How to clean out distiller for new distillation

Recently, I did distillation with fennel seed. Wonderfully, milky hydrosol and essential oil are produced from these lovely, sweet smell seeds. However, when I make my wife’s favorite ginger hydrosol, she complained there is mixed fennel smell which makes the ginger hydrosol not authentic.

This is commonly happened especially after distilling herbs, seeds or other plants with strong odor. Don’t worry! There is a simple way help to solve the problem.

During condensation, some of the odor chemicals stick onto the tubing. Because of their “oil” properties, they can become not easily washed away by the steam and hydrosol. A food grade chemical can be used to help clean out.

Vinegar!

Vinegar has been used as safe home cleaning agent and it works well to wash off oil and grease due to its acidcity.

It is like our recommended first-time use cleanning procedure. There are 3 steps to clean:

Step 1: Use 5% vinegar and add straight into the pot with at least 1 liter.

Step 2: Assemble the whole kit and boiling the vinegar in the pot.

Step 3: Wait untill vinegar coming out from spout and let the steam out for 1 minute before adding cooling water into condenser. Let it run for 30 minutes or till collect 500mL of vinegar out.

After your distiller cooled down, rinse it with water.

Finallay, don’t throw out the distilled vinegar. It is reusable as home cleaning agent. Also, it contains the lovely residue essential oil which been washed out.

After one round of cleaning, authentic ginger hydrosol is made and no more complain from my wife.

Watch this video to know how to make organic ginger hydrosol with LT3000 distiller.