(work in progress-15/3/13)
This are my second home distillation web pages, after the first ones almost fifteen years ago, with my first glass distiller of 2 liter.
I have been adding more and more details recently to this pages. I recently did a lot of research on internet and realized that many people have a distorted understanding of (home) distilling. I even found people on Youtube announcing to make essential oils and actually were making an oil infusing of some herbs! Other made very complicated devices, more based on old alchemy methods than modern distillation. Many other devices are simply to tiny, distilling only 200 or 300 gr of herbs is really to discouraging, as you can harvest barely some drops of essential oils!
Plenty of other devices use the middle-ages methgod of direct fire, sometimes the herbs are directly put into boiling water. Have a look at my distillation basics pages to understand how old this method is!
Gildemeister & Hoffmann proved already in 1905 in Barrême after extensive studies and lavender distillation research that "water distilling" (feu nu or direct fire" ) even with a separation of the herbs from the water, that is without an independant steam generator:
-altered the quality of the lavendel oil (less ester content)
-lowered the yield of lavender (up to 10%!)
-often gives a bad fragrance result
(Die Atherische Öle, Gildemeister & Hoffmann, 1929, III, 644)
I gave a lot of practical workshops since we moved from Belgium to France and realized that I had to improve the glass distillation unit:
Here you can see my second model of 10 liter that had a disapointing result: difficult to fill and remove the herbs, lower yield compared to the former 2 liter small model,
hydrosol/late quality with low yield and not of the best quality!
The new model should be:
-big enough to have a good yield of oils (minimum 10 to 30 ml for common oils like lavender, peppermint...)
-easy to add and to remove the distilled herbs
-have the right dimensions to give a nice hydrosol/lat of the same quality as the professionnal units give:
I once tried to make a bigger glass unit, but it was too long and gave bad results, so I deceided to have a larger instead of longer alembic.
What equipment will you need (glass still)I have been adding more and more details recently to this pages. I recently did a lot of research on internet and realized that many people have a distorted understanding of (home) distilling. I even found people on Youtube announcing to make essential oils and actually were making an oil infusing of some herbs! Other made very complicated devices, more based on old alchemy methods than modern distillation. Many other devices are simply to tiny, distilling only 200 or 300 gr of herbs is really to discouraging, as you can harvest barely some drops of essential oils!
Plenty of other devices use the middle-ages methgod of direct fire, sometimes the herbs are directly put into boiling water. Have a look at my distillation basics pages to understand how old this method is!
Gildemeister & Hoffmann proved already in 1905 in Barrême after extensive studies and lavender distillation research that "water distilling" (feu nu or direct fire" ) even with a separation of the herbs from the water, that is without an independant steam generator:
-altered the quality of the lavendel oil (less ester content)
-lowered the yield of lavender (up to 10%!)
-often gives a bad fragrance result
(Die Atherische Öle, Gildemeister & Hoffmann, 1929, III, 644)
I gave a lot of practical workshops since we moved from Belgium to France and realized that I had to improve the glass distillation unit:
Here you can see my second model of 10 liter that had a disapointing result: difficult to fill and remove the herbs, lower yield compared to the former 2 liter small model,
hydrosol/late quality with low yield and not of the best quality!
The new model should be:
-big enough to have a good yield of oils (minimum 10 to 30 ml for common oils like lavender, peppermint...)
-easy to add and to remove the distilled herbs
-have the right dimensions to give a nice hydrosol/lat of the same quality as the professionnal units give:
I once tried to make a bigger glass unit, but it was too long and gave bad results, so I deceided to have a larger instead of longer alembic.
