How to Distill Roses

A rose is flowering shrub of the genus Rosa. There are between 100 and 150 species of rose but only two species commercially cultivated for rose oil: the damask rose and the cabbage rose. Rose oil is also known as rose otto or attar of rose and is probably the most widely used oil in perfumery. The following steps will show how to distill rose oil.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Harvest the rose flowers in the morning before sunrise. This process is labor-intensive because the harvest must be done by hand and the oil content in the rose blooms is quite low, only about 0.02 percent.
2. Use steam distillation on the roses the same day they are harvested. The large stills are usually made of copper and filled with roses and water. They are heated for 60 to 105 minutes.
3. Allow the steam and rose oil to exit the still and enter a condenser where it is cooled to a liquid. Drain off the water from this distillation to leave a concentrated oil, called direct oil, that will comprise about 20 percent of the final product.
4. Re-distill the water to recover the water-soluble fractions of the rose oil, especially phenyl ethyl alcohol. This process also is known as cohobation and produces 80 percent of the rose oil.
5. Combine the oils from both distillations to produce the final rose otto. Some of the compounds in this oil are denatured from the heat of distillation, which is why rose otto does not smell much like roses until it is diluted.