Do you want to distill plants and obtain essential oils with a copper alembic at home? At Cobrelis we give you the instructions to use an essence distiller.
1. What is an alembic?
2. Parts of a copper alembic for distilling plants
3. How a still works: steps to distill essential oils at home with a copper alembic
1. What is an alembic?
An alembic is an instrument for distilling liquor or alcohol and essential oils that has been used for centuries. The material is copper, since it is very malleable and is an excellent conductor of heat, which greatly favors distillation.
Enter Cobrelis and we will show you our entire catalog of special stills for the distillation of plants and essential oils.
2. Parts of an alembic:
The traditional alembic consists of the following parts:
Squid: it is the lower part of the alembic where you put the water and the mixture to distill.
Hood: upper part of the alembic where the steam comes out.
Serpentine cube: the cube where the steam condenses, and we obtain the distilled mixture.
Column: Column stills are widely used in distillation of plants and essential oils, even more than traditional stills. These alembics have a column where the distilled mixture is put that gives more quality to the distillation.
You can see our entire catalog here of column stills in Cobrelis.
3. How an alembic works: Steps to distill essential oils at home with a copper still:
First step: Prepare the mixture to distill:
To distill an essential oil such as lavender, rosemary or oregano, you must choose the freshest and most tender parts of the plant. It is very important that you choose plants without herbicides and without pesticides, that is, that they are organic plants so that the quality of the distillate is better.
Each plant has a different maceration process, in this blog post we will tell you about the most used essential oils for distillation with an alembic.
Here we leave you a video where they explain the procedure to extract lavender essential oil.
Steps to continue with an alembic:
1. The first thing is to introduce the distilled mixture to obtain our essential oil of lavender, rosemary, tea tree or lemon, for example, in the squid (or in the column in the case of a column alembic).
2. The next step is to put the water in the pot and heat it (the temperature will be measured with a special thermometer that can be supplied with the alembic included).
3. The heat will cause the steam to pass from the squid (where the distilled mixture is) to the hood (the top of the alembic) through a copper grate. With the passage of steam from one part to another, the oils and aromas are extracted.
4. In the serpentine cube we will obtain the liquid result of the distillation of our essential oil.
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