In which I learn how to distill… essential oils from herbs and plants and stuff, and that Lavendar actually tastes quite good. So might those cockerels if they’d stayed still long enough.

Being a Friday, it’s a normal work and school day for our hosts, so we’re on our own for entertainment. First, we slept until about 9:00am (well, the grown-ups did), which is later than intended. Gotta get on to a better local schedule than that. We’ve got a couple of places that we want to visit today, so just time for a quick breakfast before setting off.

The kitchen has one of those taps (faucets) that has constant 99C water for coffee, tea, etc. This thing is dangerous. If I had one of those in my house, I’d never drink plain water again. It’d be coffee all the time always. Oh, worth noting is that casual coffee in many, possibly even most, UK houses is instant. Yup, instant. It’s what I grew up with and, for the most part, a perfectly reasonable version of the beverage. In fact, I always keep instant in the cupboard back home. Is it the same as “real” coffee? Nope. But then, what’s real coffee? Drip is different from cafetiere which is different from espresso which is different from latte which is different from cappuccino which is different from half-calf-double-shot-six-pump-no-foam-happy-bunny-frou-frou-liquid. And like most things, some instants are better than others. I have to say that, like ‘em or hate ‘em, Starbucks have made what I think is the best instant coffee I’ve had, and it’s what I keep at home. I dislike the waste of the little, individual tubes that they use, and the cost per cup is waaaay more than other instants, but I think it’s worth it for the amount of instant that I drink at home. If I had one of these taps, I’d need something much more cost effective.

Trivia question: what do Buffy the Vampire Slayer and instant coffee have in common? Anyone? Come on, the Brits should know this one easily. The answer is, of course, Giles. Anthony Steward Head. The way that most Brits my age first got to know him was through a series of Nescafe Gold Blend instant coffee ads.

These ads were a serious business. They ran for years, and told the story of the Gold Blend Couple (I kid you not, this was how they came to be known), who met when she ran out of coffee and asked a neighbor (him) if she could borrow some. Romance bloomed in a wonderfully, cheeesily British way, as we explored coffee’s lesser known qualities such as, I dunno, an aphrodisiac? Over the course of many years the relationship developed as the British public hung on every cliffhanger. Yes, they ended every ad on a cliffhanger. And since the campaign ran for years, there were significant gaps between chapters. It was big news when the next installment was released, delaying briefly the nationwide power surge that occurred when commercial breaks started and the entire country turned on their electric kettles for a quick cuppa. It was an insanely successful campaign for Nescafe (Nestle) and concluded, as one would expect, with the couple finally getting together. I /think/ that they tried the same thing again in the US market, under Taster’s Choice, but I can’t remember for certain.

Anyway, where the hell was I? Ah yes. Lavender.

Our first stop for the day was the Jersey Lavender Farm. Mija had wanted to visit the past two trips over, but it had always been closed. It was open now, so we thought we’d spend a few minutes wandering around and sniffing the flowers. That’s what we thought. In fact, we spend several hours there as it turned out to be a fascinating little place.

Jersey Lavendar looks like a small, rather quaint place on arrival. And, in many ways, it is. But it does occupy a much larger area than I expected. We got our general admission tickets and just started wandering around. Past the old gypsy caravan, through the herb gardens (that’s “herb” with a clearly pronounced “h” because we’re in the UK, dammit), and around the cockerels. Lots of cockerels. Quite magnificent plumage, might even put the Norwegian Blue to shame, but their time was off. Actually, now that I think about it, they may just have been trying to make us feel at home, because they were crowing at what would be wake-up time in Minnesota. But as it was early afternoon Jersey time, they were a little off. We had some fun feeding these beasts, and then made our way to the distilling barn. The smell in the room was amazing, as they had just harvested a huge amount of rosemary for the next distillation. The setup was fairly simple as they operate on a relatively small scale – just enough for their own business, and really no major commercial contracts.

This distillation process is a steam extraction process. They drop a metal basket with about… 25Kg (55lbs) of plant material into the still, then the steam from the boiling water does the rest. Soaking the whole lot in water and boiling it (essentially like making tea) apparently does’t extract as much good oil as suspending it over the steam. Which is an interesting difference that you perhaps also see in the (craft) gin making process, to some extent.

Small craft distilleries often start by making a basic vodka, then move on to gin, and then to longer-term products like, oh, I don’t know, say, whiskey. But there are two approaches to making the gin. The first is to bundle up your aromatics in a giant teabag and boil it in your vodka. I believe that this produces a slightly smoother, perhaps less potent product, where characteristics of the vodka may still be present. The second method is to suspend your aromatics in a basket higher up the still and let the vapors extract the flavours on their way to the condenser. Based on what I learned at Jersey Lavender, I suspect that this second approach extracts a more potent, perhaps astringent flavor from the aromatics. Might explain why some folks like juniper-heavy gins that are made the first way and not so much the other. Speculation on my part, really, but it sounds vaguely plausible!

At the designated time, the owner came out to give us a brief demo. Or so we thought. There was a brief demo, then a good 50 minute talk on the history of Jersey Lavender, the farm, the extraction process, the history, and many everyday uses for steam extracted oils (so many personal hygiene products that feature lavender and other oils, like, say, toothpaste!). If I’d realized that there was going to be so much info, I’d have taken notes. But I didn’t, and I’m writing this a few days after the fact, so you’re just going to have to live with the fact that it was fascinating and well worth the time and a visit.

One bit I do remember are the aroma samples that he gave out. There are two main types of lavender used in products on site. One is considered the workhorse (in the industry), producing a larger yield of oil by weight of original product, and used  in cheaper, high-volume products, The other is a richer, lower yield product, generally considered of higher quality, I believe with a higher percentage of camphor.

The latter reminded me a lot of Early Gray tea, so probably bergamot. So much so that I want to start playing with it in cocktails.

After the talk, we stuck around and chatted with the owner for a bit, at which point the rosemary that had started extraction during the demo part of the talk really started going. So we just sat there and huffed rosemary vapor for a while.

We were getting hungry, so we had a lunch at the café, and smashing it was too. Many of the foods included lavender, which I’m only just starting to appreciate as a flavoring. Mija had a warm lavender scone, which was delicious. I had lavender cherry pie, which was a tad heavy on the floral, but tasty nonetheless. And the wean had something else… ah yes, lavender and honey iced cream. Delicious. After eating, we spent a little time wandering through the lavender fields, then decided to move on.

Really, though, if you find yourself on Jersey, put this on your list. It’s worth the time, especially if you time it for the demo / talk. Even our hosts were even surprised at a) the length of time we spent there (“So that killed 15 minutes then… No?”), and b) that we enjoyed it so much.

 

Next up, Jersey Pearl. The wean wanted to head over to this place because they had a really nice “pick a pearl” thing for the kids. We’d done it before, and it was simple and fun. For about a tenner ($13.34 at today’s exchange rate), kids got to point to the oyster that they wanted in a tank. The staff member would pull it out, shuck it, and extract whatever pearl was inside it, which would be a genuine reveal to even them. The pearl would then be cleaned, polished, and graded. Catriona had done rather well in the past, landing pearls worth several times the price of admission.

Sadly, they’ve upgraded the experience, and it’s much less kid-oriented now. For a start, the price jumped to £25. The oysters were now in nets in a little room with mood lighting, clearly intended to set a more elaborate tone for the experience. Then – and this bit looked kinda interesting – the pearl would be graded in a more elaborate, 3-stage process before being added to a setting of your choice (extra charge). On the one hand, it might have been a more educational experience, depending on how the grading stages were presented. But, on the other, it seemed much more formal and intimidating for a kid. And to that end, the wean decided that she didn’t want to spend that much more of her money just to add another pearl to her collection. We even offered to chip in half, but it just wasn’t an appealing thing any more. A bit of a bummer, but we all still had a chance to ogle the thoosands of pearls on display.

Fortunately, the next desired stop was “a large sandy beach where we can run out to the water”, which is pretty much precisely describes the beach across the road from Jersey Pearl. We drove down the road a bit to find a good spot, then spent a good hour or two just taking a relaxed wander across the sand and rocks and tide pools of the beach. Not much more to say about that.

Heading home, we stopped off at the Coop to grab some food and snacks, and some meat to barbecue (grill) the following day. Then it was a nice, chill night in again with the family.

I could get used to these slow, relaxing days.