How We Distil at A.S Apothecary

I've been distilling for years, it's one of my favourite activities in the Apothecary. It feels like an extraordinary alchemy every time. I learnt to distil when I lived in Cyprus under the advice and guiding hand of my good friend Mariam Khan. I remember the moment I first smelled Orange Blossom Hydrosol, it was at Mariam's house and she had recently distilled it, It was in a pink bottle with a spray top and she squished it in my direction. I had never smelt anything like it. It made every other Orange Blossom Water I had smelled over the years seem like a pale imitation. Here was the real thing, so complex, floral and slightly herbaceous, bright and alive. The second it touched my skin I felt so good, the scent was both uplifting and beguiling, it was a perfect cooling mist.

That moment changed my working life, opening up endless new possibilities for scent, taste, therapeutics and plant work and I have never looked back. I now have 5 copper Alembic Stills of various sizes, some are best for seaweed, others for flowers, some are for testing, others for when we have a bumper harvest. Having the right Still is essential to success. All our Stills are traditional copper Alembics with the big round retort, onion top, swan neck and condensing unit. They are beautiful to look at and lovely to use. Where they have been dropped over the years they have dents and scratches. Each dent makes the plant matter within move in a slightly different way, which also affects the distillation as a whole. Where there are big dents, rather than hammer them out, I've come to appreciate their effects and enjoy the altered sounds the Still makes. I distil as much by sound as scent and taste.

Distilling offers a unique method of extraction - it captures the spirit of a plant from the lightest brightest molecules at the start to the heavier deeper scent and taste molecules, as the distillation progresses. Sensitive distilling involves really understanding the plant and what it needs to reveal itself. Every plant is different. Every point in the season yields a slightly different distillate. Every year the plants will behave slightly differently depending on the conditions in which they have been growing.

This year in Harris it has been so cold, wet and windy. Our Summer has been quick and cool. I barely remember any full days of sunshine. For the last couple of weeks I've been distilling for the Isle Mist with a little break earlier in the week. I started with the Flowers - Roses, Meadowsweet, Heather and Blackcurrant leaves. There is always a magnificent moment, usually alarmingly short-lived where all these flowers are all blooming together, so we have to act fast to gather enough to distil them. I can't even begin to adequately describe the scent, it is utterly beautiful, floral, slightly spicy, earthy and the Meadowsweet lends a tartness in taste and scent.

Second are the trees - Spruce resin collected over months, Spruce pollen, leaves and stems and Bog Myrtle - in combination they are blissful. Bog Myrtle has a little hint of gingerbread when it's distilled. I love it. The balance of this one is hard to get right, too much Spruce makes it smell too antiseptic. The right amount makes it sing. 

The final part is the Seaweed, we use Fucus for its alginate rich offering. I love to distil it with Apples. It sounds slightly strange but seaweed and apple is a brilliant combination, the one softens the other and together they are utterly harmonious. 

Then everything has to rest for a little while, scent continues to evolve after distilling and waiting patiently for the final expression is critically important. Only when I'm happy that the distillate has settled do I blend it together and add the Bush and Findhorn Essences to make the Isle Mist and then we wait again for it all to settle, for the various distillates to mingle into one perfect whole. 

Commercial distilling isn't like this, it's a violent process, in a stainless steel rather than copper still of a very different design. Pressurised steam is forced through the plant matter breaking open the cells and separating out the essential oil. It all happens fast to make production costs as low as possible and because that process is about grabbing the essential oil (which is the valuable bit) and minimising the amount of no- essential-oil distillate. It is the way to get through masses of plant matter and extract efficiently but it is a process rather than a celebration and the resulting product always feels slightly lifeless to me.

It also usually involves acres and acres of monoculture. Commercial Lavender fields, far from filling my heart with joy, depress me profoundly. They don't encourage biodiversity, they usually have a single variety of Lavender and it has to be one of the varieties that yields a large amount of oil. Acres of the same blue flower at the expense of insect rich mixed planting or even a wide border to the fields of mixed planting. Commercial growing like this can lead to the proliferation of disease and harmful pests with nothing to counter balance the single plant varieties that predominate.

What we do is at the other end of the spectrum and can only be done on a small scale but the difference is stark. Our little croft and greenhouse is a-hum with bees, hoverflies, butterflies and moths, everything is organically grown or sustainably wild harvested but more than anything we devote time to every part of it. We wait for plants to grow, flowers to set, bees to pollinate, we weed, and feed our plants with seaweed from the beach or teas that we make. Then we distil when everything has aligned and then we wait again until it's ready to work with. Only then do we bottle it and make it available for you.

Time and waiting are so underestimated. They are expensive because they delay sales but for me, it's a price well worth paying. Through patience, what we make is as good as it can be and to us, that matters because really great quality can't be hurried.