With the early arrival of “magnolia season” here in town, I’m looking ahead to the year’s bounty in terms of things I can heat up a lot and force oil out of. Yep, it’s almost time to take the big ol’ Portuguese alembic copper pot still off of the shelf.

The great hurdle with distilling your own essential oils is obtaining knowledge. This is something you can’t really google. First, even owning a still is illegal in many states. Second, distilling anything but plant matter without license/permit/legislation is pretty much entirely illegal, and, though I give it to you on my Word that I’ve never made booze with my still, I’d wager to guess that an awful lot of people probably do, such that the group of everyday folks who own alembic pot stills who legitimately want to generate, merely, things that smell good is likely a narrow demographic indeed.

This is unfortunate, because mistakes are not always benign in this craft and I could sure use a strong guiding hand. Distilling the wrong kind of cedar can make your lungs bleed. Being a doofus about your condenser setup can get you exploded. The one time I was exposed to the master distiller (or whatever his title might be) at The Essential Oil Company (which, miracle of miracles, is here in town), I spewed out dozens of questions in rapid-fire demand, both annoying the hell out of him and also eliciting a couple of compliments as to the relative advance of my knowledge. Again, relative. Because not much of this is written down.

Here’s a good and typical story about how I might end up killing myself accidentally. I have a passionate love for Ponderosa pine, which has bark and sap that smells like butterscotch. I like to smell the trees. And they are great to look at, with that plated red bark. My idea was that maybe distilling the sap would give me some sort of wonderful ambrosia. Unfortunately, research led me to what it is you get when you distill Ponderosa pine sap. Turpentine. That is super not what I’m into.

As an entertaining side note, there is a species of pine, Jeffrey pine, that looks nearly identical to Ponderosa and often grows in the same groves (stands? Whatever.). If you try to distill the sap of Jeffrey pine, zut alors.

Occasionally the backwoods turpentine makers in the 1800s in California would mix up the two, “with explosive and sometimes tragic consequences.” Jeffrey pine sap contains heptane, a flammable hydrocarbon so potent that it was a basis for the octane scale in gasolines.

Even the dog looks dubious sometimes.

All I can say is, fire it up! It’s almost distilling season!

Sources

• “Pinus Jeffreyi (Jeffrey Pine) Description.” The Gymnosperm Database: Home Page. Web. 09 Mar. 2010. .
• “Turpentine from Ponderosa Pine – Industrial & Engineering Chemistry (ACS Publications).” Turpentine from Ponderosa Pine. ACS Publications. Web. 09 Mar. 2010. .