The most I’ve distilled is three distillations in one day. Special clay is kiln baked, soaked in water and distilled for a month. It takes a lot of doing to create this attar. After a colleague encouraged me to consider adding attars to our apothecary, I decided to try Mitti from our adored distillation partner due to the superb work they do in this field. Nothing matched the scent of monsoon rain on red clay in Arizona. I kept samples over the years as both a record but also to age them out in the hope I would capture that scent but I was disappointed. I didn’t know that in India, this beautiful oil has been distilled for over a thousand years. In those days, I knew little about Mitti Attar or Petrichor oil. It was dusty and deep and I wanted to bottle it. It smelled soft and sweet with a clay mineral note. I remember the scent when the monsoon came. After weeks of 100 degree heat and red dust caked on all my belongings, there was rain. Arizona was hard on my body and after almost a year, I decided I had to return to the sea but not before the desert saw fit to leave me with a parting gift. I felt lost as my place to write or meditate were no longer near the ocean. I had heatstroke too many times and found it hard to acclimate to cactus and red dust. For what it's worth, you'll now have to travel to Kannauj for a heavenly drop of the original Mitti Attar.In 2006, I moved from West Coast Canada to the extreme heat and desert of Arizona. So, if you want to dabble in nostalgia, quite literally, and not get all your hopes pinned on Mother Nature to provide you with the musky smell of wet earth anytime soon, Kannauj's Mitti Attar is your solution. The attar concentrate enters the semi-permeable skin while the moisture evaporates. Research has just begun and it might take two years to complete it," he told Homegrown.Īs for the packaging, these attars come in a small leather bottle, which, according to Shukla, is a natural de-moisturiser, like the human skin. We can make it more green and environment friendly while making it easier to operate. We want to modify this process and electrify it. Right now the original method uses firewood and coal and is marred with safety issues. At FFDC, we are working on a project that can replace this ancient method. The geo-climatic conditions of the region make it favourable for the industry to grow. We have received a geographical indication status. The deg and bhapka are connected with a hollow bamboo pipe that carries the fragrant vapors from the simmering pot into their sandalwood oil base." She then goes on to describe how the clay is broken into disks and placed in this apparatus for baking.Īccording to Homegrown, the more the clay bakes in the summer, the better it is. They light a wood or cow-dung fire underneath, then fill the receiver with sandalwood oil-which serves as a base for the scents-and sink it into the trough. When a fresh supply of flowers comes in, the craftsmen put pounds of rose or jasmine or other petals into each deg, cover the deg with water, hammer a lid down on top, and seal it with mud. Each still consisted of the copper deg built atop its own oven and beside its own trough of water-and a bulbous condenser called a bhapka (receiver) that looked like a giant butternut squash. To put things simply-Kannauj extracts the Mitti Attar through a long process that involves cultivating the clay, baking it, distilling it and capturing the steam it lets off when contained in the deg bhapkas.Įnvironmental journalist Cynthia Barnett, in an article for The Atlantic, describes the process as: "The ancient, painstakingly slow distillation practiced in Kannauj is called deg-bhapka.
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