New to mixing, and first juice turned out okay but it has a little bit of a bitter aftertaste on my tongue. I read that not shaking nicotine can cause that. Just making sure I don’t have to dump it all into a bucket or something to try to fix it.
EDIT: So I ended up adding a bit more sweetener, and a little extra flavor, which totally fixed it. It now tastes exactly how I wanted and there’s no bitter aftertaste. Turns out that it just needed a little tweaking with flavor ratios. I’ll still probably get something to test nicotine strength in the future. Thanks for the help!
Mixing your bulk nic bottle before decanting in smaller ones is only essential if it's been sitting a long while after arriving at your house. Over time the nicotine separates from the pg or vg due to density and nicotine will rise to the top of the bottle.
I know this because I let a liter of 100mg/ml sit for 2 months before decanting it. After separating the liter, I made a batch of ejuice from it and it kicked my ass. So I tested my working bottle with a nicotine titration kit and it was 180mg/ml! Not the 100mg/ml I ordered. So I dumped all my small bottles back into the liter bottle and mixed it up really good. Then checked it again with a titration kit and it read 100mg/ml like it should've. Then had to decant back into all my 60ml bottles a second time. Pain in the ass.
So long story short, always make sure your nicotine is properly mixed before decanting.
Do you think I should bother decanting 120ml of nic?
On the other hand, I decanted my first 500mL of VG nic from Wizard Labs a couple years back without shaking. The first couple bottles of juice were seriously hard-core. Instant constricting of the throat. Once I realized my mistake, I adjusted my recipes for that batch kind of blindly. So, maybe it depends on the retailer and how long it's been sitting in the original container.
Yes instead of putting all your nicotine back together, shaking, and decanting all over again you can adjust recipes blindly or use a nic titration kit to test your individual working bottles and mix accordingly. A nicotine titration kit comes in handy though. Personally I want to know that I'm actually receiving 100mg when that's what I purchased.
>I know this because I let a liter of 100mg/ml sit for 2 months before decanting it.
just curious where you let it sit for 2mo at. in the freezer? or in a cabinet
I let that one sit in a cool dark closet that time. Unfortunately it did slightly oxidize and got a strong wet tobacco taste because of it. Lesson learned, all future orders after that got tested upon arrival for oxidation, then decanted and straight into the freezer. Putting your nic in the fridge until you have time to decant would work as well.
A taste that is often described as "peppery" is a sign of oxidation of the nicotine, in other word, nicotine going bad. Oxidation happens when nicotine come in contact with, as the name oxi-dation suggest, Oxygen. Shacking the nicotine bottle will introduce more oxygen into solution than not shacking. So that is not the reason for sure.
Though, depending on how well the nicotine is dissolved and suspended in the carrier agent (VG or PG) it might settle out after a while, leaving the bottom of the bottle with a higher concentration of nicotine compared to the rest. Why we advice to shake, just to be sure.
Was it PG or VG? If it was VG, you likely have a wide range of nic strength per bottle.