CLEANING THE STILL (AND A MYSTERY GIVE-AWAY)!

Guest post by AZAR

Last summer Ellen, Michael, Brad and I took a field trip to Mesha Munyan's lavender farm near Sequim, WA USA.  We spent the day with Mesha and David Falsberg cutting lavender flowers and helping (observing really) Mesha as she distilled lavender oil and hydrosol in her 60-plus liter still. We had a great time and learned just enough to catch the "distill it yourself" bug. (See this post).  

The idea of creating our own custom distillations in our very own still was so appealing that in early January, 2014 we ordered a 35 liter hand made solid copper Al Ambiq alembic still from Destilarias Eau de Vie in Portugal. In a week or so the still arrived on my door step, in excellent condition, and was immediately placed on semi-permanent display on the kitchen island, gathering dust until we had the time and the good weather to get busy and get it cleaned. [The left half of the first photo shows it in its original, shiny condition and the right half shows it after its first run]

Constant heavy winter rains made it impossible to set up the propane burner out of doors.  Finally, on Sunday, June 29th, Ellen, Brad and I were all free and the skies were clear.  My son Andy set up the burner in the morning. When Ellen arrived just after noon we began sealing the joints and seams with rye paste - a kind of pasty glue made with rye flour and water [photo on right].  Rye is one of the most glutinous of all grains and, when made into a paste, makes an excellent sealant that prevents leaks of liquid and steam. When diluted with water to the consistency of a slurry [photo on left, breaking up lumps], rye flour serves to clean the still by adhering to the impurities, industrial oils and solvents left from the manufacturing process.

After adding the slurry (about 1 kilo of rye flour and 13 or so liters of water) to the still we attempted to light the burner.  There was one tense moment when the gas leaked at a line connection, but that was quickly taken care of and soon the slurry was boiling and bubbling merrily, making its way up the curved pipe of the swan neck, through the condenser coil and out into the cleaning bucket, carrying the industrial residues with it. [Brad lights the gas, upper photo; the first liquid comes out, left half of the photo below, and starts collecting in the bucket, right half of the photo]

After the initial cleaning we discovered considerable scorch in the bottom of the pot.  Ellen and I took turns scrubbing out the inside of the still, we then did a clear water distillation, rinsed and dried the still thoroughly and placed it once again on display, this time with a lovely new patina, ready, at last, for our first distillations of essential oils.  The whole process was quite time consuming, taking at least five hours to complete! [Gail scrubs the inside of the still in the last photo]

At this point you might be wondering what we plan to give away.  Sorry, we are not giving away the still, especially after all that work!  The two winners will each receive samples of two different varieties of the completely legal dried herb that we plan to use for our first serious distillations.  In addition to the mysterious herbs each winner will receive one 2ml spray decant of a favorite vintage fragrance that uses the scent of the herb(s) as a prominent top note.  To be eligible just leave a comment about stills, distilling or about your favorite essential oils.  We are sorry that we have to limit this drawing to US addresses only. The dried plant material might have trouble traveling internationally!    
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[The before and after photos of the still are Gail's, the rest are mine]         

THE NEXT PERFUME EVENT, HOT WEATHER, HOT SPRINGS, AND GRAPE CARE

We are back from our trip to southern Oregon, and I’m taking a few days to get organized and packed up for the Pacific Northwest Perfumers’ Salon at Tigerlily Perfumery in San Francisco, which will take place from 6:00-9:00 PM on Thursday, July 17. Tigerlily is located at 973 Valencia Street in the Mission district of San Francisco. It’s free, there will be special cocktails, and a 10% discount on all of Tigerlily’s stock, so it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re in the bay area.

It was refreshing to spend a few days in a place where it’s really hot. I know most people would not think of 100F/38C heat as refreshing, but after years of dank chilling in Seattle, it is a pleasure to bake in the dry heat during the day and not have to wear a jacket at night. There’s something liberating about being warm 24 hours a day.

Most of the time was spent in Ashland and the surrounding area, doing town things, searching for sagebrush and other interesting plants in the hills, and visiting wineries and hot springs. The bottom line is that sagebrush doesn’t grow in the Ashland area, so we need to look closer to home. However, there were all sorts of small aromatic plants that I haven’t seen before, including a lot of things in the mint family.

The other interesting thing is that Jackson Hot Springs, which has a small hot pool and a large swimming pool, “purifies” the water to remove the sulfur smell that is characteristic of hot springs. Having been to natural hot springs where the water comes straight out of the ground steaming and smelling of sulfur, I thought the commercialization and “cleaning-up” of the water was an odd thing to do because it removed part of what seems like the “atmosphere” of places where volcanoes make their presence known in benign ways. We were there in the evening, so I think there may have been some "natural" pools that we missed. 

It’s always reassuring to visit a winery and actually see grapes growing. All too often the winery just buys grapes from growers at some remote location and is basically just a factory that processes them. The Belle Fiore Winery just outside Ashland is actually surrounded by extensive vineyards (and their wine is good, too). I was happy to see that they were pruning their grape vines at this time of year, which is what I’ve been doing too, in an attempt to control the ridiculously vigorous growth of new canes and leaves so that they can put more of their energy into producing fruit.

The vines at Belle Fiore had been trained to have one large trunk that grows upright, then branches at the top, with the branches trained upward between two wires. This is the model for how I’m going to train our grape vines next year. It’s too late for this year since the bunches of grapes are already developing, but I think that next spring I can do some retro-training to improve their growth habit even though they got off to an unruly start. Training the new growth upward between the wires and pruning often to keep the vines compact seems to be key.

[All photos are mine, taken on the trip, except the one from the Jackson Hot Springs website. The sunset was one of the most incredible I've ever seen.] 

SAMPLE DRAWING WINNERS

I'm leaving tonight for a week in Oregon, so decided to do the drawing today instead of tomorrow to make sure that I got it posted.

The winners are:

ANNA H - Full sample pack

HOLLY GOODHEAD - Full sample pack

LAURIE BROWN - Modified sample pack


Runners-up will receive two samples each:

YUKI

KARIN ARCHIBALD

I really appreciate everyone who left a comment!

Please e-mail me (olympicorchids-at-gmail-dot-com) with your full shipping address. I will send your samples the week of July 14.

I just realized that my contact e-mail doesn't show up under either of my profiles! Another of Blogger's little random bugs. I'll try to fix it once I'm back from my trip.

[Photo on the beach at Seaside, on last fall's trip to Oregon]

FOURTH ANNIVERSARY!

This month is Olympic Orchids Perfumes’ fourth anniversary. On the one hand, it seems like just yesterday that I first opened my online store, but on the other hand it seems like it’s been so long that I can’t even remember how it was back then. It’s interesting to reflect on how far I’ve come over these four years, and how much I’ve learned in the process.

These past couple of days I’ve been busy getting out the fourth anniversary issue of the perfume newsletter as well as the eighth anniversary issue of the orchid nursery newsletter, and updating the orchid website. It’s no coincidence that both businesses have a July birthday, because that’s when I’m out of school and able to be proactive about doing fun things.

To celebrate the anniversary, I’m offering a 20% discount on all of the original fragrances that were issued back in 2010: Little Stars, Red Cattleya, Golden Cattleya, Javanica, Elektra (originally A Midsummer Day’s Dream), Olympic Rainforest, Kingston Ferry, Arizona, and Carolina. To get the discount, you just have to enter FOURYEARS at the checkout on either website (the Flagship Store or the Original Boutique).

I’ll probably have a couple of anniversary drawings on here, too, when the sample drawing is finished. In the meantime, we’re actually taking a real vacation, going on a road trip to southern Oregon, and will be gone through July 11. I have an ulterior motive of scoping out interesting plants to distill, but that’s a topic for another post, or several.

Being out of town means that nothing will get shipped out until mid-July, including the sample packs, but rest assured that the winners will get them in due time.

I have no idea whether I’ll be able to post anything or not, but I hope so. 

[Birthday cake image adapted from Wikimedia] 

PURCHASES IN A NEW CURRENCY

From time to time I receive messages via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or other social media asking me to vote for someone’s project so that it can “win” an award or a competition of some sort. I find it mildly dishonest, at least on an intellectual level, to vote for a project I know nothing about, often from a person I have never heard of, especially when I do not know what the competition is. Even if I do know the person, maybe there’s a project I would like better, so why should I vote for something without reviewing all of the entries and knowing what I’m voting for?

I assume that there are people who will vote for anything they are asked to vote for, whether they’ve experienced it or not, whether they know the context or not, simply because they were asked to do so.  At best this is an innocent, though debased, form of social interaction in the digital world. If extrapolated into the world of politics, however, the implications become downright frightening.

 

I know many people automatically vote for the politician whose name they’ve seen most often on posters and TV, asking everyone to vote for them, never having looked at the qualifications and platforms of any of the candidates. Other people vote for whomever their authority figures recommend, still knowing nothing at all about what they’re voting for or against. I’m not sure if the social media get-out-the-vote popularity contest (and the fact that it seems to work) is simply a reflection of the passivity and laziness that people have always indulged in, or whether it’s a new mode of operation that will further foster ignorance when it comes to voting for real issues, not someone’s Etsy store that sells overpriced dog collars decorated with hand-painted macaroni.

For artists and businesses, is building superficial popularity through “likes” and votes the equivalent of political movements building credibility simply through the amount of money raised? I know requests for “likes” work on the assumption that “like” begets “like”, which it sometimes does, but often those solicited “likes” are meaningless, unlike bartering a chicken for a newspaper subscription as they are doing in the old print on the right. So far I have refrained from asking people outright to “like” my website, so can be fairly confident that all of the “likes” are actually genuine.

Recently, however, I tried the experiment of mounting a Facebook offer in which people who “liked” my page could receive a free sample of Salamanca, which is about to be re-released. Interestingly, when I tried to set up the offer, which is supposed to be free, Facebook tried their best to charge me a considerable amount of money for “advertising”. This happened when I got a message saying that I wasn’t finished setting up my offer. When I clicked “continue” I was taken to an ad order page. Sneaky! It turns out that the offer was set up already and working, so their misleading tactics didn’t work on me.

I’ve read that Facebook ads are pretty much worthless anyway, given that approximately 25-80% of clicks are bot-generated, depending on whose account you read. There are certainly a lot of bot services out there that will generate “likes” for your Instagram page, YouTube video, Facebook page, or just about any form of social media. If you’re willing to pay them, they’ll produce thousands of “likes”. In any case, it seems ridiculous to assume that Facebook ads could target anyone in the real audience that I’m trying to reach.

The other interesting phenomenon is that more people claimed the offer than “liked” my page. I’m not sure what to make of that, but assume that there was a misunderstanding and people “liked” the offer instead of the page. Or maybe people who had already “liked” the page claimed the offer. It’s not a big deal, because I don’t mind sending out a few extra free samples, it’s just one more puzzling thing about Facebook. I suspect that my blog and newsletter reach more real people than Facebook.

As a final coda to this post, I’ll mention that this morning as I was reading the newspaper, an ad came on with a “like” button in the upper right corner where the “hide” button usually is. I almost hit it reflexively, but fortunately checked myself in time. I’m sure that whatever company it was advertising got some accidental  “likes” that way, by people who wanted to X out their ad.  Just goes to show you how hard it is to know what’s real in the virtual world. 

[All images adapted from Wikimedia]

A DRAWING FOR THE END OF JUNE

To celebrate the fact that I’m finally able to blog again and comments are working, I’m putting on a little drawing for some sample packs that were assembled some time ago as part of the “press packs” that were given out at one of the perfume events. Some samples are the old-style “carded” ones, and others are the old-style baggie ones.

I had some extras, so am offering three sample packs to readers. Two of them contain Seattle Chocolate, California Chocolate, Tropic of Capricorn, Café V, Arizona, and Olympic Amber. For some reason, the third one contains one sample of Tropic of Capricorn, two samples of Café V, and two samples of Arizona, so whoever wins that can share.

To be entered in the drawing, all you have to do is leave a comment saying which of these fragrances you’d most like to try and why.

The winners will be chosen by random drawing on Sunday, July 6. 

[Fuschia photo is mine, from the beautiful public garden at the Ballard Locks. Our fuschias are blooming, too, but are not massed in such a spectacular way]