Here we are once again everybody. I never thought I would be able to BS this far out.

Anyways, today's topic is one that I believe a lot of DIY'ers take for granted, but if you hop on over to ECR, you'll find a lot of creative ideas from people trying to make their "premium" e-juice palatable.

Steeping. A combination of the homogenization of your bases, evaporation of flavorings, and chemical reactions of your flavorings and bases. You will so often hear people on here saying the only steeping method is time. Depending on your goals though, this is not always the case. Hopefully this doesn't go too far into /r/deeper_DIY, but I must thank /u/abdada for helping me gain some understanding for what goes into steeping. It's much more complex than I would have imagined.

For my testing, I used my Dreamsicle recipe. This is a recipe I am very familiar with and know inside and out.

So, the different steeping methods:

1.Time

2.Machine

3.Heat

4.Open top

5.Ultrasonic Cleaner

#Time

The tried and true steeping method. You mix up your juice. Shake it by hand and put it in a dark, cool place. Shake every day until ready.

When people report a steeping time on a recipe, this is the method they are referencing. You have some pretty standardized steep times depending on your recipe:

• Fruit: 1-2 days

• Cream: 5-7 days

• Dessert/Bakery: 10-14 days

Your overall recipe steep time depends on the longest steeping component. So if you make a bakery vape that includes fruit notes, you will want to steep your juice till the bakery notes are completed. There are always exceptions to the rule. This is just my personal standard.

#Machine

Whether you're using a sander, reciprocating saw, or a hobby paint shaker, it's all the same. You are helping speed along the physical homogenization of the compounds within your e-juice.

I went the route of hobby paint mixer, which I also use for hobby painting, for 2 minutes. This was about all I could bare listening to it shake back and forth. It produced a nice white, airy looking froth within the bottle. In my opinion, it tasted no different any sooner than shaking by hand. My final conclusion on this method is that it's no better than thoroughly shaking your juice by hand and just about the hype of building something neat to shake your juice.

#Heat

Using a controlled heat source such as a crock pot, electric kettle, or just a coffee mug, you immerse your freshly made juice into a heated water bath. The idea here is that once the VG has thinned, you periodically shake the juice to allow for a more full and complete homogenization of the flavorings.

In my testing, I used a 20 oz. Yeti Tumbler, which is quite effective at holding temperature over long periods of time. Temperature testing ranged between 80-150° Fahrenheit. Steep times ranged between 30 minutes to overnight (10 hours). Overall, the warmer the temperature and longer the steep, the quicker my juices were fully steeped, but the shorter the longevity of my juice. More sensitive volatiles such as most fruit flavors were more impacted by longer and warmer steeps. My personal preference is about 100°F for about 2 hours, shaking periodically. I started by adding the creams to the bottle, started steeping, then adding the orange flavorings with 15 minutes left. I allowed my juice to cool before taking the cap off to drip.

It makes sense that this method would be optimal for fastest steep time. The heat thins the VG allowing for quicker homogenization, it excites the volatile top notes allowing them to reach equilibrium faster, and the increased energy allows any chemical reactions that may happen to occur quicker. Warmer and longer steeps with this method also could potentially degrade flavor compounds and allow more top notes to escape than you desire, which would contribute to flavor muting.

Overall, this method is best for personal use and if you plan to vape your juices relatively quickly. If you are the kind of mixer who creates 20 different juices and then shelves them to use over a period of months, this method is not for you. The flavor of your juices will quickly fade over time and you will be left with a less than optimal outcome.

#Open Top

After making a fresh juice, you keep the top off of it and place it into a dark place.

For this test, I made a fresh juice and let it sit overnight (~10 hours) and then replaced the top for the remainder of the test. The fruit notes were noticeably more muted. The creams did not seem affected, but the juice was overall less robust than the time steeped juice.

The only time this would even seem like a half good idea would be if some of your flavorings contain ethyl alcohol. With a very high vapor pressure, leaving the top off your bottle allows the ethyl alcohol to evaporate out of the juice, leaving behind the desirable flavors. It should be noted that any other high vapor pressure compounds will also be allowed to escape.

#Ultrasonic Cleaner

Under review. Will update worth user reviews until my testing is completed.

#Conclusion

Of the 5 different steeping methods, Time, Heat, and Open Top are the three most worthwhile. They have their pro's and con's. Time is ideal for people who are actually patient and make a lot of juice at once or for juice makers looking to sell their juice to a shop where it could potentially sit on a shelf for a while. Heat is good for people who don't want to wait for a standard steep cycle. Open top steeping is good for people who are using ethyl alcohol based flavors, though you probably want to do the open top steeping before you add other flavors or nicotine.

As always, be sure to check out /u/matthewkocanda and I tonight on BeginnerBlending, and you can check out last week's episode on YouTube

You can also view all my previous Modest Monday posts over /r/ModestMonday