Beach Glass Bottles

Green glass vials from the beaches of Brooklyn.

I've been very lucky this past summer finding bottles on the beach.  I seem to have hit the motherload.  Clear, amber and green glass bottles in all shapes and sizes are finding their way into my collection.  Some of them take on a frosted patina which makes them glow in the light from being rolled and tumbled in the ocean.  I can't help wondering where they originated and what was their original use.

Two perfume bottles

Cleaning them up and getting them ready to be used has been a big job.  They spend a lot of time soaking in soapy water in between scrubbings.  I've collected a vast array of bottle brushes to help with the job.  Once they're squeaky clean they're sterilized in a boiling water vat before they can be used.

Amber vials

A collection of tiny vials

I live my life in a very "green" way, long before anyone called it green.   I deplore waste of any kind so to find these bottles and be able to give them another life is a joy.  I've been collecting caps from broken bottles for ages so spent some happy days sorting through the collection and finding the proper cap.  Some of the bottles will be filled with the colognes I was producing this past summer but some are for sale on my Etsy store.  I love that each bottle is a one of a kind treasure.

Beach glass bottles put to use for my cologne collection.

Park Perfumes Review

The online gardening magazine Soiled and Seeded, dedicated to cultivating a garden culture, has been so kind as to review my trio of Park Perfumes.  This is some of my earliest work and includes some synthetic oils that I couldn't get in nature.  I'm in the process of revising those perfumes using only natural oils and utilizing some of the skills and experience I've accumulated over the past ten years.  The first to be finished is The Ambergill which formerly used a synthetic amber note.

After extensively researching amber I discovered that there is no real amber oil extracted from a plant. There is a pine tree in India that exudes a sap that a lot of it starts from, but then many processes occur and a proprietary blend of oils and macerations are added to create amber in many forms. Some are crystalized in beezwax so a mere touch melts on the fingertips.  These blends are closely guarded secret formulas.

I've had a bottle of amber oil for many years that I bought from the Persian perfume vendors on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I knew that it was probably adulterated with synthetic materials but I liked that warm velvety chord and couldn't be deprived. This year I made my own proprietary blend with absolutes and essential oils. I'm happy to have come up with a blend I can use in my perfumes without resorting to it's synthetic counterpart.  From that I've created a scented Amber Oil.

Now that I had an amber chord to work with I went ahead and recreated The Ambergill, a perfume inspired by the beautiful Ambergill ravine and falls in the Prospect Park in Brooklyn, NY. A gill is a narrow stream-filled glen, which feeds a grotto known as the Amergill Pool, whose banks are populated by green herons, columbine, wild roses & blackberries. Amber, oakmoss & neroli are the peak notes of this warm perfume.

Cologne Experiment Results

The results are in!  My experiments macerating dried flowers, roost, rinds and herbs are completed and I have detailed notes on the results.  After a month's time the liquor was strained off and clarified and then some were matched with hydrosols.  Certain recipes didn't work at all and were discarded but most of them yielded results.  I was really surprised by the tenacity of the different brews, some of them will last days on a tester strip. 

Summer Splash came as a real surprise.  The floral note that resulted from roses and lavender macerating with vetiver, sweet annie and orange peel was astonishing.  It was blended with lemon balm hydrosol to create a summery splash.  This one changes over time in a most interesting way.

Florida Water epitomizes summer for me. There is a large Latino community intermingled in my Brooklyn neighborhood and a lot of the pharmacies cater to this clientelle so are stocked with Florida Water. I have memories of my first years in Brooklyn discovering the pleasures of an evening shower followed with a splash of Florida Water. Orange blossom and clove are the distinctive notes in the cologne so I decided orange blossom hydrosol would be used with a maceration of meyer lemon rind, sweet woodruff, lavender, benzoin, cinnamon and clove. The results smell surprisingly like the water I used all those years ago, and I think it could be considered suitable for men as well as women.

Verbena Water is the result of macerating fresh lemon verbena and sweet woodruff from my garden, dried jasmine, linden blossoms and vanilla pods and then mixed with verbena hydrosol.  It's as fresh as it sounds, the softness of the woodruff and vanilla pared with lemon verbena counterbalance each other beautifully.

Rose Garden is a blend of dried roses, angelica root, jasmine, vanilla pods and lemon verbena which was then mixed with rosewater to create a veritable rose garden in a bottle.

Violet Water is the result of orris root, sweet woodruff, benzoin and jasmine marrying beautifully to create a woodland violet sort of fragrance which was then blended with cornflower water.  Violets contain a chemical called ionones which give them their characteristic fragrance.  Orris root, the dried and aged rhizome of the Iris pallida, also contains ionones but also has a woodland quality to it.  There are no violets in this blend so the name is merely a suggestion.

Each cologne is bottled in a one of a kind vintage glass bottle collected from the beaches of Brooklyn, NY. They've been scrubbed clean and sterilized but they're old and scratched to different degrees. Expect some wear from tumbling in the ocean for who knows how long.

Making Elderflower Liqueur

Elderflowers macerating in vodka

A few years ago elderflower became the new darling of the artisanal cocktail explosion.  It was hard following up something as popular as yuzu but those people at St-Germain know what's good.  Elderflower liqueur has been on every mixologist's short list in recent past, specifically St-Germain.  I was astonished to discover that this strange, subtlety flavored libation is a new invention and not the ancient tradition their advertising campaign would have you believe.

Elderflowers grow all over Prospect Park and another artisanal cocktail enthusiast told me that he'd made his own liqueur from the flowers in the park.  I made a point of getting together with another friend, a local forager and farmer, to hunt for the blossoms.  Armed with wildflower guides we set out and identified plenty of look a likes but came home empty handed.  A second foray found what we were looking for.

I've read that the flowers must be picked in the morning when they're at their most fragrant, and that they should be used within two hours of picking.  The stems are toxic and undesirable so the flowers were cut from the stem and placed in a wide mouth jar.  When the jar was full I covered the flowers in vodka and capped it.  I'd also read that the flowers will float to the top, and that the flowers that come in contact with air would turn brown.  The flavor is not altered, it's just not very appetizing, so I placed a clean lid from a slightly smaller jar upside down on top of the flowers to weigh them down under the vodka.  Every day I removed the second jar lid and shook the jar, then replaced the lid.

I macerated the blossoms for a little over a month.  Each day when I shook it I would compare the aroma with the small bottle of St-Germain that I have.  It was only in the last week or so that I began to notice a similarity, prior to that I was wondering if I had the wrong genus.  I find a honey note in St-Germain so now that it's been strained, like many of my other herbal liqueurs, it's waiting for that special local honey to be ready before it's bottled and labeled and ready to use.  Results to follow.

My First Class Coming Up at the New York Horticultural Society

Vintage Chartreuse

I spent a day poking around at estate sales in Long Island with a good friend a few weeks ago and had the good fortune to raid someone's liquor cabinet before anyone else got to it.  I bought four bottles of booze, two whiskeys - one a blended Scotch called Black and White and another nearly empty bottle of moonshine labeled "pot still whiskey".  The third was chosen only for the bottle and label.  I doubt I will ever open that ancient bottle of Freezomint but I'll enjoy it's artificially colored glow on my liquor shelf.

The true find was a 3/4 full bottle of Chartreuse.  I've been doing a lot of research the past few years on herbal liqueurs and amaros and have read abbreviated versions of many of the old recipes.  Of all of the old formulas Chartreuse is the only one still made by Carthusian monks.  They have been making it continuously since 1605.  Other liqueurs have claimed to be made by monks but in reality are made by large companies.  Benedictine, for instance, is an invention of Alexandre Le Grand who made up the story of the liqueur being a medicinal recipe of the Benedictine Monks in Normandy.

Chartruese is a secret recipe of more than 130 herbs and "secret ingredients".  The formula is based on a recipe for an elixir of long life from an alchemical manuscript given to the monks.  The monks intended their liqueur to be used as medicine but the beverage became so popular that in 1764 the recipe was adapted to what is now Green Chartreuse.  In 1838 they developed Yellow Chartreuse, a sweeter version colored with saffron.  Only two monks have the recipe at any one time and they are the only ones who prepare the herbal mixture.

I took the vintage bottle to my local watering hole, the magical Barbes in Park Slope, one Saturday afternoon and presented it to the bartender who expertly removed the rotting cork without getting any in the bottle.  We poured a glass of the vintage and a fresh glass from the bar.  To my amazement there was a woman sitting at the bar who had just written a paper on Chartreuse for her French class.  I sat with her comparing the two liqueurs and taking notes on anything that jumped out at me.  Each sip revealed something new.  One sip would coat my mouth in angelica, the next in mace, then mint, then vanilla as I swallow.  I know that Chartreuse is sweetened with honey which is much more apparent in the vintage bottle.

I've been macerating herbs for the past couple of months to make herbal liqueurs.  One of them, a creation of my own which reflects the herb garden at 6/15 Green Community Garden, has a strong similarity to Chartreuse.  Angelica is the predominant note in chartreuse and the garden happens to have a healthy specimen.  I used the fresh green leaf and stalk, dried root that I dug up last fall and the seed I had collected.  I used nearly every other herb growing in the herb patch including chamomile, lemon balm, hyssop, mint, rosemary, basil and sage and fresh spices from the Park Slope Food Coop like cloves, mace and saffron as well as some dried herbs from my collection.  This is my second year in a row creating a liqueur from the garden and I'm hoping this year's will be better for the few tweaks I made in the recipe.  It's strained now and aging while I ponder which honey to use.  I'm hoping to get some local Brooklyn honey at the farmer's market to keep it as local as possible.  I'll be serving my elixir come holiday time.

Cologne Experiments

I'm having way too much fun riding out the heatwave researching old forumlary on the internet in search of cologne and toilet water recipes.  After years of collecting fragrant herbs, dried flowers, roots, powdered gums, tree resins, barks, citrus rinds and spices I wanted to see if macerating in vodka would produce results.  All of the old recipes I found used essential oils, absolutes and tinctures but I wanted to see what I could come up with with just the raw ingredients.

I've started two traditional cologne recipes, a violet water, something akin to 4711 and a Florida Water, as well as one true experiment.  It's been about ten days and I can already tell which ones have promise and staying power.  My plan is to let them sit for 30 days and then strain them off, filter them and let them settle.  Then I'll pour off the clear liquor and blend it with hydrosol.

When deciding on what to use for each experiment I'm still thinking like a perfumer and making sure I have top, middle and bottom notes.  I've been aging some orris root powder for a number of years now and it's developing a subtle sweetness that I hope the tincuring will release.  I also have powdered benzoin, cedar bark, vanilla pods and vetiver roots to play with.  Dried roses and lavender make up the bulk of the heart note but I'm also using a generous supply of jasmine sambac flowers that I've dried over the past year.  The linden blossoms that I collected last year have found their way into one as well.  For top notes I have citrus rinds that I dried over last winter including mineola tangerine and meyer lemon.  From my herb garden I've added sweet woodruff, lemon verbena, lavender, basil, sweet annie and rosemary.

So far I'm loving the process and the romance of it all.  When I was a child my grandmother bought me some cologne that I used as a kind of splash.  I have such fond memories of warm summer nights splashing on her cologne after a bath and going to sleep smelling sweetly.

I'm also enjoying using the fruits of my labor over the years, and feeling like a real apothecary.  I looked around during the process and thought that it looked like a film set of an apothecary at work, yet it wasn't contrived at all.  I find I'm repeating to myself, "oh, true apothecary".