I recently ordered a list of supplies for homebrewing. The shipment came but the carrier oil is missing. I had hoped to use MCT oil (usp filtered) for the decreased PIP.
I don’t want to order more because of the cost. Has anyone ever purchased oils from the market or health food store and used the syringe filter after heating up the oil and raws?
I’m wondering if there is any research that has addressed it. Some say that the heating and filtering is enough to sterilize it while others say not to use anything except pharmaceutical grade carrier oils.
Using store bought oils is fine as long as you filter and heat as you mentioned, just make sure to add benzyl alcohol to your solutions to help keep them sterile.
With how that post read I am going to say a few things extra. It’s not an assumption of ignorance it just might read like that as I am trying to clearly cover the subject.
First you are supposed to ALWAYS filter, period. That 0.22 filter in itself is almost a way to sterilize your finished product. It is so fine that it will catch bacteria. The 0.45 use to be industry standard but they realized there was something small enough that it wasn’t catching so then came the 0.22. So just with how that read I wanted to cover that you always filter as your last step. I don’t think that the filter is fine enough to catch all viruses but a virus needs a host to survive so once brewed it’s a good idea to let the finished vial sit for a while, you can also use this time to verify that it does infact and not crash.
If you want to and this is always a good idea, heat the solution high enough to kill what might be living in it. Some home brew instructions advise you to bake your finished vial as an extra sterilizing step. You need to put a venting needle through the septum so the expanding air can get out. Make sure the point of the needle is well above the top of the oil or the expanding air will push out oil not air. The basics of this is just bake the vial at about 250 f degrees for about an hour. This will also help make sure the hormone is well dissolved provided your hormone melts below 250 f degrees. If you are using a hormone with a high melting temp and you want to bake it at that high temp then make sure your oil doesn’t have a low flash point. The venting needle can just be a basic needle from a needle syringe unit. That plastic base that screws into the syringe is made out of stuff that doesn’t melt until 300 something degrees and I am fairly sure that is 300 something Celsius but I would double check that before trying to bake it at 300 f.
So yeah if you have to I don’t see anything wrong with using an unfiltered oil because you are going to filter it. Speaking of filters and filtering, i tried to use syringe filters my first brew…after 3 plus hours, two broken filters, and lost oil from when the filters broke I managed to keep about 60-70 ml out of a 100ml brew. I tried to put the oil in a large syringe, like 60ml large ment for farm yard Animal use, put on the filter then put the whole thing in a chaulking gun so I could just squeeze one notch then let it sit while it filtered. Well after all that I immediately decided vacuum filtering was the way to go. They make presealed sterile one use vacuum set ups. It’s so easy and fast you just need one of those vacuum pumps they use for bleeding car brakes. The 100ml filters in less than 10 minutes. They even make electric pumps if you don’t want to have to keep pumping the brake bleeder.
Lastly in not sure if you paid for the oil that they forgot but if you did then get ahold of the vendor and get them to send it. If they forgot it then it’s on them to send it.
Good write up. For those using syringes, the smaller the syringe the more pressure is generated per force input.
Also, if you can get a high flow medical filter, and not a button filter do it, it’s a big difference. The downside is that the priming volume will probably be around 1 mL more.
No, because you need the heat to be evenly distributed to the whole vial and all the oil inside. With a hot plate the heat is rising and dissipating into the air. The self enclosed unit of the oven insures that heat surrounds whatever is in there.
You could try on a hot plate but like iron said the transfer isn’t consistent. The easiest way to adjust for the transfer issue is put water in the pan then put the bottom of the vial in the water, this will help with the heat transfer but just like those water cooled machine guns the water will never let the temp go past boiling. All the extra heat you put into it from the heat coil being turned up just gets transfered into more and more steam. You could put an oil in the pan but then you are essentially frying your bottles, not sure how easy it would be to control the heat like that.
Used plain old grape seed oil, .22 micron filter. PIP is usually more about the type of steroid, unless you are allergic to a particular medium like ethyl oleate.
Never ever heated any solution.
Never used any BA, as per Bill Roberts advice.
Never got any infections, even with gear that had been brewed well over a year ago.
Proper filtering is more important than pretty much every other step. The heating at the end is simply to sterilize everything that happens between filtering and capping the vial. If you use the right filters your risk of infection drops to almost zero (assuming you use best practices after filtration).