New craft of the month: Distilling hydrosols!

Hydrosols are basically floral or herbal spritzers. A nice little refreshing spray on a hot day. I buy it every summer, but I have always wanted to make some of my own.

So I bought a small countertop distiller from Amazon, and Montana and I picked some sage and gave it a shot. It was not only easy to set up, but it was really rewarding to use because the whole process takes less than 20 minutes!

So there is a covered pot where you put some distilled water in and you set on the stove burner to boil (on low). Then there is a little cylindrical holder for the leaves, with a sieve (with holes for the steam to penetrate) underneath and on top of the leaves. There is a rubber tube that collects the condensation and deposits it into the condenser collector, which has the coiled metal tube.

There’s our sage leaves, ready to distill.

Montana’s sage plant was the donor.

You surround/fill the condenser container with ice water. We did two small batches and used up ALL of the ice in my house!

Here is our first attempt to assemble (though we eventually took it apart to add safety clamps to the tube before we really started the heavy boiling.)

OF COURSE you have to have ChatGPT make you some super cute labels for the bottles.

Here is the set-up in action. The smells were WONDERFUL!

So much ice!

It was so much fun we immediately ran out to the garden to pick some lavender to see how it would work. Same amazing results!

It doesn’t take very much.

You can use this distilling process on any leaves or flowers that have a great smell that you want to capture. On our list to try next are lemon herbs and rose petals. Fun!