How to Properly Store Flavorless Liquid Nicotine:
The question of how to properly store flavorless liquid nicotine has been much talked about in the vaping community. There are many reasons that led us at *****, a division of ******, to believe that storing nicotine in the freezer is by far the best option to keep your nicotine fresh, odorless, and clear for as long as possible. Before getting into why the freezer is the optimal choice for storing your flavorless liquid nicotine it is important to understand what the opponents of nicotine are.
• Four Major Opponents of Nicotine:
o Light (Ultraviolet Rays)
o Heat
o Air (O2)
o Moisture (H2O)
All four of these will aid in the decomposition of liquid nicotine and over time render the nicotine unvapeable and useless. The perfect world for nicotine is far from easy to find and it would be completely uninhabitable by us humans. Even though it seems as if nature works against nicotine in every way , scientists have gone as far to say that with proper storage techniques flavorless liquid nicotine can last 24 months or even many years. The key to increasing your nicotines survivability is to keep your nicotine stored the right way.
Choosing your storage container:
Keeping your flavorless liquid nicotine in the proper bottle is a very important step in lengthening the amount of time that your nicotine will survive. The first and possibly the most important step to keeping your nicotine fresh it to store it in a cobalt glass bottle. This is ideal because the dark blue coloring of the glass allows less light to get to the nicotine. Ultraviolet rays are bad for nicotine and when combined with oxygen causes numerous reactions that in turn increase the decay rate of the nicotine. An additional part to ensure the survival of your nicotine is to make sure that your glass bottle is tightly sealed and that there is little to no air in the top of the bottle. Limiting the amount of air in the top of the bottle is a vital step because keeping the amount of air in the bottle low decreases the rate at which oxidation occurs. Storing your nicotine in glass bottles as opposed to plastic is also a better choice because Nicotine is a corrosive chemical that’s known to eat away at plastic, and Propylene Glycol is known to be a plasticizer, a chemical that absorbs the plastic present in the solution. Vegetable Glycerin has also been known to leech the plastic eroded away by the nicotine, but in much smaller amounts. It is also very important to limit the size of your cobalt glass bottles to sizes you would use in less than couple of weeks for your day to day mixing of e-juice. Doing this will allow you to keep more in the freezer and less out on the shelf exposed to increased temperatures and faster rates of decomposition.
Why the freezer?
The freezer is the best place to store your flavorless liquid nicotine because the low temperatures slow down the speed of the oxidation process and nearly put a stop to the growth of bacteria/mold. The oxidation process is slowed down because as air gets colder the density increases thus causing the movement of gaseous molecules to be slowed, in turn slowing down the overall time of chemical reactions allowing the nicotine to survive longer. But won’t my glass bottles shatter when the Proplyene Glycol and/or Vegetable Glycerin freeze? There should also be no worry about your glass bottles breaking in the freezer as this only happens in the transition phase of a substance from liquid to solid which results in expansion, therefore cracking/shattering the glass bottle. However, this is not a concern with Propylene Glycol or Vegetable Glycerin as the freezing point for both of these chemicals is far below the temperature the average household freezer operates at, or even dreams to operate at. The key is to break down your large bottle of nicotine into smaller glass bottles (again cobalt, light is the enemy!) so that your entire nicotine supply won’t be exposed to the environment. Our opinion here at ******is that flavorless liquid nicotine will last about a year, but with proper storage techniques this can be doubled or even more!
Storing Final E-Juice:
The long term storage of liquid nicotine is intended only for the nicotine in its raw unflavored and undiluted form, in strengths ranging from 36mg/mL (3.6%) through 100mg/mL (10.0%.) When it comes to storing the final flavored e-juice it is best to keep it stored in a cool, dry, dark place. This is best place as it keeps it out of the light, away from moisture, and out of extreme temperature. The best way to make these Do-It-Yourself batches is to keep them small and to use up majority, if not all, of the previous batch before mixing up another batch. This is a great way of doing it because it allows you to keep more in the freezer and less out exposed to its opponents. Storing the final flavored e-juice in the freezer, or the refrigerator, doesn’t really change much because this doesn’t stop the breakdown of the food flavoring. The concentrated food flavoring is the most unstable part of your e-liquid, and just the fact that these flavorings contain water will increase the speed of decomposition of the e-liquid. Fruit flavors are especially prone to this because they are esters that tend to hydrolyze into organic acids, producing a sour/vinegar/vomit taste, and organic alcohols, producing a wet-dog/funky taste. This is why minimizing your final e-liquid batch sizes is important to keeping your e-juice tasting as fresh as the day you received it! Here at *******we would also like to remind you to use safety equipment (goggles, gloves, lab coat, etc.) when mixing your liquid nicotine! Also to ensure the accuracy of your Do-It-Yourself batches use laboratory glassware to accurately measure all components of your e-juice!
