Distilation!!!

I love distilling! There is something about choosing your favorite medicinal plant and creating your own product from it that makes me so happy! The first distillation I did here was sea mint. We walked with the boys to the cliffs where it was located and harvested it on a dry sunny day. If you harvest in the rain or when it is cloudy you will get less oil from it. The sun brings out the oils and aromas and the rain washes them away. Distilling is fairly simple once you have the equipment. You can use a still that is used to distil alcohol which is what they use here. It works the same way. Our set up consists of a one heater gas cooker that can be placed on the ground and plugged into gas. We put cinder blocks on either side of the cooker and rest the still on top of the blocks so there is space between it and the cooker. Inside the stil there is a cylinder with a metal grate on top. You fill water almost to the top of the cylinder (better to be safe if you want to distil for several hours) and put the grate on top, make sure the grate is not in the water. You then stuff your still as tight as possible with your material. So far we have distilled sea mint, orange peel, pepper elder and licorice basil. You then put the latch top with the pipe on top and attach the pump hoses to the pipe that arches down into your glass ware. You place your water pump into a bucket of water and put the hose that brings the cold water out of the bucket into the bottom notch and the hose that brings the warm water out back to the bucket into the bottom notch. Once you turn on the cooker and the heat reaches that middle of the pipe, you can plug the pump in. You always want to make sure that the pipe extension is sweating and very cold by adding ice periodically to the pump bucket. If it ever warms up, steam instead of liquid will come out of the pipe and you will have lost a significant amount of your oil. The liquid that drops into the glass is called hydrosol, and your oil will rise to the top of the glass for you to separate.