If you are considering making your own e-liquid or are interested in the process of making e-liquids, you may have heard the term steeping. In this post we will be looking at what steeping does for your juice and how to get the best results.
What is Steeping?
Steeping is comparable to when a wine or cheese is left to mature. Some flavours of eliquids are known as ‘shake and vapes’ because they can be mixed up and used straight away as they require no steeping time before use. Other juices come with a recommended steeping time in order to ensure the flavour has had time to develop, this time can range from a week to a few months depending on the flavour profile.
In this instance steeping simply means letting your bottle of eliquid sit in a cool, dark place with the cap on.
The reason the flavour will improve when steeped is that the time left to sit allows the different molecules in the eliquid to bond better, the more complex flavours require longer steeping times simply because they have more components to bond together. The difference can be quite massive with some flavours, with a juice tasting bland and boring when first mixed and tasting fantastic after a few weeks of steeping.
How Long Should I Steep for?
If you buy a pre-mixed flavour concentrate, often referred to as a ‘bottle shot’, it will usually come with a recommended steeping time.However, if you are mixing your own eliquids from scratch using multiple flavour concentrates the steeping time will depend a lot on what kind of flavour you are mixing.
A general rule of thumb is that fruity flavours and menthol flavours don’t require a lot of steeping time, these flavours tend to be the most likely ‘shake and vape’ flavours, but usually benefit from a week or two of steeping. Tobacco flavours usually require between 2-4 weeks to reach their best, and custards and desert flavours require a longer steep, often upwards of 4 weeks, but the longer you can patiently wait the better!
Changes to Expect
Have you ever noticed that some eliquids get darker over time? This is caused by oxidisation. The bottle is opened and some of the eliquid is used then the lid is replaced, however the eliquid inside has already started to react with the air. This causes the flavour molecules and nicotine, if present, to change. Think of how a sliced apple will start to go brown if not eaten straight away, in this instance it is the sugars and amino acids in the flavourings that are breaking down and reacting with one another that causes this change in colour.
This can be off-putting to some people, however, so long as you are not leaving the cap off your bottle for long periods of time this should not affect the flavour and you can still vape this liquid no problem. This darkening in colour is particularly prevalent in higher nicotine eliquids, simply because there is more nicotine in there to react, therefore higher strength nicotine eliquids are often darker than their lower strength counterparts.
For more vape related news, advice and reviews head over to our blog. Let us know the longest time you have left an eliquid to steep before vaping it by using the hashtag #EvapoBlog #VapeWithEvapo
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