It’s so much fun creating your own perfumery materials to experiment with.  Here I’ve taken some photos of the progress of a green tea absolute.  Well, an absolute of sorts, it’s really a highly concentrated tincture. A true absolute would use a lighter hydrocarbon such as hexane to extract the aromatics at the first stage but here I’ve just used an alcoholic tincture.

The first photo shows the tea when I’d just added it to the alcohol (the menstruum) – there’s about 300ml of liquid there.

The next photo shows about 250ml of the tincture after it had been re-loaded with tea four times (leaving a few days between each load and discarding the spent tea leaves) Check out the colour!

Then the last photo shows about 20ml of the home-grown absolute where the majority of the alcohol has been evaporated out as quickly and gently as possible (I won’t tell you how as it’s kinda dangerous and I won’t be responsible 😉 It’s almost black.

The result? Interesting. It has a very grassy, dried hay smell which doesn’t last long. A coumarin and tobacco smell but not as sweet and with tea-like overtones. Definitely a top note material which would probably have limited use. I’m going to let it age for a while and see if it improves. A while back I did the same thing with a box of black tea and the result was certainly more useable with a much more pronounced and longer lasting tea and tobacco scent.