Distilling Hydrosols

This has been sooo much fun! I love putting together new projects and all the new stuff I learn whilst doing so! This time, I made a still to distill herbs/plants into hydrosols and/or essential oils. I probably could have bought something off ebay cheaper than this, but wouldn't have had near as much fun. :D

I started with two stainless steel stockpots. These aren't the good ones, just thin, pressed sheet metal.

 The bottom pot is where the water to be boiled is to go. I cut a hole in the lid a bit smaller than the bottom of the smaller pot. That black thing is a gasket to help with steam escaping.

 Next I drilled holes in the bottom of the smaller pot (forgot to get a pic) this is the chamber where the plant material will go. That will allow the steam to come up through the plant material instead of being boiled. Different plants seem to have different outcomes on being boiled vs steamed with some doing better with one method and some better by the other. I figured this would allow me to do both as needed. I can put plant material in the bottom pot with the water when needed, no problem.

I used those rubber rings that are in a lot of 5 gal bucket lids for my gaskets. Cut them to length, the ones on the edge of the pot itself area also split down the middle.

Then I added a copper funnel I acquired on ebay and attached a copper fitting to the top. Then another fitting that necks down to 1/2", that's what size the copper tubing for the condenser is.

The condenser coil sits in an old 20 gal plastic tub that I used to use for rabbit water, it already had the hose inlet and outlet doohickies (yes, that's a technical term). And, yes, it's a redneck operation. :)

The bottom pot with water.

The top pot full of catnip.

This lid ended up being cut out, too, since the funnel was exactly the same size as the pot and I couldn't get it to sit right. Using the lid, flipped upside down, allows a platform for the funnel to sit on.

The finished product.

Yes, it is held together with rubber bands. Hey, it works. There's also a couple of those big, black paperclip thingies on there as well. The steam goes up through the plant material and out the top of the funnel into the condenser coil and the condensed fluid comes out into the gallon jar.

It worked very well for a trial run. I do think I should get another 10 feet of copper tubing so I can have more distance between the distiller and the condenser. I didn't even fill the blue tub halfway since I don't have that much confidence in the hoosier standing up to that much weight. I'd like to be able to lower the tub a bit onto something more substantial and fill it all the way. Even better would be to fix up the 2 burner propane stove and do it outside. That would avoid heating the house and allow easier filling and draining of the blue tub. I could hook a hose to the inlet and refill as needed with no trouble.

I also need to do something better for gasket material. My husband says I should try some sort of silicone engine gasket stuff/thing that he uses at work a lot (I forget exactly what it was). Says it'll stand up the heat better.

But still, not too bad! So far today I've made some catnip distillation and am working on some fringed sagebrush (artemisia frigida). It smells very nice in here! I'm hoping the catnip distillate will work just as well as the catnip tincture as a mosquito spray. We'll see.


.Fringed sagebrush ready to go.

A bit of the finished catnip distillate.

I can see that this is going to be way too much fun and I will end up with way too many jars of various distillates laying around the house!


ETA: Here's the sagebrush distillate. You can kinda see the essential oil floating on the top of the water. Not much, but you can see it.

 You can barely see it in the pic, but there is oil floating on the top. You could really see it quite well when looking down in real life.