Making E Liquid - the ins and outs.

I thought I’d write a little piece about how we go from an E Liquid idea in our head to the finished E Liquid that arrives to you from LegioX.

Any E Liquid that is branded as LegioX is dreamt up, designed, tested and mixed by us. Those who make their own E Liquids at home will be very familiar with this process, just ours is on a slightly bigger scale.

The first step is coming up with an idea, usually the hardest part! For us this comes from our own likes in food and drink, or ideas that other people inspire us with. We have such a wide choice in flavours to combine that almost anything is possible, from your traditional Lemonades or Custards to Bacon or Roast Chicken. We strongly suggest you avoid the last two though!

Once an idea plants itself, we do some research online looking at recipes that people use to create these as foods/drinks. Let’s take a cocktail for example, a brandy lemonade in a bar may not just be as simple as brandy and lemonade, they may use a splash of Augustine Bitters or a sprinkle of brown sugar, it’s these little additions that can make the drink substantially better and the same applies to E Liquids. A dash of something else may just push an E Liquid from being good to being superb and this research allows us to know what may work better.

Now we get to the time consuming part, making samples. We will gather together a wide variety of different flavours from dozens of different flavour manufacturers that we believe will work well with whatever E Liquid flavour we are aiming for. Using experience (and sometimes more research) we then work out what percentages of each individual flavour is needed in order to not be too weak or too overpowering. Some flavours only need 0.2% some may need 20% in order to really make them shine. We also look at the safety data sheets for each individual flavour to make sure they do not contain any banned or potentially unsafe ingredients. Once we have a rough idea of a recipe, by combining selected flavours, and an idea of what percentage each needs to be added at, we grab a bottle, a pair of scales (we create everything by weight but other options like drops or volume are available) and mix up the flavours. We then add nicotine, VG (Vegetable Glycerin) and PG (Propylene Glycol), give it a good shake and leave it 24hrs. We mix all samples at 4.5mg Nicotine Strength and 60VG/40PG ratio in order to try the E Liquid in Mouth to Lung and Direct to Lung devices.

After 24 hours, we put the E Liquid into several devices and give it a go. This gives us a rough idea how the E Liquid will turn out but as it’s only 24 hours old, it won’t have fully developed yet. We need to wait longer for all the individual flavours, nicotine and base ingredients to blend properly. This is called steeping.

After another week most E Liquids will be steeped, and so the proper testing begins. We will use the E Liquid in numerous different devices at various different power levels over the course of several days. In this time we will also ask friends and family to try it and get their feedback. Once in a blue moon, we will have a great liquid straight away but most of the time, something needs a tweak. Either something is missing or something is too overpowering and blocks out other flavours and at that point we go back to all the individual flavours and start again until we end up with an E Liquid we are happy with.

When we have an E Liquid we are happy with, we contact numerous people from our Facebook Group or PlanetOfTheVapes and ask them if they’d like to try the new E Liquid and get their feedback. This is where more than a few E Liquids fail. If the overall feedback is positive, that’s great but we also take on board any negative feedback and this can result in either a fresh start from the beginning or an E Liquid idea being scrapped altogether. For every E Liquid we release, more than 30 different versions or ideas will be scrapped, never to be mixed again. 

So let’s say everything has gone well, we like it and the feedback is great, we can finally start to pick up the pace. We contact a flavour provider and order the ingredients needed to make the finished E Liquid in large quantities. Whilst we wait for these to arrive, we can work on designing the labels and the next part, thinking up a name! We do cheat here though, we take a double barrel name, for example Rhubarb Custard, and simply change one word to Latin or Italian so you end up with Roseus Custard instead or Limonata Apple.

Once everything is in place, time to get into the clean room and mix everything together. We mix 3 different versions, one version is over flavoured by 50% and this is used for all our 20ml Shortfills for 6mg Vapers, a version over flavoured by 20% at 60VG/40PG ratio for 50ml Shortfills and a final version over flavoured again by 20% but in 70VG/30PG ratio for 100ml Shortfills. We over flavour all our Shortfills so when you add the nicotine, the flavour level is exactly where it was designed to be. 

Everything is then added to its appropriate bottles in the correct amount using measured pumps, caps are sealed and labels printed and applied.

We can then take all the jazzy photos for the website and social media and make the final E Liquid available to you to enjoy.