Ya know how there's sourdough starters for bread, you let them sit overnight (or forever if you keep feeding it) then use them to make bread with. Could you use old juice as a starter to make the new juice steep faster?
I told you it was silly 😋
This is an actual thing, i remember reading about it on vapingunderground i think. It might cut off a day or two of steep time but I think its moreso effective for shake & vapes. A higher percentage of the finished juice will be steeped and the flavors melded better if you use a starter (i usually just mix back into a bottle of the same juice with about 2-5ml left)
Well golly gee, I'm not totally insane yet!
Edit - I didn't mean to sound sarcastic af, I just didn't want to swear here haha
Kind of but it’s nothing like how a levain yeast culture works. In breadmaking, a yeast culture is basically a way of farming a mix of wild fungus by continuously renewing their food source. It would be nice if flavoring in e-liquid worked this way. I don’t think that’s what you were suggesting though. What’s going on with e liquid is that you have volatile flavor compounds which are trying to evenly diffuse across a mixed medium. When you add a new batch to an old batch it’s like lighting a fresh cigarette in an already smoky room. The smoke doesn’t fill the room any faster than it would in a smokeless room. Iirc it diffuses more slowly because the concentration gradient is decreased. When you add a new flavor the older volatiles don’t stop deteriorating, and the new volatiles don’t begin a game of catch up. You just have a flavor that is more rounded out because you have an even distribution of flavor in the background to mask any sharp edges. Because volatiles ultimately deteriorate there’s not really much to be gained by repeating this process beyond the life expectancy of the original batch.
Honestly I don't think it's that silly. I don't know if it really works, but when my stash of ADV gets low I usually leave the last 30-50mL in the bottle with the new juice. I haven't done any science with it, but I feel like it makes a difference. Kind of a snowball effect on the steep.
Again, totally anecdotal, but I definitely do this.
It's an interesting idea but I doubt it will affect steeping very much. Steeping is, as far as I understand, letting the flavours diffuse so it could perhaps help a little as a certain percentage of the VG/PG has already been diffused but as soon as your add anything else to it the diffusion needs to happen again in the newly added stuff. Perhaps if you take 90% steeped and add 10% VG/PG it would resemble a steeped juice after a short time. It seems a rather complicated way to achieve not much though.