Bald cypress knees standing in still blackwater under heavy dawn mist.

A small apothecary on Bayou Teche

Cypress
& Tide

Everything we distil grows within one mile of the water it is named for. Twelve plants, four seasons, no shipping in of anything that could be picked here.

Est. 2019 · Breaux Bridge

01 — The water

Blackwater is not dirty. It is steeped.

Bayou Teche runs the colour of strong tea because it has spent a very long time sitting on cypress bark, tupelo leaf and rotted palmetto. Tannin, mostly. The same compound that makes wine grip the tongue.

We started here because that smell — wet bark, cold iron, green rot, something faintly sweet underneath it — did not exist in any bottle we could buy.

Distilled on site
Copper alembic, 40 L
Harvest radius
1 mile
Batch size
60–90 bottles
Still blackwater surface holding a pale reflection of overcast sky.
Bayou Teche, six in the morning, late February.

02 — The notes

Start from a smell you already know.

Choose what you want to smell like. The shelf below narrows as you go — and everything is listed by where the note sits, because a perfume is mostly a question of what lasts longest on you.

Nothing selected — the whole shelf is showing.

03 — The shelf

Six things, made in small numbers.

04 — The still

From standing water to a bottle takes about nine weeks.

  1. Spanish moss backlit by pale morning sun.

    Week one

    Cut

    Everything is picked by hand before the heat comes up, because volatile oil leaves a leaf faster than water does. Spanish moss gets rinsed twice — it is full of things that bite.

  2. Dried vetiver root, cypress sprigs and sweet olive flowers laid out on bone linen.

    Weeks two to five

    Dry & steep

    Roots and bark go into jojoba and sit in the dark. Flowers go the other way and are distilled the same day, because sweet olive keeps its smell for about eleven hours and then it is simply a leaf.

  3. A single white magnolia blossom resting on wet handmade paper.

    Weeks six to nine

    Rest

    A finished blend smells wrong for a month. The alcohol has to soften and the top notes have to stop shouting. We do not sell anything that has not sat in glass through a full moon cycle, which is superstition, and which we keep doing anyway.