When you buy flavors, what bottles do you prefer the vendor uses? What do you use at your mixing station to dispense your flavorings? I am growing tired of all the different bottles I have as each dispenses liquid differently. I think the HDPE ones Ecig Express uses are my favs. They go straight to my flavor racks. I really don’t care for PET bottles for my flavors, especially the ones Flavorah uses. And the childproof caps for flavorings to me just doesn’t make any sense.
But I think in the very near future I am going to switch all my flavors into 30ml glass bottles with Polycone caps and just use glass droppers for each. I would only need a dozen or so glass droppers for 99% of the recipes out there. A quick clean in the USC after each use would be easy enough, then store them in a small container. I have been doing this with a few of my flavors that I haven’t transferred over to dripper bottles yet and I really like this method because it seems easier to dispense more accurately.
I don’t really care for the FLV PET bottles either. I do like ECX and Cap’s bottles but I can’t stand Cap’s droppers they’re terrible and slow.
I buy a bunch of vial droppers at WL when I get their flavors so I don’t have to bother getting pipettes out. WL usually has a package of 5 droppers for like 2-3$.
I prefer glass with real lids not droppers but it doesnt really matter as that is what i put everything in as soon as i get them for long term storage, in case i dont use it right away. I have an unlimited supply of pipettes or i might think differently.
Yeah, I wouldn’t like pulling the dropper out of the bottle and having it drip everywhere. I have found in the clear bottles, I can draw the liquid out with just the tip of the dropper touching the liquid. This makes things a lot cleaner for me. The only drawback is having to clean all the glass droppers. Do the pipettes have really fine tips on them? Because the ones I remember using in school would drip every once in awhile when moving from one container to the other because the tips weren’t small enough.
They will drip a bit but i just pull the liquid up into them then move quickly to the bottle im dispensing in. I have some mechanical pipettes too, they are glass and you can set the ml on it. I dont really use them tho.
The wife works in a non profit lab, they get a lot of stuff sent to them to trial and they never use it so i got one. I just prefer the way i do things, i have 4 scales and they sit in the boxes…
EIDT: Pipette pumps are pretty inexpensive, Karter Scientific makes them for around 15 bucks for the pumps and a few bucks each for the glass pipettes. Mine didnt hold up very well tho.
I like ldpe bottles with the thin tips. I mix by weight, and those seem to give the most consistent drip. I hate the pet bottles, the density makes them hard to control the drip, and the original FA 10ml bottles are the worst. You either squeeze lightly and get nothing, or too much at once if you squeeze a little too hard, and it’s hard to control. Especially with CTS and arthritis. I don’t like the droppers as most tend to drip slightly like the pipettes and too much cleaning. Would be perfect if someone invented a drip tip that works on a glass bottle
Have you ever tried using 1ml syringes ? I just started mixing and it seems to work out good with little waste and mess so i have just kept the bottles the flavors came in.
I almost knocked over a couple of bottles of flavoring using syringes myself at first, until I got the knack of the “one-handed method” of using the syringe in my right hand, while holding the flavoring bottle firmly in my left hand. I hold the syringe with my fingers while sort of crimping my palm around the plunger - it’s a bit awkward at first, but at least I’ve got a firm grip on the flavoring bottle in the other hand. (I have what’s called an “intention tremor” in my hands - which is where a tremor, not otherwise present, develops when you attempt a precise manual task, so needless to say I have to be really careful about these things.) I’m thinking about switching over to pipettes, since right now you can get a box of 100 for only $3.00 from Amazon, and since I’m moving to mixing by weight, the less-than-precise measuring ability of the pipettes doesn’t really matter.
Ugh, essential tremors run in my family. Mom had to quit dental hygienist school because of them. So far I’m lucky they don’t affect me much except when I’m stressed. Anyway, I definitely think you’d prefer dropper bottles with any sort of tremor.
I have found it is far easier to use regular bottles and the separate droppers because when I draw the flavoring into the dropper I just put the tip in. No extra juice on the outside of the shaft means no mess at all. So the drops are only coming out of the tip instead of dribbling down the outside of the shaft. It’s far less messy. Seriously try it. Just put the tip in!
I just hold the dropper bottle upside down when I add the flavors. Gravity does the work and no drips on the shaft. I started out mixing using separate droppers. No way I’m going back.
This is kinda off subject but has anyone else noticed that drops in the calculator don’t really equal ml for flavorings? I have been thinking about going to droppers but don’t want to have to refigure out the few recepies I have come up with that I like.
Most people here measure by weight and not by ml or drops. Drops are really imprecise as it depends on a lot like dropper bottle type and viscosity of the flavor. If you decide to switch to weight, you can go into your user preference and choose “use grams” instead of “use drops” and the calculator will automatically re-figure your recipes for you.
