Large Scale Guide: Preliminaries

Please read this entire page.

Warning

This guide creates injectables. A lot of them. Considering the size of the batch you’re preparing to make, these injectables will be going into the bodies of people you don’t know, bypassing the wonderful filtration system of their digestive organs. Injectable preparations are inherently more dangerous than topicals or orals. Do not skip steps. Do not skimp on prices. You want to do this, so do it right, the first time. You have an obligation to keep the people you’re serving safe.

Please contemplate if you’re capable of doing this process correctly before beginning.

Making Testosterone or Estradiol

It is a near identical process for compounding these two hormones. The only major difference is that the ratios of the ingredients slightly differ. Cost is also, roughly, the same. This guide will teach you to make both and when it comes time to get your recipe, just choose the one relevant to you.

Scale: Up to 200 Vials

This guide is designed to create roughly 600mL of your target preparation, dispensed into 200 3mL vials. You can, of course, change these sizes and quantities as you see fit.

You can do less, and you can for sure do more, but you will start running into upper limits of how much a couple of hard workers can accomplish in a long weekend.

Cost

Rough estimate (2025, USA)

• $2000: Equipment
• $500: Disposables
• $500+: API (active pharmaceutical ingredient)
• $200: Excipients
• $500: Misc expenses

Probably good to have at least $4,000 set aside if you’re going into this starting with no equipment.

I watched a kitchen preparing to use this guide spend around $5,000 and still need more for odds and ends. I think it depends on what you’re starting with, how you spend, where you spend, etc. If money was no object I could easily drop $10k on this.

Time Commitment

These are total estimates:

One time only:

• 1-2 months studying, preparing, ordering
• 1 month learning your equipment

Every brew:

• 10 hours of prep work
• 30 hours of brew time

You NEED Helpers

This is way too big of a task to do alone. My most recent brew of this size I worked with a single part time helper. In a three day weekend I logged over 35 hours of work and my helper logged around 10. I cried. A lot. Unfortunately this isn’t something you can space out over a longer period of time. Because you’re working with sterile shit you need to accelerate timelines.

An ideal setup for me would look like a three day weekend, 10 hour days, and the following personnel:

• Me, brewmaster-ing, full time
• Helper 1, skilled assistance (or co-brewmaster), full time
• Helper 2, prep work, part time
• Helper 3, care work (food, dishes, music, errands, vibes), full time

Do not underestimate the importance of a care worker. Budget for good food.

Trust & Security

Even taking into account that you’re doing this in a place where it is legal, you’re still going to want to keep this operation completely under wraps. There are many people, some with lots of power, who would not take kindly to you doing this work. It’s best to stay as quiet as possible about this. This is difficult considering there are several people, lots of equipment, and presumably distribution. If you do not consider yourself moderately advanced in security culture, then you need to make moves to get there. Find someone in your network that you can fully, truly trust who is read into security culture and gently ask them for help.

Your network should have as much isolation built into it as possible. Your care helper, for instance, doesn’t need to know about distribution or the people involved in that. Some people, if they don’t already know every other helper going in, will use an alias in the brew space, so as to keep their identity secret.

Make sure the people you’re working with can be trusted. You’re not just trusting whether or not they are cops/nazis, but you’re trusting their ability to keep their damn mouths shut about the brew project. Bringing someone on who frequently overshares, who is clutzy, who forgets, etc is bringing on a security weak link.

Many people view brewing HRT as “cool.” While, yeah, it’s cool, this is also a red flag. This attraction to “cool” will cause people to make poor security decisions over time. We need to avoid spreading the word about what this project is for any reason that is not strictly strategic. Am I guilty of reading in a few friends? Of course. And we want to limit how volatile that spread of information is. Stop being cool.

Try to limit who you tell about what you’re doing. All 12 people in your polycule don’t need to know. They can know you’re up to something, but they need to respect that it’s a need-to-know project.

Best practice would be to keep the project highly isolated from your full social life, and to have the distribution channels make the final product leave your circle. You do not distribute yourself. The brewer needs to stay as protected from distribution as possible. In an ideal world the brewer has a single distribution point of contact that moves product quietly away from the brewer and brew site. The brewer does not and should not need to know destinations.

Don’t leave this project set up. You set it up to brew, and you tear it down when you’re done. Too much risk comes from staying set up.

Standard Loss

With any batch, but particularly with a large batch, you’re going to have some loss.

10% loss should be considered standard. 20% loss will not be uncommon, especially if you’re new to all this.

If I’m trying to make 200 vials, I will prepare everything as if I’m making at least 220.

Loss can come in various forms:

• water exposure (from wetpack)
• messed up sterilization of glass etc
• spills
• drops on the floor
• fails visual inspection
• blown filters
• run out of supplies
• run out of time/energy

Other Guides

I’m not aware of any other guide that attempts to teach how to brew at this scale. Use extreme caution when combining information from other guides with this one. This guide is designed to be a whole unit with supplementation not needed except where explicitly flagged. Much of the homebrew advice available online is not properly researched and explicitly advises poor and dangerous practices.

Large Guide Contents

• Defining and gathering supplies
• Building a work area (makeshift clean room)
• Preparing materials (sterilizing)
• Working in front of a laminar flow hood/box
• Choosing an appropriate Tek for filtration
• Using bubble point tests to ensure filter integrity
• Dispensing into smaller vials
• Capping
• Visual exam
• Label
• Log

Pre-Brew Education

Please read up before beginning this process

• Learn and practice aseptic technique
• Learn about PPE
• Learn how to work in front of laminar flow
• Read this whole guide start to finish
• Make a list of how this guide is different from what you’ve done in the past
• Explore the items in “Topics” area of the sidebar to improve your knowledge

Science-Mind

When you homebrew you’re doing something that is highly regulated, the secrets of which are strictly guarded. It’s also pretty dangerous to cook something in your kitchen and then to inject it into your own body. Even more so to give it to other people to inject. You’ll be best served if you adopt a science mindset as you move forward. Ask as many questions as you can about why things are they way they are. Ask if things are safe or not. Ask why we know if they’re safe or not. Keep this up and never stop. It would be low key insane to assume you know what you’re doing at any point in this process. The people who do know what they’re doing have received highly specialized training, training that you will never have access to. Logging 1,000 hours in your home lab is nothing compared to professional know-how. Never forget that you are an amateur. Always question yourself and your assumptions.

You should be thrilled to learn that there’s a better way to do something. Treat every failure as a success because your set of knowledge just got broader. Be cautious of people with homebrew knowledge who are highly defensive and who have no data to back up why what they do is “safe.”

Accidental skin contact

Be aware that full PPE should be worn while following this guide, including gloves, masks, hair covers, and a tyvek suit. All people can have their hormone profile interfered with if they make accidental skin contact with what they’re brewing. If you are a person who has hormone cycles, or a person who is on testosterone to suppress those cycles, you may notice that accidental skin contact is detrimental to that cycle. I have seen people wearing poor PPE have skin breakouts, early/late periods, and even reappearing periods.

You will come into contact with this preparation, and you need to have PPE protecting you.

Staying Clean

As you go, you’re going to have spills of the preparation. Whether it’s just a few drops here and there or full vials tipped over, eventually it’s going to be on your work bench. As soon as you identify spilled preparation, finish any time sensitive sterile task, then immediately clean it up. You 100% need to avoid getting it on anything that will spread it around.

To clean a spill:

Spray rubbing alcohol on a paper towel, then use that to pick up the spill. Go back over it with more alcohol on a fresh paper towel.

Create a guide summary

Preparing for the day of your brew, you should have a personal summary of this guide written out so you don’t have to refer to a website constantly.

It might also be useful to create a work schedule for your and your crew.

HRT.Mom is not Perfect

While I hope it’s clear how much work I’ve put into this, it is far from perfect. Please contact me if you spot any errors worth fixing, or if you believe I’ve gotten the science wrong anywhere. It’s also likely I’ve left a few things out of the supplies list etc.