Cascadia Botanical Apothecary

Mission: The Cascadia Terroir Essential oil Distillery is located in Olympia Washington, or preferable to say the Tumwawa ecoregion of the Cascadia Bioregion. We believe that the land here is sacred, and find a strong identity in being Cascadians, people of the falling water. Our goal in this endeavour to provide you with the finest wild crafted products Cascadia has to offer. Our goal is also to work to the point where our project can support itself and commit funds to protecting Cascadian flora and fauna. Our hope is that by assisting the land to communicate through scent we will strengthen or commitment to the region that supports us. All of our products are wildcrafted within the Cascadia Bioregion, we do not outsource our plants for distilling and hope in the near future to be working with local farmers for our more domestic plant needs. The essential oil product industry is extremely unsustainable. Thousands of tons of mono-cropped (even if organic) plants are grown and shipped from around the world to fill the needs of the essential oil industry. The ecological foot print of this practice creates a lack of health and beauty in the natural world while at the same time attempting to create health and beauty. A catch22 we find is not necessary when we are surrounded with such amazing fragrant and medicinal plants that yield essential oils and hydrosols that can fulfill so many of our needs. At Cascadia Terroir our hope is to reduce the ecological foot print and damage of the essential oil industry by localizing not only sales and stimulating local economy but also by harvesting locally and supporting local farmers, co-operatives and farmers markets.    Our wildcrafting practices are based on our spiritual ethics and respect for the land. We havest very little from one place, and attempt to work with sustainable agro-foresters so that the plants we are harvesting are growing naturally in areas where there has been no pesticide,herbicide, fungicide, and vermicides used by large corporate forestry. Our intention while wildcrafting is to leave the forest looking untouched...   Distilling: We do things the old fashioned way here at Cascadia Terroir. We harvest plants in the wild as has been done since the dawn of time and we work with extremely ancient technology and methods to bring you not a product but a living art form. The equipment we work with are variety of stills from glass lab ware, hand hammered Portuguese copper Alembic stills, to our own 55 gallon stainless steel still of our own creation and design. We spend hours late into the cold night distilling with precise timing and attention to heat, so that our products are not only ethically produced but produced with the highest attention to quality. In the production of our resiniods, we use glass lab wear and pure food grade ethanol instead of the common carcinogenic solvents commonly used in the industry. We see what we do as an art and our utmost desire is to produce art for our customers.     Who we are: Cascadia Terroir is the entrepreneurial and technical genius of Eric Zvonchenko, and distiller Marcus McCoy. Marcus has studied Southern American Perfumerismo practices for over 10 years, a plant teacher shamanism practice of the Amazonian region. He hails from another type of rainforest however and has applied his practice to the local plants, producing unique perfumes, colognes, smudges, essential oils and hydrosols with a holistic perspective in mind of their unique personal qualities and potential human relationships.

 

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