Making Excotic Aroma Scents From Common Herbs and Spices.

Hello past Instructable viewers.

Remember when I made perfumes and aromas with my other two Instructables? Well, I want to it again but with lemon cake mix, ginger, coffee (Instant), Vanilla mix cake, Coconut flakes and much more! I decided with the high sugars involved that Perfume this time around would not be good but instead, an air freshener approach would be better.

In this instructable, I will be extracting Lemon aroma, butterscotch, butterscotch-vanilla, coconut oil, coffee-butterscotch from stuff and bubbling it through an air bubbler to make an Interesting Instructable. Keep tuned and follow this and you could get other exotic smells like Storax or sweet banana smelling air fresheners as well.

An issue is the high amount of sugars gets converted into carbon which must be treated with concentrated dangerous sulfuric acid I will explain this later On.

Step 1: Materials and Chemicals Plus Supplies That Are Needed.

To start out you will need a piece of Distiller equipment (70-100 dollars US) plus an Oil bath set up as well as clamps.

Distiller equipment

Clamps and water pump

Hot plate

Oil bath

You will need either 70 or 95 percent ethanol (Denatured medical grade Important***) using denatured with Methanol can be toxic only medical grade ethanol can be used and you will probably need to be concentrated Sulfuric acid 96 percent drain cleaner to clean the sugars out of the boiling flask many times.

Warning: Concentrated Sulfuric acid can burn threw clothes in minutes, cause serious burns and blindness and must be handled with PPE (Safety glasses, face shield, Rubber apron, and gloves) while working with it!

Ethanol is flammable and normal Oil bath use prevents this.

Also, you will need glass boiling chips 5-6 mm diameter to work with the ethanol when heating to 80-100 degrees Celcius. Without the bumping can get very violent and they are (just like the Oil bath---, essential!).

50 g of ginger powder -- gingerol at 1-5 percent dependent on the quality.

50 g of Lemon pie mix (Note adding more will give a stronger Sweet Lemon aroma as well) but will also make it more prone to carbon forming in the boiling flask.

50 g of Instant coffee (some sugar will convert into Soltone as well) giving it a coffee-butterscotch aroma.

100 g of coconut flakes Unsweetened.

Butterscotch 180 g mix.

Vanilla pie mix 160 grams.

Other chemicals

Glycerol 5 ml in 300-500 ml sample.

Tween 20 (eBay)- Polysorbate 20. About 5 ml in 300 to 500 ml aroma sample.

Both of these Help keep bacteria inside from consuming the sample and prevents aging of the product. Tween 20 is kind of expensive but it a good addition to the sample.

Step 2: Preparing the Distillation of Certain Materials. Part 1

Note that I have a LOT of Pictures for this and explaining them will take two steps.

Starters for Lemon cake pour out (weigh 45 g of Lemon cake mix) and add 450 ml of 70 percent ethanol add boiling chips beads and boil under Reflux for 2 days. Check on the distillation every 15-20 minutes and don't crank the heat up too high and only run it for 6-8 hrs at a time.

Do the same with coffee and the ginger 50 g each. Ginger requires 95 percent ethanol and boiling chips.

See Sulfuric acid Part on how to clean the flask.

Next, add 180 g of ethanol 95 percent 500 ml and add boiling chips. Run it the same as the Lemon cake mix.

For each extract they are cooled down at -10 degrees C and filtered.

Step 3: Preparing the Distillation Part 2.

For the next Part, we will be adding 95 percent ethanol to 100 g coconut flakes and boiling them. Same time period but afterword freeze the solution at -10 degrees C in the fridge to get rid of Impurities. It frooze due to the Oil of coconut (it gives the aroma of the coconut too).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_oil

I assume 10-30 percent Oil can be extracted from the flakes that are processed. Freeze the solution and filter off it in a clean bottle to get rid of Impurities.

Step 4: Using Sulfuric Acid to Clean the Flasks.

Carefully add to the flask while wearing full PPE about 250 ml of water with soap to concentrated Sulfuric acid it will get hot enough to boil the water so be CAREFUL with this step. Let it sit for 24 hrs and repeat a few times. Sometimes it takes longer and can not completely remove the carbon that may have to be carefully removed by a rod.

Be careful not to break the flask use hot water to rinse off and clean with a rod to get rid of chunks (this is one of the most difficult processes.) but can be reduced by controlling the heat of the distillate. Sugar in the mixes are the worst for this.

Step 5: Final Steps Setup for Aroma Therapy.

An Air bubbler is added to Pic 1 (Butterscotch aroma), Coconut extract (Pic 2), Coffee-butterscotch (Pic 3) and Lemon-ginger for the final picture. As said you can mix different aromas like Ginger-coconut, ginger-lemon, ginger-coffee for different aromas. If I wanted to continue I would have extracted Banna cake mix to give a sweet banana-aroma possibly mixed with ginger or coffee or coconut.

The mixing is endless if you can do it and the tween20 and glycerol if stored in the fridge, can last min 6 months. That a very long shelf life for these types of aromas.

Yes, the cost of 100-200 dollars is expensive but it an easy way to make aromas at home and I hope you enjoyed this Instructable as much as I did. I enjoyed making the 6 aromas themselves!

Thanks for reading this Instructable.