Ph Levels In Juice - How important is this?

E-liquids Beginners
1

Brand new DIY’er here, so I’ve started mixing some strong fruit flavors (not real hip on the creams or bakery flavors, yet I guess), after settling on a 60/40/3mg mix - I did some reading concerning why my flavor seems muted. The recipe is supposed to be a shake and vape - but still seems a little “timid”.

After doing some research, someone made the suggestion of checking the ph level of the juice - is this a feasible factor for good flavor?

Any advice or feedback is appreciate… and I have thick skin - so lay into it if you need to.

2

I’ve never once done this.

But I do know nicotine is an alkaloid and a lot of flavors are mildly acidic, so I would expect different recipes to be all over the place in terms of acidity/alkalinity. Not sure what a specific measurement would prove. Very curious if anyone has info about this.

3

I bought some pool supply sticks once and I tested about 1/2 a dozen and they all pretty much fall into the middle of the road category around 7.45 It could of been mostly d/t the way I mix -Max Vg with lower % flavoring in the 10-15% range. However chocolate was right on par it was very acidic 6’s

Correction ! I looked back at my notes and most of my fruits fell into the acidity levels but that’s to be expected.

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4

Well I’ll be. I’d have guessed chocolate would be alkaline, since it’s a bitter sort of flavor. Neato!

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5

It was a milk chocolate and chocolate batch so that’s sort of cheating the system lol

6

Great question. Which has been answered.

You should ask the experts here. In this thread.
Give us an example recipie that didn’t work.

List in %, flavor, company. Like…
2% Apple cap
1% fresh cream FA.

The common mistake is under flavor or over flavored. Oddly enough too much flavoring mutes the over flavor. It’s a chemical and flavor sensitivity thing.

7

I don’t claim to have any knowledge here, but I’m curious just the same. Is one extreme or the other either harmful or beneficial? I’m just wondering what effect vaping either acidic or alkaline liquids my have on body chemistry if any. Would one extreme promote bacterial growth more than the other, or even encourage pneumonia?

Note - the answer will have zero affect on how I vape! :slight_smile:

8

So here’s the recipe I was dealing with:
Keep in mind: 60vg/40pg/3mcg at 15ml

9% Strawberry Ripe (TFA)
4% Apricot (TFA)
1.5% Mango (TFA)
.5% Marshmallow (TFA)

The only thing I haven’t tried differently is any steeping, it should be a shake ‘n’ vape - but I suppose I could set a bottle away for a week, or fire up the crockpot for a 2 hour soak.

9

Those numbers don’t look like completely unreasonable starting points - though some would say that’s too much strawberry ripe.

Do you have any other strawberries? If you, say, cut the strawberry in half and added a different strawberry to replace the difference it might help.

Steeping should help a bit too, even with a “shake and vape”.

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My all day vape is crunchberries w strawberry…I lose all flavor after 7% strawberry-anything, just becomes a flavor blur, for me.

11

I agree with zigs. It’s a pretty good starting point.

Strawberry is one of the fruits that needs a bit of time to blend and settle. I’m also not sure if you’ll get want you want out of marshmallow tpa at 0.5%.

I have also not not mixed with tpa apricot and mango. I mix with a ton of FA and supplement flavors by adding 2% of tpa or cap to round out my flavors.

I looked at the average mixing percentage form the resources/flavoring section and it sits around that 4-6%. Maybe 9% is to high and you’ve hit the flavor ceiling for strawberry ripe tpa. http://e-liquid-recipes.com/flavor/5361

If somewhere were to swear about the flavor cominations and said it was going to be totally fabulous I would start with since you said the flavor was muted and assuming it’s not a dirty cool issue, or mod issue and just the juice…and nothing to do with the nic.

SB ripe tpa 5.5%
Mango tpa 1.5%
Apricot tpa 3%
Marshmallow 1%.

And ofocurse since I have a ton of SB=strawberry flavors I would add 1% SB FA. But tpa ripe SB is pretty good.

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12

Get one of these
http://thumbs3.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/mPUCgVwlOuyI9FnkXpw8YpQ.jpg
and a meat thermometer fill the mini crockpot with dry rice. Nestle the open bottle of juice down in the rice put the meat thermometer close to it and plug in check every half hour heat till about 180 f. in the rice unplug and allow to set till back at room temp. It’s almost like a week long steep.

Some insist on doing this before you add nic. but the short time it is really that warm in so short that I’ve never noticed any difference.

13

look at this reddit post from A.B.Dada I hate you Citric Acid

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14

That’s a very interesting post.

Here’s my takeaway from it:

  1. pH is irrelevant
  2. a tiny amount of citric acid helps flavor, but not because of pH
  3. too much citric acid causes a DECREASE in flavor compared to adding no citric acid, but not because of pH
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15

ph level in eliquid plays a major role in nicotine delivery in the body.

I would encourage everyone to read this post and preferably th entire thread .

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16

unfortunately TFA/TPA strawberry ripe isn’t a very strong concentrate… i am making recipes that go from 5% up to 9% of this flavour… while Strawberry (normal strawberry i mean) in recipes works perfect even at 2-3% in mix with other flavours… but i have noticed that some flavours even in very low percentages
(like marshmallow, Bavarian cream etc.) can mute sometimes other flavors… i mostly use TFA sweetener or CAP Super Sweet. (over 1,5% goes very sweet and mutes other flavors unfortunately,)

17

Been wanting to do this for a long time as I read that falling in that perfect middle provides a lot of appeal to the taste buds, hence, better tasting e-liquid. Good to know that they land there pretty much by default.

Not that I would know how to shift it one way or the other without throwing off the flavor of the mix…

:+1: :+1: :+1: