No heat ever touches it, so nothing bright is lost on the way out of the still.
One pass, one bottle, the cold reduction of a scent to only what it could not afford to lose.
Iris root frozen, then pressed, so the powder reads clean and almost mineral rather than sweet. The first breath of air off snow.
The center is skin and stone: cold-wrung birch sap over a thread of grey salt, the smell of a window left open through a clear night.
What remains an hour later. Dry blue cedar over washed vetiver, the part of the scent people lean in to place and never quite can.