Patchouli essential oil is a vital raw material for the perfume, medicine, cosmetics, and additive for food industries. Currently, in Indonesia, the usual method employed by traditional farmers to extract the patchouli essential oil from patchouli plant – Pogostemon cablin (Blanco) Benth., Lamiaceace is steam distillation. Information of the yield and quality of patchouli essential oil during product processing by the distillation is an important issue on evaluation of the distillation efficiency and economic issues, i.e. fuel expenses. Due to many types and non-standard construction of distillation units applied in place, however, it was difficult to find an accurate performance of the distillation process and to compare raw material quality in several locations. In this study, a small unit of steam distillation with a capacity of 1 kg of raw material was constructed. The unit was equipped with a condenser and temperature monitoring. The objective of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the current operating distillation unit by the farmers. To compare the results, in this study, it was collected patchouli plants from four locations of different districts of Aceh Province (Aceh Besar, Sabang, Aceh Jaya, and Aceh Selatan). The quality of the essential oils obtained was analyzed using a gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy (GCMS). The patchouli plant from Sabang provided the highest yield percentage of patchouli essential oil up to 4.5% as compared with the other locations. Moreover, the plant from Aceh Selatan has the lowest yield percentage (2.1%). The content of patchouli alcohol (PA) in Sabang's sample was 29.33%. Aceh Jaya's sample has the lowest percentage of PA (27.77%). These findings provided the actual quality of the patchouli plants from several locations in Aceh Province and improve the current method of the steam distillation unit..