biOpificio essential oil extractor stems from Massimo Corbara’s 25-year experience in essential oils distilling, from his passion for Aromatherapy and Spagyrics, from on field practice in his Agro-organic Company and from his travels in Africa and South America co-operating in projects regarding production of essential oils, hydrosols and soaps.

biOpificio essential oil extractor is designed to obtain top quality therapeutic essential oils and hydrolats and without strange odours. Choosing food grade stainless steel is the minimum requirement in order to comply with the creed “first, do no harm”. In fact, copper and the necessary related tinnings would release lead and copper into the essential oils so produced, making them unsuitable for any human application.

After the first distillers designed in Golden Ratio (1994-2004), already since 2005 the shape evolved in the more efficient and versatile harmonic ratio, thus obtaining:

1. Better compactness of the toughest plants during the still filling phase.
2. Significant energy saving, because the same steam works on more vegetable mass.
3. The still can also be half loaded, ensuring that the vegetable mass is evenly arranged and well pressed, in order to avoid an undesired ways out of the steam formed.
4. Also unexpected better yields without any apparent reason.

A gentle distillation "according to the art" with a separate low-pressure (lower than 0.2 bars) steam chamber is very useful to:

1. reduce the operating temperature to the lowest minimum required in order not to needlessly alter the essential oils produced.
2. limit evaporation water consumption thus producing hydrosols that are much richer in water-soluble fractions (active principles) and therefore more effective and long-lasting.
3. limit energy consumption necessary to the extraction process.
4. obtain essential oils containing all their most volatile or heavy components and hence with superior therapeutic properties in comparison with industrial products.

A separate steam generation chamber allows to optimise yields and quality with no margin for errors and to reduce electricity expenses dramatically. Size and ratios of all parts are balanced according to the Laws of Nature and allow good distillation results even with partial loads (of plant materials). The condensation chambers are engineered in a food grade brushed stainless steel finish that is easy to clean and exploited to the maximum in order to capture even the most volatile and fine components of the essential oils. All small and medium size extractors are so designed to contain all necessary components inside the still for easy storage or transportation.