hi i'm dennis and i've been a gardener for 50 years i've learned a lot about plants that i'd like to share with you especially growing and processing medicinal plants this is my humble alchemical laboratory here and today i'd like to talk to you a little bit about how to distill plants that you're harvesting it's like fall now going into winter here it's cold and i'm going through the garden and pulling out herbs that will not make it through the winter normally they would just be thrown away but they are a very rich source of medicinal
substances that have to be extracted or distilled in order to use them i have a lot of lemon balm growing it's wonderful herb melissa and i have to trim it all the way down to the ground and there's a lot of it left i run it through a still today we'll look at the still you can take an old pressure cooker and make some really good essential oils out of maybe 12 plants here i can get about 15 mils of very high quality very fragrant melissa oil from a very simple distillation 15 mils which is
about that much of melissa essential oil will cost you about three hundred dollars so welcome to my laboratory let's see what happens this vessel here is a four gallon pressure cooker it's been modified so that i can put herbs in it and let steam come up through the herbs and run it through glassware to extract the oil so in order that things don't burn i place a strainer in the bottom and i collect rain water during the year and that's what is making the steam so this is lemon balm and it's fresh just harvested this
morning and i put that in there but i've i've found over time that i get much better oil if i harvest it in the evening and then let it wilt and that's an old process called shocking so what happens when you cut an herb it goes into kind of a hyper oil production mode if i shock it and let it wilt overnight i can put a lot more in the boiling flask and i get a better quality oil so the thing you want to not do is just pack it really tight the steam has to
get through the herbs and i know people who say you should never include sticks like this in the boiling flask it should just be leaves but lemon balm itself when it gets hit by the steam kind of looks like spinach that's been cooked and if you take all the leaves off and pack this still with leaves the steam won't go through the lemon balm it just settles into kind of a mush in the bottom i'm just kind of packing it in in a nice way i'm not tamping down but i'm running my fingers through it
in order to try to feel is there any stuck places down in there i wiggle my finger and separate it i want the scheme to try to touch all parts of everything that i'm putting in and now it's packed pretty well and i have about an inch here or something called headspace the steam that comes up expands in the headspace and then goes up into my apparatus you want to leave a little bit of headspace to get a really good distillation so this is just a standard hot plate from target you don't need really super
duper equipment to do this but you see it gets a lot of use i have it set on a temperature that i know when i go to distilled oil will not burn anything and will give me what i want so i have three or four of these for different operations they're eight or nine bucks a piece so it's better to have a bunch of them set to where you want rather than trying to set them all each time you use it so this goes down here and then my boiling flask with the lid on it
goes on top here's an adapter that is made from parts from home depot and then a glass fitting on the top we'll do a separate video on how to make that but this allows a pressure cooker to be plugged into laboratory glassware it's a really good system works really well it's inexpensive try it you'll love it so the steam goes up through the herbs goes up through here and i want to capture the steam in glassware in order to pull the oil out so in order to do that there are a series of different glass
apparatus that i use this one here is called a vigro fractionating column it's a beautiful thing and what happens here is that the steam comes up through here and goes out the top but you see there are little fingers of glass that have been pushed in there steam comes up and circulates around those little fingers and around each time it circulates around the temperature drops slightly on the steam when the temperature drops the oil that's being pushed out of the herbs in the steam rises and the water falls so down here there's a certain proportion
of oil and water that's pretty much equal but at the top of the separator there's much more oil in the steam than there is down here it's a beautiful beautiful piece of equipment and you order it special treat it like a baby it's very very delicate and i'm going to put this in here and bring it over and support it so my gross separator is placed into the boiling flask these joints are made out of ground glass so that they kind of will walk but what i found over time that if it is just used
all the time sometimes they get locked a little bit and you break them trying to separate them so what i do is i use something called vacuum grease or high vacuum grease that are used by chemists to do this and i coat these with a little bit of vacuum grease in order to keep the system flexible so up here is another component known as a clevenger and i'm just going to lift this whole thing up here and pop that into the top and just to make sure put a little clip on there hold that together
and now the steam will come up through the vegro and go up into this piece of equipment here this is a clevenger and it's a brilliant piece of equipment designed to separate out the oil so what happens is the seam goes up through this tube and goes in here and then goes up when it goes up up above here is a water filled condenser the hot steam goes into an inner tube inside the condenser and condenses and then drops down and falls down into the clevenger the clevenger has water in it up to there because
that part right there is equal to that they are at the same level and the beauty of this is as water with oil drops down into the receiver down here the extra water gets pushed up and out and returns back into the boiling flask so it's continually recycling the water you don't run out of water in the boiling flask but over time very small amounts of oil begin to build up so this little bit of oil you can see there is from a run that i did yesterday and i'm going to do another run or
two or three today to build up enough oil for me to extract so the oil will stay on the top of the water here the water will return down when i turn this still off and everything settles out i have a pellicle of oil captured in the top and the little stopcock here allows me to let the water out until the oil comes right down to the bottom and i can then take the oil and put it in a little bottle and i have a very beautiful oil for making salves and making oil applications so
in order to keep the water jacket and the condenser cool i use uh 150 gallons per minute pump in a bucket of water and the water then gets pumped out of this tube and runs up here and goes into the bottom of the condenser then the condenser fills up and the extra water comes out the top and returns back and goes back down into the bucket after one or two runs depending upon how warm it is during the day i have another bucket here that i can just put the pump in there for working all
day i have 10 gallons of water i'll just keep it in there for a couple weeks while i'm doing the work this is a very efficient way to do it so i'm not wasting water by letting the outflow run into the drain so you need a pretty good pump to get a good head and keep it going i used to use little small aquarium things they don't work so well but this one is a fountain pump and it works just really great so the water comes up goes through the condenser and comes back in a
continual recycling system so here's the still in action these little fingers are pushed in from the outside into that chamber and they create a turbulence when the steam comes up it goes around each set of little fingers and drops a little bit in temperature the water that is carrying the oil up is heavier than the oil so the water has a tendency in the lower part of the separator to drop out which means that the steam that's coming up here is richer in oil than that that is coming out of the still at the bottom
there's more oil in water and here more water in oil so that means we have a kind of oil rich steam coming up and coming up through this tube and going and it meets a block here and then is pushed up and goes up into this there's a condenser as cold water coming in it and you can see that there's an area here where little droplets form that's the condensing line where the steam goes up and it's in a cold environment it condenses and it falls back down when it falls back down it goes through
and then lands in the water that's at the bottom of the clevenger and you can see here a layer of oil and that oil is what we are after it's a beautiful system for extracting small amounts of oil the lemon balm has only a small amount of oil but this is a pretty good extraction of oil for one charge of the still [Music] [Music] [Music] you
