extractions, etc.

[Mr.P]

Making an extract of very old dry white pine needles gathered from a large slab of bedrock. These needles have been accumulating for years without decaying, just becoming bleached with age and acquiring a very dry sophisticated aroma that reminds me of iso e super and cedar. If any of you have wandered through a white pine grove during the summertime, you have probably experienced this aroma. I was not able to grind this as finally as I would like but I think the extractor will work its magic. As I reduced the needles to these smaller pieces, I noticed a little bit of an evergreen aroma returning, something that for the most part has been driven out of the needles.

It'll be interesting to see whether the dry woody smell that I am looking for accumulates or whether it will end up smelling more typically evergreen. Smelling the bag of needles, I'm pretty hopeful that this will go the way I want it to.

 

[Mr.P]

oof this stuff came out strange, which I suppose is to be expected. Very small yield, resinoid is basically a paste. It contains the scent that I enjoy but some other facets are over blown and overall I don't find the scent appealing. I used some alcohol to collect the residue from the flask it was concentrated in and in more dilute form it's kind of pleasant. Perhaps I have to try diluting it further. Interestingly, the alcohol that was recovered during the extraction has a really pleasant soft evergreen aroma. I almost feel like that distilled "aged pine cologne" is more useful than the resinoid!

 

[Mr.P]

Post-extraction kinam wood. Mildly sweet on the burner but why bother… Not sure what to do with this, it could form a base for incense if I were dabbling with that. I just let it sit until the alcohol is all evaporated and will put it in a jar and figure out what to do with it another time. The alcohol was coming out clear at the end... looking at this wood, I feel like i could've done one more cycle and gotten a few more drops of resin out of this.

 

[AlHind Oud]

Post-extraction kinam wood. Mildly sweet on the burner but why bother… Not sure what to do with this, it could form a base for incense if I were dabbling with that. I just let it sit until the alcohol is all evaporated and will put it in a jar and figure out what to do with it another time. The alcohol was coming out clear at the end... looking at this wood, I feel like i could've done one more cycle and gotten a few more drops of resin out of this.
View attachment 50376

try distilling it in your alembic pot for a day or two.

 

[Mr.P]

try distilling it in your alembic pot for a day or two.

Good idea, but I don't have a rig conducive to anything other than short distillations. With what I have it would require 24 to 48 interruptions for recharging with freshwater, bringing it back up to a boil, etc. and I am not that motivated. The yield would be microscopic though... I really took a lot out of that stuff.

If I ever get a still that is a little more functional - meaning a larger volume kettle and a collector that feeds hydrosol back into the boiler - I could start to consider trying to extract things by distillation.

 

[Mr.P]

Making an extract of very old dry white pine needles gathered from a large slab of bedrock. These needles have been accumulating for years without decaying, just becoming bleached with age and acquiring a very dry sophisticated aroma that reminds me of iso e super and cedar. If any of you have wandered through a white pine grove during the summertime, you have probably experienced this aroma. I was not able to grind this as finally as I would like but I think the extractor will work its magic. As I reduced the needles to these smaller pieces, I noticed a little bit of an evergreen aroma returning, something that for the most part has been driven out of the needles.

It'll be interesting to see whether the dry woody smell that I am looking for accumulates or whether it will end up smelling more typically evergreen. Smelling the bag of needles, I'm pretty hopeful that this will go the way I want it to.View attachment 50351

You know, it's a basic truth that you have to give your fresh distillations a little while to breathe to really begin to appreciate what they are offering. It seems this applies with the extract as well - this pine duff extract was pretty revolting for the first several days after I made it. It has crossed over to intriguing- that initial pungency is gone, there is still a slight evergreen quality that I was not intending to concentrate, but this beautiful dry unique aged pine needle note is in fact radiating from my skin at this moment… what a treat! It's not perfect, the top notes are a little funky and it doesn't really become beautiful until the mid or base but it amuse me to have brought this aroma in from the woodlands.

 

[Mr.P]

sweet woodruff extract!

 

[Mr.P]

Some precipitate forming in the woodruff extract. Could be coumarin or some wax or gum... Aroma is enough like tonka bean that i think this could form part of the base of an unusual amber fragrance. Woodruff is famous as an herb used to prepare May Wine and other spring tonics... this would be a thematically appropriate featured player in a springtime oriented perfume. 🙂

 

[Mr.P]

Making more kinam extract. I started this last night but there was a power outage in my neighborhood. I had gotten one cycle completed before the outage and the chips were soaking in the alcohol overnight in the extractor, so I imagine finishing will go quickly today. This thick resin you see here is coming out of the second washing. The initial pull was so thick that it almost wouldn't flow through that small
tube.

 

[Mr.P]

lots of scented ethanol, these are all the different batches that I recovered from the different extractions using the rotovap, each one with a little hint of whatever it was extracting. These I figure will form the basis of unique future perfume compositions; for many the residual scent is mild so they could still be used without overwhelming, but for some the aroma is quite strong so the perfume would have to be built around them. Not surprisingly but disappointingly, alcohol recovered from sandalwood resinoid is the least aromatic

 

[Mr.P]

About a year ago I made all of these 10% dilutions of good smelling things using pure santalol natural isolate as a carrier in the hopes of beginning to establish some oil-based attars. It's not a project I have put any time into, but at some point I would really like to work on some accords and attars in this medium.

 

[Eleusis]

For the recovered alcohol, if it is not strong enough for semething usefull as it you can just mix in some activated charcoal, swirl it for some time, filter and it is good to go. Sometimes it does not work but it's good to try the recover solvant.

 

[Mr.P]

Getting ready to start work on a burley tobacco resinoid, from leaf that has been curing since the end of the summer. My expectations are not particularly high. I suppose there's a chance that attention to detail and small batch processing will partially compensate for my lack of experience growing and curing tobacco.

 

[Mr.P]

Was going to buy a smaller soxhlet but fortunately I happen to have a bunch of marbles lying around and these can be used to decrease the volume of solvent required for each cycle. The amount of material I was extracting was more appropriate for a 500 mL extractor but all I have are 1 L models. with all the marbles in there this receiver behaves more like a 500mL.

 

[Mr.P]

After a lackluster result with the glass still, we had a very successful distillation of elder flower over alcohol today.

I will assess the aroma after it has a little time to recover from distillation. Pleasant and fruity, more tart fruity than typically floral. Here's the still (picture taken before everything was in place and the heat turned on obviously).

 

[Mr.P]

Some DIY projects are very frustrating, others are quite gratifying and part of diving in and getting your feet wet is finding out firsthand which is which. Sometimes you can get good advice and avoid wasting your time but there quite a few things in the world that you really should check/figure out for yourself in my experience, meaning there are more people offering expert advice than there are experts to offer such advice, so in the end one ends up finding out for oneself anyway.

One area of experimentation that I have enjoyed is the distillation of traditional colognes. A typical basic recipe might combine bergamot oil, alcohol, water, lavender oil, rosemary sprigs, and petitgrain in a still, distilling over some particular quantity of liquid and then adding any oils that you want to contribute to the bouquet but you don't want to be impacted by the heat of distillation, typically neroli, Clary Sage oils or extracts, anything "delicate" (not exactly sure how that's determined, just lore I suppose…). The basic outcome is a bracing short lasting citrus floral along the lines of 4711 or Guerlain's Impérial. The experimentation comes in selecting different combinations of herbs / oils to put in at the beginning and then what exactly to touch it up with afterwards. Some herbs that I have tried in the past are helichrysum, lemon thyme, lime mint, rosemary, and lavender. This year I have plenty of clary sage, elecampane, wild ginger, white pine, and a variety of other Northeast native and invasive species to consider throwing into the mix.

I'll be getting this together and distilling on Sunday if all goes well I have some very fine fresh tip top quality Bergamot I'm excited to use here...

i'm not doing this commercially any more and the wabisabikouki section here is gone. I still consider the brand to be mine and it may someday produce perfume again but for now it's just experimental stuff for personal enjoyment or to share with friends or swap with people who have things that I might want!

 

[roflwaffle]

anything "delicate" (not exactly sure how that's determined, just lore I suppose…).

I assume its just where they contain compounds you care about with low boiling points that would not survive distillation temps, but you'd have to get into gcms or research to much. i suppose some will vaporize and recondense, but I assume (perhaps wrongly) you generally want ones that just hitch a ride. Maybe it has to do with the molecular weight rather than bp though, havn't really thought about it.

And super neat. It's like halfway between a proper gin basket and a traditional attar or shamama. Havn't considered it, feels too much up to skill and chance as far as ratios go, but sounds very exciting and creative. Alas, all I have here is a few rose bushes, a rhodie or 4, some small common herbs, and a VW Beetle sized rhubarb, which unfortunately appears to have no extraction capabilities, unless i wanna start getting wood bleach. Though, nature is aplenty and there's a few interesting things around ripe for exploration (currently mulling how best to extract from madrona bark, or the common tree moss that isnt oakmoss, though most assuredly has the same aterpine or whatever present)

 

[MaxFromHolland]

Sounds like a (to be) well spent sunday🙂 Hope you write up some more details how you go about a distillation like this.

The idea of cooking a Cologne of the year def has it's charm, never the same and a one-shot result of skill and luck.

I guess 'to delicate' may mean either
that key components of the scent profile are water soluble and be lost to the hydrosol, or key components are esters and monoterpenes with bonds that likely break/rearange when exposed to heat/steam.

 

[Mr.P]

Sounds like a (to be) well spent sunday🙂 Hope you write up some more details how you go about a distillation like this.

The idea of cooking a Cologne of the year def has it's charm, never the same and a one-shot result of skill and luck.

I guess 'to delicate' may mean either
that key components of the scent profile are water soluble and be lost to the hydrosol, or key components are esters and monoterpenes with bonds that likely break/rearange when exposed to heat/steam.

i've made a few of these over the past few years (and have shared results here), with good results. the technique is an old one that's reasonably well documented in the classic perfume texts at archive.org. It may be my posts got deleted because some (most) of them were in a thread associated with my previous business endeavors - I will include some documentation of the next run. I basically reviewed a few different recipes, analyzed what the common theme was, and then built variations on that.

 

[MaxFromHolland]

i've made a few of these over the past few years (and have shared results here), with good results. the technique is an old one that's reasonably well documented in the classic perfume texts at archive.org. It may be my posts got deleted because some (most) of them were in a thread associated with my previous business endeavors - I will include some documentation of the next run. I basically reviewed a few different recipes, analyzed what the common theme was, and then built variations on that.

Yes i recall reading about such thing in a rather old post, think with picture of alembic outside.
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