What Can You Make With a Copper Alembic Still?

A copper alembic still makes five families of things: essential oils, hydrosols and floral waters, distilled water, botanical perfumes, and the finished goods you build from all of those, from facial toners to room sprays. One machine, one mechanism. Heat a charge, carry the volatile part away in steam, condense it back into a bottle.

This page maps everything our customers make, with honest notes on what a pot still does well and what it cannot do at all. Every guide linked here uses the same three stills: the 5 Litre, the 5 Gallon, and the 10 Gallon.

Essential oils

Any plant that carries volatile oil will give it up to steam. Lavender, rosemary, peppermint, and eucalyptus are the classic starters. Conifer needles are free material if you have trees. Kitchen spices like clove and cardamom are the highest-yielding materials you can put in a still, no garden required.

Yields are a percentage of plant weight and they differ enormously by species. Lavender gives 0.8 to 1.5 percent of fresh flower weight. Rose gives one-twentieth of that, which is why rose oil costs what it does. Before you plan a batch, run your numbers through our yield calculator, which uses published, cited figures per plant.

Start with these guides: lavender, rosemary, peppermint, eucalyptus, tea tree, lemon peel, and pine and conifer. From the herb garden: thyme, sage, clary sage, oregano, basil, lemon balm, and rose geranium. From the spice rack, no garden needed: clove, cardamom, cinnamon bark, ginger, turmeric, fennel seed, and star anise. From the trees: juniper berry, cedarwood, balsam fir, cypress, and bay laurel. And for the patient: frankincense, sandalwood, vetiver root, patchouli, ylang-ylang, and mugwort. Or browse the essential oil distiller collection to pick a still.

Hydrosols and floral waters

Hydrosol is the aromatic water that comes over with every distillation, and for most home distillers it is the real product. A single run gives you litres of it, ready to bottle with no dilution. Rose water and orange blossom water, the two oldest products of this machine, are hydrosols by another name, and an entire medical tradition called them arqiyat.

Some plants are worth distilling only for their water. Rose, lemon balm, and helichrysum carry so little oil that chasing it wastes a season, while their hydrosols are among the best products a small maker can sell.

Guides: rose water, lavender hydrosol, chamomile, witch hazel, helichrysum, the complete hydrosol guide, and what to do with hydrosol. Selling them? Read can you sell homemade hydrosols, then see the hydrosol distiller collection.

Distilled water

Charge the pot with plain water and nothing else, and the still becomes a water distiller. A 5-gallon still produces 3 to 4 litres per hour at roughly 10 to 20 cents a litre in electricity. Our water-first buyers use it for CPAP machines, baby formula, drinking water, aquariums, espresso machines, and lead-acid batteries. It also desalinates: seawater in, fresh water out, salt stays in the pot.

Distilling water needs no license or permit anywhere in the United States. Start with how to distill water at home, then compare sizes in the water distiller collection.

Perfume and botanical fragrance

Distillers have made perfume on this exact design for a thousand years. The 1709 eau de cologne formula is a blend of citrus and herb distillates in alcohol. The attar tradition distills flowers, and even baked earth, directly into a sandalwood oil base, no alcohol at all. And a hydrosol needs nothing added to work as a light body or linen mist.

Try lavender pillow spray for a first fragrance project, or distill rose water as the base of a toner. Blossom people should read orange blossom water and our honest answer to whether jasmine can be distilled.

Finished goods, where the value multiplies

The still makes the ingredient. The margin lives in what you make from it. A litre of lavender hydrosol becomes forty facial mists. The everyday list from our customers: facial toners, room and linen sprays, hair rinses, beard oil bases, bath soaks, cold-process soap scented with your own oil, cleaning sprays, and culinary waters for baking. Our rosemary water for hair guide is the most popular example.

If you want to turn this into income, that path is exactly what The Distiller's Archive and our Maker to Market system were built for.

What about alcohol?

A pot still can physically distill a fermented wash, and this design is the traditional vessel for brandy, whiskey, and gin the world over. In the United States, distilling beverage alcohol at home requires federal permits, and state law adds its own layer. We keep that topic separate and factual: read our plain-English guide to US still laws before you consider it. Owning the still is not the issue; what you run in it is.

What a pot still cannot make

Honesty saves returns, so here is the short list, with the full explanation here. No jasmine or tuberose absolutes, those need solvent extraction. No cold-pressed citrus, that is mechanical pressing, though steam-distilled citrus is its own legitimate product. No carrier oils like jojoba or almond, those are pressed, not distilled. And no oil from plants that have none: cucumber, aloe, and watermelon "hydrosols" sold online are mostly scented water, because those plants carry almost no volatile fraction. A still cannot extract what is not there.

Tinctures and extracts, including vanilla extract, are macerations. You make them by soaking, not distilling. A still supports that work by recovering the alcohol afterward, but it does not produce the extract itself.

Which size should you choose?

The 5 Litre suits garden batches and first runs: about 1 kilogram of plant material, done in two hours. The 5 Gallon is the size we recommend to most buyers, 4 kilograms of charge and enough hydrosol per run to supply a small label. The 10 Gallon is for volume: 8 kilograms per charge, 8 to 12 litres of hydrosol per run. Full comparison in the size guide.