Distillation time!

It’s that time of year again to fire up the distiller and start making essential oil. Our new distillation plant is something to behold! It’s a propane fired boiler that generates 1.2 million btu’s and steams about 600 gallons of flowers at a time. That’s 10 times more than our previous one and is the biggest distillation unit in the area. The ground literally trembles when we fire it up. We’re already getting calls from other farms about processing their lavenders too so it looks like it will be a very busy 2-3 weeks here huddled around the still. The nice thing about this new unit is that we can tow the retort,(the part of the still that holds the flowers), out into the field and fill it there. Previously, we had to cut the flowers and put them into a truck, haul them back to the area where we were distilling and take them from the truck, placing them into the retort. Now, our labor is exponentially reduced with the larger size and the portability of the unit.