More Distillation Experimentation

There was 10 mls of lavandin grosso essential oil, but I siphoned off about 2 mls to store away -- the rest goes to Shannon at Seasons Gifts & Gardens in Sanger, CA, from whom I received the lavandin bundles and buds to distill.

After completing the lavender- um, lavandin-distillation, I moved on to those cucumbers. So now there's about 30 ounces of cucumber hydrosol waiting around to settle (still notes settling). The weird thing about these cukes is that they're the pickling kind and they already smell a bit pickly when they're cut into. They even have a strange tartness to them when tasted. Then I got a wild hair in me ar-- eye and decided to do a co-distillation of overgrown rose geranium and languishing frankincense oleoresin. Oh em gee. The still notes are crazy wild, but the gist of the hydrosol is all there -- deep, lush, herbally, rosey rose geranium with a snap of pitchy, resinous luban. Holy cow! It's inspired me to do more weird, wacky and wild distillations, so I think next is a co-distillation of lemons (going to mum's to pick lemons today) and about a cup of a strong tincture of gardenia (compliments of Ms. Velvet & Sweet Pea - Laurie Stern). It's not a co-distillation in the strictest of terms -- I don't know what to call it -- I'm just going to make it and see what comes of it. And hope that the little bit of grain alcohol in the al embic doesn't catch fire or blow up! I will have to make the fire extinguisher handy for this experiment.