 
This is my still. It's called Dante. Yes,
Dante's Inferno but it's also a good
name in general.
This is the boiler made of stainless
steel barrels 55-gallon drum...well, one of them.
Everything is stainless. It's electrically
heated. It's really just a barrel that's been
polished up. It has a few little brackets
welded onto it. We don't want to lose any
essential oil through vapor before it
can be condensed so this just makes a
seal between the basket and the boiler.
This is our plant material basket: one of the two and I'm just putting
pine needles in.
This has been mulched through a
shredder.
Pinus strobus.
There's a balance you have to achieve
of how much to pack the material. I
usually just kind of even it out to start and then give it a few
packs because if you don't pack it the steam
will make little pockets and pass through
without actually passing through the
material. It will make tunnels. So this is
shredded material that is about an inch, that wood is
about an inch in
diameter and the needles and I shred the
material because you can fit a whole lot more in here. It
also makes the oils more accessible to
the steam than if you had whole wood with
bark on it.
 
I put it in there carefully so it doesn't
mess up the gasket and get it out of alignment. Make sure there's
no particles here for this sealing of the
next gasket.
 
So a two dollar tube of silicone made a gasket that a custom gasket maker would have
charged hundreds of dollars for because
they would have had to make a custom
mold.
Okay now I'm going to fill this charge, basket - plant
material basket. It's much heavier,
so I'm going to partially fill it and put it on the still and then fill in the rest of the way.
For about 100 pounds of white pine
I'm expecting about 400 milliliters of
oil so the total volume of the two
baskets is about 35 to 40 gallons and
that translates to roughly about a
hundred, a hundred and ten pounds of
conifer material like this or up to
about a hundred and twenty pounds of the
ginger pulp.
Looks good.
So these are not to necessarily keep it...
they're to keep the steam from escaping
right here but mainly just to keep
everything from wanting to lift from the
pressure underneath. Now there's not a lot of
pressure underneath because it's a big
open pathway for the vapor to get out
which is what you want in essential oil
distilling. You don't want pressure.
Ok
now the final gasket and the lid and
we're ready to wait.
So this part is important to line up as
evenly as possible because I've learned
that the my lid sealing surface is right at
the edge of the gasket if it's perfectly
round
so I
try to make it as even as possible
around the edges
and I have an arrow again
 
so that it always goes on the same way.
 
So now I'm going to put the condenser on. I've got this
PTFE gasket, dry-clamp fitting. This is
the condenser - homemade. If you look down
in here, I don't know if you can see it but
there's three tubes in there.
Those three tubes run through the whole
length and come out this end. I know that's not
the most beautiful welding but whatever.
It works, that's the point and then water,
cooling water comes in down here, gets
pushed up, and comes out here. So this is
a jacket. The water goes through the jacket and
cools the three tubes allowing the vapor
to condense into water -  liquid. In this
case, the distillate is called hydrosol
and essential oil and in a little bit
you'll see how the oil gets separated
from the hydrosol.
Ok
There it is.
 
The unique design of the essencier allows the hydrosol to come out the bottom into
this container and the oil to come out the
top into our other container.
Ok so we're going to wrap up this
distillation now. It's been about six and a half
hours since we started. The oil has been
dripping for about four hours now. So
real quick overview of what we're going
to do: we're going to close this up and force this
oil to come out into our collection
vessel and then to clean out the
condenser, we're actually going to move all
this aside, shut off the cooling water,
and let the steam clean it out -
just push it all out. So let's go.
I'm just blocking the hydrosol so that
it forces this level to raise forcing
the oil out the top.
The other option would be to raise this
adjustable side up but there's no need
to do that.
 
Have to be quick and responsive with
this.  You don't want to send water out with the
oil. I'm going to stop it right about now, and then I'll 
lower this down. You saw how that just brought
down the whole level of everything.
Ok I might lose a drop here but it'll be
okay. So here's the oil we collected. There are
a couple of little water drops in there. You
can probably see them moving around at
the bottom. Looks like we've come to
about 200 milliliters. So now I'm going to
shut off the cooling water again to push
all the oil that's stuck inside here out
here and it's okay to not have anything
under here because this is adjusted down.
The water level and oil level is not
going to come above that.
So we just stopped the cooling water and
over the next minute or two the
condenser is going to start heating up
and then it will turn to steam
and start cleaning it out. You can see
actually that it's putting out a ton of
oil right now. This is all oil that's
stuck inside the condenser. I'm going to call
that done.
These are 10 milliliter bottles and this
is a 10 milliliter pipette
and
it's just a matter of filling this guy
up. I only use one pipette per species, in
other words I won't use this pipette for
ginger after the Fraser fir. You have to
overfill it a little bit because when
you pull it out of the oil, it goes down. So
as you can see, bottling our oils is very
much a hands-on process. No mass bottling
here. These are safety caps that come
with the bottles so once you screw them
on, they click and it's sealed. It's got that
safety ring that when you open it for
the first time it will, you know, break
that ring. So I generally do one oil at
a time so I don't get mixed up and
mislabel an oil, or one species of oil
that is. At this point, I'm not incredibly
concerned about how straight the labels.
I try to get them straight but if it's
slightly off, it just adds a little
character... lets you know is handmade.
