Botanical Alchemy Meets Brewing Science

These perfumes have terroir. They vary batch to batch because they're alive.

Unlike commercial fragrances blended from standardized aromachemicals and bottled the same day, Jitterbug scents spend weeks in barrels or cold infusion before they're ready. They're still becoming something while they sit. The 14-21 day aging cycle isn't a delay—it's the point. This is the same philosophy as natural wine, wild fermentation beer, sourdough: the maker sets conditions, then steps back and lets transformation happen. Variation in color, texture, and viscosity isn't a flaw—it's proof you're getting something that couldn't exist in commercial perfumery.

Small-batch aromatic potions using techniques borrowed from craft brewing and historical apothecary traditions. Each scent is barrel-aged, cold-steeped, tea-infused, or macerated with botanical ingredients—processes that create living preparations rather than standardized formulas.

My proprietary Aura & Spirit Spray base is a hybrid designed to carry botanicals that have been steeped, aged, or macerated—not just dissolved aromachemicals. It acts as both carrier and extraction medium, working with whole botanical materials the way a brewer works with hops and grain. What if perfume worked more like beer than like chemistry? What if scent could be brewed, aged, and allowed to become itself over time—the way a wild ale develops character the longer it sits?

After 25+ years in wonderfully creative pursuits like aromatherapy, herbology, biology, natural history, gardening and brewing, I bring fermentation science, barrel-aging, and botanical extraction techniques to perfumery. The "Barreled, Smoked, Glassed, Iced & Wilds" collection represents what happens when you apply heritage, preservation and brewing methodology to scent: time-based processes that create something impossible to replicate in conventional perfumery.

The tagline isn't decorative. It's a process. A potion implies intention, time, transformation. Something brewed, not assembled. Something that carries the energy of its making, not just the sum of its ingredients. Each bottle contains not just scent, but time—the weeks of aging, the slow extraction of botanical essences, the patience required to let something become what it wants to be.

Expect variation. That's the signature of something alive. Unlike conventional perfumery where ingredients are simply blended and bottled, these processes require time, transformation, and interaction with materials. Barrel-aging isn't instant. Eisbock freeze-concentration takes days. Tea-steeping requires patience. This means:

✨ Batch variation is expected (and desirable)—color, viscosity, and even subtle scent evolution are proof of real botanical work

✨ Small batches by necessity—these techniques don't scale to industrial production

✨ Longer lead times—many scents are finishing their aging cycles when you order

✨ Unique results—no two batches are identical, just like craft beer or small-batch spirits

Fragrance is a legal, invisible, ephemeral dream-starter that rewires your mood in a single breath. It's emotional intelligence in a bottle. A scent doesn't ask permission. It bypasses your thinking mind entirely and speaks directly to the part of you that remembers everything. It's how we fall in love, how we grieve, how we suddenly find ourselves standing in a room that hasn't existed for thirty years.

Smell is emotional intelligence in molecular form. At Jitterbug Perfumes, I believe that scent is more than a sensory delight; it’s a bridge between realms. My mission is to craft personalized fragrances that resonate with your unique energy, evoke cherished memories, and transport you to other dimensions. Whether you’re seeking healing, celebration, or introspection, my perfumes are your aromatic companions on life’s journey. Dr. Luca Turin’s vibrational frequency theory inspires me to ponder: If smell is objective and based on vibration, how can we use certain scents to influence our energy and mood? We explore this intersection of science and mysticism, creating fragrances that harmonize with your vibrational needs. Imagine stepping into our atelier, where your aura is analyzed, and a bespoke scent is formulated—a quantum leap through scent itself.

In Tom Robbins' novel Jitterbug Perfume, the immortal lovers Alobar and Kudra carry scent with them across centuries—perfume as passport through time, as anchor to memory, as proof of continuity across impossible distances. This is not fiction. This is how fragrance actually works. Smell is the only sense that bypasses the thalamus and connects directly to the limbic system—the seat of memory, emotion, and the ancient brain.

A single molecule can collapse decades. The right accord can return you to a kitchen, a lover, a version of yourself you thought you'd forgotten. This is the anthropological and atomic rootedness of fragrance: it is literally molecular time travel. The same aromatic compounds that ancient Egyptians sealed in alabaster jars, that medieval apothecaries distilled by candlelight, that your grandmother dabbed behind her ears—these molecules still exist, still function, still unlock the same neural pathways they always have.

Perfume is the oldest technology for moving through time. This is just continuing the work.

Made in Astoria, Oregon—where the Columbia River meets the Pacific, where fog and salt air and old-growth forest create a particular quality of atmosphere. Place matters. The coastal environment influences how botanicals behave, how preparations age, how scent develops.

Terroir isn't just for wine. It's for anything created in collaboration with place and time.

I carry my ancestors' wisdom with me — it's in the very makeup of my being. Freelove Paine. Urania Rainsford, named for the muse of astronomy. Patience Hopkins. Deliverance Brown. Gunilla Torsdotter — battle maiden, daughter of Thor. Karna Månsdotter — moon's daughter. Elizabeth Bright. Anne Gooding Meade, whose name echoes the sacred honey wine. Sir Richard Raynsford, whose name speaks of rain and sacred crossing places.

I have always made potions. Since I was very little. I have always been connected to nature, to the intelligence of plants, to the magic of transformation. This is where herbology, aromatherapy, brewing, history, botany, and perfumery all intersect — not as separate disciplines, but as one continuous practice passed down through blood and bone. The ancestors who carried names like Freelove and Deliverance and Patience weren't decorating. They were declaring. And this work continues that declaration.

Things are changing at Jitterbug. Narrowing focus to go deeper—concentrating on the bestsellers that have proven themselves, the scents people return to again and again, while making space for something new.

Expect new preparations in the style of ancient and historical perfumes. Recreations and reimaginings of botanical preparations that have traveled through time: kyphi and pomanders, thieves' vinegars and Hungarian waters, temple incenses and plague remedies. The formulas that Alobar and Kudra might have encountered in their wanderings—adapted for modern wear but rooted in the same traditions that have always understood fragrance as medicine, as magic, as portal. New bottles are coming too—vessels worthy of what's inside. Watch this space.

The next chapter begins.