Made My First Juice

Last night I read a recipe for a tea flavoured juice that seemed very easy to make, so thought I would give it a go myself. I got the inspiration from this site: Vaping Tea

I read last night that it is difficult to find the variety from the original recipe in stores, so I went to the local Bi-Lo to see if I could find anything similar. I found Dilmah Exceptional Berry Sensation. It comes in a pyramid style teabag and was the nearest thing I could find on the shelf.

Taking out a teabag and sitting it on the bench, the smell is quite strong (and nice), so I was hoping for good results.

I pretty much followed the same technique to make it, other than I skipped adding extra dried berries.

I had a slight problem when the teabag split and emptied its content throughout the mix, but I strained this out with no problem.

I couldn't wait and tried it straight away and the verdict.

It has a pleasant, refreshing berry flavour, with an aroma that lingers in the air
It feels a lot lighter to vape, which I put down to the PG
It lacks the same throat hit as my nic juice, but provides more hit and almost nic flavour than other non-nic juices I have

Overall, a very simple recipe and a good starting point for those like me, who are new to making their own juices. You get a reasonably satisfying vape that is cheap and easy to make and relatively foolproof.

For those running low on nic juice, the extra (body?) may be enough to keep them off the smokes until more supplies arrive.

 

Excellent Idea and a great start. Hmmm maybe a start for a new off-branch vaping technique. Kind of cool, are you going to try to prefect it?
Jeff

 

You might like this thread then

 

Well going to try it some more. I found online some Lipton Vanilla, Caramel Truffles black tea, which sounds pretty cool.

 

Interesting gt.

 

Just gave someone else a try now and they really liked it, so a pretty good result.

 

really like the idea Omni. just beginning my mixing journey and almost stumped at how much there is to learn. appreciate a new approach.

 

Hey first of all thanks for sharing this nice recipe. Its sound much easy to make flavored juice at my own and I will like to make some interesting flavor for which I am looking for. Let me first try starting with coffee itself then tell you my experience. Hope this will work perfect ..!

 

Keep the busted teabags, those triangle bags make decent wicks, iirc.

 

That's interesting, similar to cotton?, I would imagine they would burn up pretty quickly tho

 

Similar to cotton = yes. Slight earthy taste, nothing like hemp, but there. A more natural taste than silica, but like cotton/hemp/random string, you can't dry burn it or you'll burn the material.
Plenty of links in ECF (apologies) and google, the best examples I've seen is cutting up the triangle bags, then folding and rolling in lieu of silica wick.
I only did this a few times to validate finger skill and the principle.
I've got a few alternatives (most of the known methods) and since this isn't any better than anything else I haven't persisted, more for the experiment really.

Let me google that for you

Oh, if you keep the wick wet, they last for days, well beyond my interest period.

 

I have made herbal extracts using isopropyl alcohol which is subsequently mixed with pg/VG and then evaporated.

The basic idea is to quickly wash the plant material (could be tea, rosemary, tobacco, roses, chamomile or other recreational herbs of your choice - yes, the lines need reading betwixt) in chilled 99.9% isopropyl alcohol in something like a French press eg bodum for no longer than 30 seconds. Any longer and you will start to extract oils, which you don't want. Use enough alcohol to cover the plant material by about a cm on top. .

Strain the resulting pressed liquid through muslin, cheese cloth, coffee filter, panty hose or whatever.

Then, in a Bain Marie type set up, mix your VG/PG with the solution of alcohol and get the water to the point where it wants to boil but is not quite simmering. The alcohol will eventually evaporate in a couple of hours and you will be left with the pg/VG infused with the plant essences, flavours, aromas and active ingredients.

1g of plant material per ml of vg or pg is about right in terms of concentration of flavours, but if potency is a consideration I would look at using twice that. It doesn't matter how much alcohol you use be.comse 100% of it evaporates, just use enough to cover with a cm on top. 500 mls for about 30gms is enough. You will know it is all evaporated if you have the same amount of VG as you put in left at the end. Probably a couple of mls less realistically.

 

We have used a similar method to yours, but our instructions from an american website were to grind the herb very very fine in a herb grinder you keep for just this purpose, and then soak the herb for 2 hours in the alcohol in a screw top jar, shaking it occasionally. We then used a coffee filter paper to filter off the alcohol. We used spirytus. We then soaked the herb again for 2 hours in a new batch of spirytus, to make sure that the alcohol acting as a solvent in this case, stripped as much of the beneficial substance into the alcohol as possible. We used an electric frypan set to low to evaporate out the alcohol. You're left with a dark tarry sediment in the bottle of the jar. We mixed this with PG, and store it in a dropper bottle. The end result was very good, and quite potent. To give you some idea, we used about 10g of herbs to make about 20mL of herbal eliquid.

 

Interesting. With a qwiso extraction you get a nice clean solution, I have found that with longer extractions I get too many undesirables in the final product. The only other thing I didn't mention was decarboxylation, which may or may not be necessary, but I did it anyway.

Edit - wow that alcohol is pricey. Iso from eBay will do me

 

It's not really that expensive, considering it's as close to pure alcohol as you can buy. It's 2.5 - 3 times as strong as most spirits. I'm not sure that using Iso is safe.. you'd want to be absolutely sure that you evaporated all of the Iso off.. or your liver will be enjoying a dose of acetone, which is great for removing nail polish, but not so great inside your body.

 

Iso is quite safe, it all evaporates. It's 99.9%, pure - the ethanol you linked will leave 5% water behind. But whatever works, good enough is nearly always good enough I say.

 

what is the efficacy of vaping a herbal extract? Say if someone wanted to make a nice calming night time vape from something like passionflower or similar, would it have any effect or would you need to fire it up in a low ohm genny and suck down 3ml in half an hour?

 

You need to make a concentrate otherwise you will have to vape all day to get any effect. You want 3-5 drops to be one dose, so work out how much herbal passionflower you need for a dose and then,er, maths.

My suggestion is 30gms of passionflower to 15mls of PG or VG, but your preference might be different.