diy for almost a year here.. i have probably 100 ish concentrates in my collection. I scoured and searched hard for recipes for my first 3-5 months. i would tweak anywhere from 2-5 recipes at any given time. Theres those bastards though, and when the recipes stubborn or your just putting alot of thought and work into it i definitely only mess with that one recipe as far as experimenting goes. Most of my concentrates i bought about 6 months ago and havent found a "bad" one yet. i have about 30 recipes that i really like alot and make repeatedly. And to be quite honest, i took about 2 months off from testing shit all together and just made juice to vape. If you have specific flavors youre worried about not ever using (unopened bottles) you can start searching recipes by that specific concentrate so as to find use for it. Or theres /r/Concentrade also.

its 7 a.m. here... thats what i can contribute atm

I just tried an experiment. My butterscotch base is a 50/50 mix of TFA and FW. My current bottle is more than 18 months old and was getting low so I reordered. I wondered what the difference would be in flavor so I made up 2 10mls at 15%, old and new, aged 6 weeks.

I started with the old one. It had the rich BS flavor I'm used to, even after 18 months but maybe I'm used to it. I then tried the new one and was rather surprised by it. It didn't have near the body that the old one did. It tasted like it had only aged a week or so. Still a good BS flavor but the old stuff was much richer.

I'm not sure what to make of it. Did the acetoin catalyze into diacetyl? Did I screw up mixing it and make one less than the other? Did TFA or FW change their formulation? It's difficult to know for sure but that and other 18 month concentrates are just as good if not better than fresh bought. My TFA Blackberry is as sharp as it was almost 2 years ago. I'm sure different concentrates have longer lives than others and that storage in glass will increase their life span. A waste would be assuming a flavor is bad simply because it's a year old and tossing it. TFA has stated in the past that their flavors don't go 'bad' but can weaken over time if not stored properly or opened frequently.

Try your older concentrates before making any assumption. Most of them will last a long time.

250ish flavors and I fully intend to never order most of them ever again. It was an investment to find out what I like most, to try out all the exotic flavors, to be able to mix any and everything up at a whim. Now I know what I like and don't like, I know what the differences are between various brands and I know exactly what I'll need to restock in bulk. Expensive, yes, but I wouldn't call it a waste.

DIY has served two purposes for me. First, the freedom to make anything I want and knowing what's in it, or more importantly, what's not in it. Second, it's therapy. Vaping is one thing, but all this tinkering with mods, coils and wicks, creating recipes, testing flavors, keeping records, browsing forums etc has all created a very time consuming hobby to keep my mind off cigarettes and it has worked wonders. After 24 years of smoking I am now free of that addiction, my health is improving and I'll happily keep throwing money at this habit for as long as I want, knowing full well I would have spent that money on cancer sticks anyway.

I have almost 200 flavorings that I have been accumulating for over a year now and I have found only 1 that doesn't last - Anise. It's not that it goes bad though - more like the flavoring changes. For months every time I opened the drawer all I got was strong wiffs of it despite the bottle being sealing well, so I'm sure it was just certain chemicals were escaping the LDPE bottle it was kept in. For flavorings like these, glass is the best answer as it will prevent it from 'off-gassing' and changing flavors.

There may be more flavors in my collection that act the same. I realistically only use about 40-50% of them regularly.

If you listen to the InTheMix podcast, Wayne, Skiddlz, and NCM all agree that flavorings lose potency over time.

I think it also has a lot to do with how often you are opening and closing the container.

It's just a cost of getting into mixing your own recipes.

I'm also curious as to what the shelf life of an average flavoring is. I've been DIY for over a year and have ~125 flavorings and some I've had since my first order was placed. I've never noticed a flavoring that's changed dramatically or gone bad.

Over 300 flavors here. Haven't noticed any issue in 14 months of having the flavors.

The only flavoring that I've ever experienced going "bad" was TFA Strawberry Ripe getting very faintly skunky when the bottle is almost completely empty and it sits around for a year or so. Even then I still use it because that skunkiness isn't noticeable once you've blended in your other flavors as well.

My only wasteful act is dumping out a 1/3rd of a tank of perfectly usable juice because I want to change flavors. I'd be much less likely to do this if I didn't know exactly how many pennies worth of juice I was wasting, or if I was buying juice for more than a few cents per ml.

Everything else is rolled into "R&D Costs" for my own successful flavors.

Thanks for all of the responses. I have read mixed answers to how long concentrates last. Anywhere from 3 months to a year. Glad to see that most of you are leaning towards the year + mark.

This for me is my biggest problem with diy and I'm glad you brought it up. When I first started diy I ordered a large amount of flavors all at once. I was happy for about a year of mixing and testing flavors. Then all of a sudden a lot of my favorite concentrates started to go bad all at once. This could have been something else maybe bad nicotine, vg or pg. So I started again and ordered new flavors and stopped using all my first order flavors. They are still sitting there. Recently I made a small batch of just 3% FA Vanilla Tihiti. It didn't taste bad but it lost a lot of potency.

What I do now is order smaller amounts of flavors every couple of months. Instead of all at once. I'm not sure if its just a problem I'm more sensitive too or what but I notice even with my new concentrates they vary when I first test them to now. It's as if they loose some of their top notes and some potency.

I think that concentrates do change over time. How about when people had cap chocholate glazed donut taste off because it wasn't a popular flavoring before bronuts and had probably been sitting on a shelf for a long time before being used.

To me this is the biggest problem with diy. When you mix someone elses recipes and they taste crap I think part of it has to do with old or bad concentrates. So when your mixing and trying to nail down recipes you are being thrown off with poor ingredients being a variable factor. I don't know this is just something that I have experienced.

I can't speak for all flavorings, because I'm sure they are all unique. But, I think BCV puts "expiration dates" on their bottles. Or maybe it was Vaperstek. I can't remember atm, but they were dated for 1.5 years. I'm willing to bet they will actually be good until past that date though, so I'm not really worried about having to throw any concentrates out.

I have a ton of flavorings that i haven't touched in many months myself lol.

The good news is i rarely come across any that go bad just sitting in a cold dark place , try to find highly rated recipes , the below link has some great stuff but you need to translate it.

http://www.lediypourlesnuls.com/

I have 6-12 mixes active, usually. It helps me pace the mixes and let them steep a little. I did start to feel wasteful when I realized the drain clog I had downstairs was from pouring so much juice down the upstairs sink. Flavors though? I trade for other flavors in hopes I can try some new ones while not letting mine (that I don't care for anyway) go bad. Add up how much you've spent on DIY total (it'll be fucking scary) then figure how much you would have spent at the B+M in the meantime (even fucking scarier).