I'm aware of the fact that there's been more than enough posts on storing aromas, bases and liquids. Personally I just go with /u/botboy141 's overview of the general consensus/best practices on the subject. EDIT: found it.
Now I'm reading this here forum post and if I understand correctly, I've been doing it wrong after all.
https://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/threads/storing-e-liquids-in-the-fridge.801451/
TL;DR of that article: an extensive report of how ejuices stored in the fridge deteriorate a lot quicker that those kept in a dark cupboard.
There's no scientific explanation and I would have dismissed it if it hadn't been such an elaborate post. I'm posting it here hoping someone can explain what's going on and to ask for advice:
All my aromas and finished mixes are in amber glass bottles with quality caps on them. I've been keeping them in the fridge for a couple of months to half a year now. The only things not in the fridge are the bottles I expect to vape within the next couple of weeks, and, strictly speaking, my nic base, which is in the freezer.
The conclusion of the article is clear: avoid the fridge. I appreciate the heads up, but I have heard so many contradicting views and opinions and this is just another one, albeit more elaborate than most others. I would be interested to know what to think of it, so if anyone can explain these observations I'd be interested.
Ill never understand why people tend to overthink this stuff so much.
When you buy premium juice from a store, where is is it stored? On a shelf, in a little cardboard box, or in a glass case, at room temperature, sometimes for several months at a time. If refrigeration was better, you can bet your ass the vapeshops would be doing that.
Don't put it in the fridge, dont heat steep, dont use supersonic Batman gizmos, it's all bullshit. Just store your juice at room temperature in sealed containers.
Liquid Nic is a little different, especially at higher concentrations. The nicotine wants to oxidize, and that process can be slowed in 3 ways: limit exposure to air by removing the cap for as short a time as possible, keep it in the freezer, and don't expose it to UV light.
I transfer to brown glass because it's a generally accepted best practice. I mix in my kitchen and looking for a dark place that never gets too hot, the fridge made a lot of sense to me.
I don't really understand why you assume that I must also be heat steeping, using batman gizmos, overthinking stuff or following any other hypes in DIY, or that I must be unaware of nic storage basics. If there's something in my post triggering these assumptions, please let me know so I can rephrase it.
No not at all, sorry if my post came off dickish, not my intention at all! I wasn't assumuning that you were doing the heat/ultrasonic steeps either. Just that these posts come up quite frequently - i.e. should I store in the fridge, should I heat steep, should I use an ultrasonic mixer, should I store only in 18th century tequila bottles? Just wanted to cover some common misconceptions in case you were wondering about the others.
There aren't a whole lot of secrets to mixing, and the most common practices you read about on here are typically the best.
Is TPD what you Brits call the Trans-Pacific Partnership? How did that affect Nic in the UK?
OK no problem. I actually rephrased some of my post because I could see how I sounded a bit like the hysterical type of mixer who's looking for the Magic Method.
Your assumption that I'm British is much more like it. It suggests my English can pass as that of a native speaker :-)
I'm in The Netherlands - TPD is EU legislation. It's basically a set of rules and standards cooked up by people who believe that vaping and it's growing momentum is best dealt with by subjecting it to suffocating regulation . It affects not only nic; there's also a restriction to the tank capacity of atomizers (2ml), imagery of vaping devices on webshops and to the maximum size of an e-juice container (10ml), to name just a few things. There's businesses being closed for selling zero nic e-liquids as these also fall in the category of "tobacco product" nowadays. These restrictions are openly intended to harass vapers and dishearten any would-be-vapers to make the switch (the Dutch name for these legislations literally translates to "discouragement policies"). The EU government provided the spirit of the TPD, but every country can fill in the practical details to taste. Our Belgian neighbours can't buy vape stuff online anymore. Because there would be "no way to be sure it's not some children buying them".
Comment of the year... How to steep your ejuice, explained in 7 simple sentences!
Edit: Ok, so it's basically 5 sentences with 2 more about storing nicotine.
>When you buy premium juice from a store, where is is it stored? On a shelf, in a little cardboard box, or in a glass case, at room temperature, sometimes for several months at a time. If refrigeration was better, you can bet your ass the vapeshops would be doing that.
This isn't necessarily true and a pretty bad metric. I've been to dozens of beer and wine stores who store their products in direct sunlight and also store their wine right side up. It isn't the proper way to do it and is actually bad for the product but most do it like that. Just because a bunch of people do something one way doesn't mean it is the best way. Oftentimes it is just the easiest or most affordable/cost effective way. People post on ECR all the time about how they have gotten old or oxidized juice from B&M and, more generally, how B&M employees and owners rarely know what they are doing.
>Ill never understand why people tend to overthink this stuff so much.
Its a hobby. Some people get really into their hobbies others just like to know the hows and whys of things.
Sure there are always less than ideal practices out there - but the high end beer and wine stores, or at least a smart employee, will tell you not to store in direct sunlight, and that wine should be at an angle. My point is that you've never seen a vape shop store their juice in fridges, nor has any respected authority said there's any benefit to doing so. If there was (like with the wine/beer points), you'd see people doing it that way in the high end shops.
I get it's a hobby, and people are always looking to try new things. I just laugh about the crazy shit people come up with to try and change the processes of mixing and storing, when basic chemistry says just giving it a good shake and giving it time is the way to go. I'm all for trying crazy flavors to find something new, but there's really nothing to suggest changes to the common practices of mixing/storing will improve the final product.
Unless you can afford bourbon barrels, because barrel aged stouts are amazing. Maybe barrel aged juices are the next thing??
I don't bother refrigerating anything, including nicotine. Mainly because I don't buy in large enough batches for it to ever be an issue. I'm not the kind of guy that worries about saving $10 by buying 2 years worth of nicotine instead of 6 months. The last bottle I bought, which is almost gone, still looks and tastes the same as it did the day I opened it 6 months ago. All I do is keep it in a dark place, and extract it with a syringe through a pinhole instead of removing the lid.
Wife mixes juices for a living(since 2013) and the only thing she keeps in the fridge is the nic base. Your juice just has to be kept below around 30C (then the nic will oxidize) and out of direct sunlight - then depending on the quality of the nic, it can last around 2 years. I say around, because it varies. Sometimes nic will oxidize quicker (like 6 months - especially if at any point it was exposed to direct sunlight/heat/air-bubbles)
After that the nic might/might not oxidize, but your VG and PG will have started drawing water - not bad at first as you won't taste it, but eventually you do.
The only times she has put them in the fridge is when we have had heat-waves or whatnot and abient temp went over 30C
My guess is that he's ruining his juices by repeatedly cooling and heating them, as well as opening multiple bottles over and over again (especially when cooled). Cooling juice can cause separation and crystallization that can be hard to undo though. Just stick to room temperature for everything except bulk nic, out of the sun and caps secured.
Very useful tip man, thanks for this. However I'm from a place where it is like 30-35C (85-95F) is it still ok to keep it at room temperature ?
His experiment is a bit of a mess but unfortunately I don't have too much time to flesh out a detailed response right now. There's one thing that sticks out to me like a sore thumb, and it's that he says he would take the high-VG juices out of the fridge and immediately fill a tank. ... ... ... and he wonders why the taste is off and why the nicotine may not be homogeneously distributed.
Plain and simple, storing e-juice in the fridge will not hurt it if it is properly stored and you bring it back to room temperature before attempting to use it. A fridge is just a cold box. Cold is an absence of heat, and a room temperature e-juice put into a fridge will "give up" all its heat/energy to the surrounding cold air, slowing down the individual molecules considerably.
Ejuice can be stored in the fridge, as long as it is brought to room temperature to vape.
Commercial juice (and all its individual ingredients) often experience drastic temperature changes when being shipped throughout the manufacturing and distribution process- with no noticable effects to the product.
For instance, the concentrates we are receiving right now are near frozen when they arrive, but are perfectly normal after coming to room temp.
I will say that high heat may cause negative changes to the final product though.
OK so I'm no expert buy I buy enough Nic so it's used up in 3 to 4 months, and u simply store it in a dark dry place. Sure you save money buying in bulk, but if it's sitting for over a year then your buying more than you need. I think if you do it this way, then your product won't ever go bad. Only reason I don't freeze my stuff is i reason that If something transitions from a solid crystal phase (ice) into a liquid phase, then some thing is happening and I simply don't know what it is. For this reason I avoid giving ejuice hot baths, warm is probably the safest bet if you must. I noticed when ejuice gets too hot it sometimes leaves weird residue in my clear test tubes, and I reason cold does something funky too but I can't say for sure. I keep mine cool in my basement.
> but if it's sitting for over a year then your buying more than you need.
I appreciate your help, but I'm in the EU. I have bought for the rest of my life, and then some. What used to come in a 1000ml bottle of 100mg/ml now comes in max 10ml bottles of max 18mg/ml. That's more than 500 droppers to replace just one of the liter bottles and it would cost about ten times the price I paid.
That will be a problem. Nic has a shelf life, and it WILL eventually oxidize. Same is true for the nic that you add to juices (lower concentration = longer shelf life). Mixing juices for years down the road probably isn't a good idea. It lasts a really long time, but not forever. You'll end up throwing a ton away.
I appreciate your point, but I'm not mixing for years nor would I buy aromas , PG or VG for years. The nic base is another story: Ive spent a couple hundred bucks on a stash that will indeed go stale one day, but the risk that I'm going to have to throw half of it away doesn't stand in proportion to the ludicrous mark-up we're dealing with since the TPD landed on may 22 last year. By the time my bunker base goes stale it will already have saved me thousands and thousands of dollars.