Extracting Rosemary With Hydro-Distillation

This is a video on how to extract rosemary essential oils with hydro-distillation.

It is a very easy method of pulling oils from the plant to match its scent profile.

Step 1: Extracting Rosemary With Hydro-Distillation

The process of hydro-distillation is used often when creating hydrosols from plants.

When creating hydrosols it is a straight forward process that lets you pull the oils from the plant, giving you a scent profile.

The steps are simple, as seen in the video.

1: Process Plant Material into smaller bits

2: Distill the plant material into the hydrosol mixture, and drain off any remaining oils.

3. Remove the water from the hydrosol to leave mostly oil

Step 2: Terpenes Expected to Be Extracted

Each terpene within the essential oil of rosemary can be seen in the picture above. There are more scents, however these are the most prevalent ones. So we should expect to see them more.

Comments

[kymyst]

In steam distillation, the essential oils do not distil at their individual boiling points as you have described, but at temperatures slightly below the boiling point of water, depending on the total vapour pressure of the water + oils. The mixture of oils isolated from the steam distillation will only display the individual boiling points if it is redistilled directly. The purpose of steam distillation is to separate the essential oils at temperatures well below their boiling points and avoid any thermal decomposition caused by distilling at higher temperatures.