working with vg based nic work for you? I freeze all the nic that I'm not using and separate into 30ml bottles, the PG makes it easy to work with even if it's still a little cold, I would imagine 100%VG nic would be a bitch to bring back to room temp. I also measure via syringe for now, so vg carried nic would make my life much more difficult. Is it true that VG based nic doesn't hold as long?
I freeze my nic as well, keeping it in an amber tinted bottle. I don't bring it back to room temperature, but I measure by mass and not volume. I'd strongly recommend spending the $20-30 on a scale as it makes mixing child's play.
Honestly, the viscosity of the VG nic makes it easier to pour in with weight measurement. It's like pouring molasses, and as I am not a commercial producer I can afford to be 1% off of my desired nic volume. That's my acceptable margin of error when mixing 120mL batches of juice (usually make about 1L split between different flavors in those bottles, might be 125mL, can't remember off the top of my head).
Having tried to draw room temp VG through a syringe, I can say that there is no way I'd be able to do it if I still measured by volume. And repeatedly heating nicotine is something you just... shouldn't do. You'll get pepper so fast... I can't even.
As far as storage goes, PG/VG doesn't go bad, nicotine will oxidize to harshness/pepperiness though. Oxidation of nicotine is brought about by light, heat, or whatever forms of energy are put into it. I can't speak to the degradation rate of VG vs PG dissolved nicotine as I've only ever bought 100% VG nic.
What I can say is that I've never run into harshness from age with the nicotine I have purchased. I have had 500mL 100% VG 100mg/mL nicotine bottle in an amber tinted plastic bottle for about a year or maybe more now and it is still as good as when I bought it. I put it in a plastic bag marked that it's poisonous and has nicotine and store it in the depths of the freezer when I'm not using it.
When I've experimented with recipes, I usually leave out nicotine until I've decided a flavor base, and if I need to make a test batch of 5-30mL I draw the <1g nicotine with just a standard 1mL plastic pipette. It's a bit of a pain, but really you're adding 10 seconds to draw nic and make a juice that's already got a tested flavor base. A box of a couple hundred is like a couple dollars on Amazon, and you can trash the pipettes when you're done. The openings are much wider than your standard syringe.
Thanks for the info, I've been meaning to move to measuring by weight for a while now, but as of lately I haven't had a ton of time to devote to mixing and haven't burned through all of my syringes yet. Once that's done I'll be getting my scale and some new equipment.
I think Velvet Cloud is the true king of VG mass production. But you're right. Totally fucking gimmick. "Max VG"?! That could be anything.
I was going to mention Velvet Cloud also. Their juices are thicker than almost any other that I have bought or made. That makes them gunk up coils faster so I try not to use their juices in tanks. But it also makes some of their flavors less than great. There are one or two that I think are awesome and still actually purchase, despite time spent making my own. Have you tried their somewhat recent strawberry recipe, Pink Square? Maybe it didn't steep for long enough, but it is definitely lacking and just doesn't taste strong enough like strawberry in my opinion. Their White Beard Tobacco, however, is one of my favorite flavors ever. I buy it by the 120ml.
Obviously be careful, but this is one of the reasons to use 100mg/ml nicotine.
I don't really understand the point in buying Max vg juice if your looking for clouds. Wouldn't it be smarter to just use straight vg for blowing clouds or doing tricks then use the flavored stuff for just casual vaping.
I put "max vg" on my bottles to say that it is highest vg ratio possible without cutting down the flavor. That being said, none of my flavors take up more than 20%, so my max vg juices are all 80% vg and up. Anything below 80% would be misleading to label as max vg.
I fell ya. I actually went into a b&m who makes their own juice. Well the owner owns a juice company and the store so he can supply his own juice. And he said max vg, and premium. I was like oh boy here we go. Prepare for the sweetner. Stated a good number. I must say. They where pretty good, no fucking sweetner, and well priced. His actual juice line is ambrosia. But all in all i could tell instantly hes into it for the love not for the money. So a nice suprise all around.
Pinup claims Betty is 75/25 on their site. I think all pinup flavors are "max VG", as in after flavor and sweetener it straight VG (including nic in a VG base)
Just as an example of a premium brand that doesn't fall into this trap is Boosted/Restomods. They mix everything at 60VG in order to be thin enough for pen style vapers to use their juice. There is some amount of water or something else in there to help smooth it out (maybe MTS) because it is every bit as smooth as any max VG.
I don't really see this as much of a rant, rather you're pointing out something that others who thoroughly understand DIY mixing realize early in their endeavors.
You're right. Max VG loosely means they put as much VG as they could in. So if their flavors and nic are all PG based, then yes, that all counts toward the PG % of the recipe, even at 50-60%. There's no real industry "standards" on what can be defined as max VG.
At one point there was a kind of unspoken standard on it though. Most companies would've had PG/VG choices and then a Max VG which the highest choice was typically 30/70 meaning that Max VG was anything above that. Unfortunately there's to many shitty juice companies coming out trying to make a quick buck and they've just ruined the standard.
> Maybe it's just me bitching about things that don't matter
Maybe..
:D it took way to long for somebody to say this.
Well there are VG nic and VG flavors. Really a non-issue, and the deceptive criticism of the premium juice concept, is very much circlejerking here. Low quality post.
Why so salty? Non-issue is pretty objective. Some people think companies pandering to certain groups such as cloud chasers with no improvement on quality is pretty low, some dont. Also myself and many other don't think VG carries flavorings or nicotine as well. It's just like, my opinion, man.