---
title: Concepts
description: Distillery, tokens, authoring, collection, naming, and the single-copy invariant.
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/distillate/concepts
---

# Concepts
How Distillate turns tagged templates into CSS, in engine order: bind, author, collect, emit.
- [The distillery](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/distillate/concepts/distillery) — `createDistillery` and `DistilleryOptions`
- [Tokens and vars](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/distillate/concepts/tokens) — theme trees, `lightDark`, `cq`, `contextualVar`, `vars`
- [Authoring](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/distillate/concepts/authoring) — modules, handles, `css`, `rule`, `media`, `variants`
- [Reachability collection](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/distillate/concepts/collection) — `StylesCollector`
- [Naming and output](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/distillate/concepts/naming-and-output) — the four-way matrix
- [Ordering and specificity](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/distillate/concepts/ordering) — base rules before at-rules
- [Single-copy invariant](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/distillate/concepts/single-copy) — one loaded copy of the package

Named variations are a guide: [Declare and select variations](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/distillate/guides/theming). Literal values for non-CSS surfaces: [Read values outside CSS](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/distillate/guides/non-css-surfaces).