Glass Vials

Glass vials, responsible for holding your preparation, are important pieces of the equation.

Pre-sterilized

You’ll find that on many websites, including amazon and ebay, you can purchase pre-sterilized vials. This is a practice that I strongly recommend against. We don’t know anything about what these vials underwent before or during their sterilization process. We don’t know if they’re even actually sterile. Maybe they are technically sterile but weren’t washed properly, and so they have dust inside of them.

Pre-sterilized vials offer far too many uncontrollable variables. Please avoid these.

Pre-sterilized for the small guide

If you’re following my small guide, how to make one or two vials at a time, then I’d consider pre-sterilized vials less dangerous. This is for a couple reasons. 1) if something is wrong with the vials it’s only effecting one person, you, 2) you likely don’t have the resources or the equipment to sterilize your own vials, 3) your standards don’t have to be as high when you’re producing for just yourself.

If you want to +1 your setup though, this is definitely the thing to upgrade.

What size vials?

If you stick with a 3mL vial, and the 20mg/mL concentration for E or the 200mg/mL concentration for T, then you’re left with a vial that will last about 12 weeks. This is a stark difference to most homebrewers who are selling vials that last 80 weeks.

Some folks who are homeless, and who have steady access to supply of fresh vials, will benefit from vials that last much less than this, anywhere from 1-4 weeks. This is due to them having a harder time keeping things clean and the cops messing with their possessions.

The FDA recommends multi-use vials expire after just 28 days, or 4 weeks¹. This is unless the manufacturer can prove that the bacteriostatic agent (benzyl alcohol in our case) can preserve their preparation for longer than this time. Since being able to prove this is out of scope for home brewing, I tend to stay closer to the FDA’s guidance than to what is popular in the community.

Washing Vials

Vials need to be washed prior to use. This is to remove any debris or grime from the inside of the vial before sterilization.

Wash your vials in hot soapy water with a good detergent. Use an appropriately sized bottle brush to clean the insides.

Rinse all vials in distilled water, then loosely cap with aluminum foil hats before their dry heat sterilization cycle. You should cap them before there’s a chance for dust to fall into the vial while the opening is exposed to the air. It should be capped in such a way as to allow steam from the distilled water to escape while not letting anything fall into the vial.

Sterilizing Vials

Vials can be dry heat sterilized in the oven, which can allow for them to be depyrogentated as well.

Depyrogenation temps²

Reminder that this is how long you need to hold the item at the given temperature for, not how long you need to put it in the oven for. You should use an infrared thermometer to check to make sure your glassware is up to temp.

References