@Ensar, nah, ‘guilty until proven innocent’ wasn’t directed at you, but at the usual guy.
The same gentleman who thinks my posting about the hunters’ death / leg crushing has some pity-rousing agenda with sales connotations. He doesn’t know that I refused to sell Pilipinas No.1 (far more suffering involved, not just the team but me myself as well, financially as well as physically). And that whoever I did send small amounts to, were folks who I
wanted to share this oil with, and it was at far far
far below cost. And when I say far, I mean
FAR below.
'Capitalizing', huh. Right.
Having said that, I can tell you that there haven’t been any jabs at you in the longest time on ‘that’ website you’re referring to, so you need not worry about that.
Its okay though, folks who have never seen a distillation of rotted or fermented or untampered wood… are entitled to their preference-driven opinion. I can just shrug my shoulders. And I’m entitled to my observation-based beliefs as well. Wait, clearly I don’t know, coz I don’t distill.
You, living in Singapore, know very well what happens to a bucket of clean drinking water if you just let it sit out (yes, covered) for a few days. No maggots. But the water gets slimy.
“Shit smell” per your teachers might sound a bit of a stretch to most of us, but I can understand where they’re coming from.
One can choose to believe what they like, but I’m the one who goes to offsite distilleries for larger scale distillations and have to disassemble everything and thoroughly wash and scrape to remove the insect paste build up which, YES, has an effect on the aroma (
@m.arif, I’m sure you recall the “
bau busuk” Malaysian oil). So yeah.. what do I know right???
Ensar, I haven’t for a second forgotten the fact that you are quite OCD-driven as well, and I haven’t forgotten your prefacing post (#461) either. Nor have I forgotten what you have expressed to me in person.
I will say however, that I do however prefer neither amniotic fluid nor maggots in my oatmeal, and the same goes for the distillation feedstock.
I know you don’t either.
But my maggot post was a deliberate (but fact-based) hyperbole to prove a point.
So even though neither you nor any other online vendor would approve of co-distilling agarwood and maggots (whereas for the mass-produced junk that IS the norm, and you, Ensar, who travel and see, know that), the point of the hyperbole was what the point of any hyperbole is: to present the most extreme case (yet still sadly standard, as far as mass market oud is concerned), to give weight to my actual topic of contention, namely: fermented oud.
And unlike what our dear friend alluded to (me capitalizing on death and disaster by posting the photos), the balanced mind will come to a very different conclusion from my post: that Taha is showing the suffering involved immediately followed by the maggot video... so that consumers will better value and appreciate
unwarped agarwood. And realize how little respect is typically given to it, at the hands of mainstream distillers.
As for fermented oud, I said it before and I’ll say it again: it is not the same as rotted oud.
And I said it before, and I’ll say it again: whereas
I am unable to appreciate (or produce) it any more, this is a Taha thing, my personal conscious decision that I'm entitled to.
…and fermented oud ≠ rotted oud.
Clear enough folks?
Finally, I got a storm of private messages reprimanding me of criticizing “other vendors”...
Guys - vendors and their ever-more-passionate defenders - not everything I post is a criticism of “other vendors”. I’ve done footnote upon footnote, after footnote after footnote in the past BECAUSE of your reprimands. I have then gotten followup private messages from other people scratching their heads, wondering why I’m always (utterly-inorganically) bringing up other vendors and their oils in some of my posts. It makes me look like a fool, because those utterly unrelated references to other vendors/oils stick out like a sore thumb. And yet I did it only to appease you.
Just because I don’t single out every vendor and laud them and their products in every single post, does not mean I have waged war on them. Must I be dragged up to the stand and forced to sing praises of oils A B and C from vendors X Y and Z, every time I open my mouth about anything? I’m starting to get a bit tired of being dragged like that.
I was having a conversation WITH Ensar here, hence why I addressed Ensar. My leaving out names (now, or earlier, or ever) has no twisted connotations. I was neither cleverly attacking Ensar’s oils.. nor any other vendor's.
YES I don’t like fermented oud, because like rotted oud (the hyberbole in this scenario) it is warped. And yes, that IS a fact. In that sense, yes, my vocalization of my preference pertaining to that fact can be seen by a twisted mind as an ‘attack’, but its actually just the statement of a
preference. To me, fermented oud is oud perfume, and it does have a place, it is art. Just not a genre I’m interested in. And this is meant as no disrespect towards Ensar or anyone else that sells fermented oud alongside any other type of oud they sell. Nor an attack at anyone who appreciates "oud art" oils.
As for the photos of the hunters, again, they were supposed to dramatize that for a well-meaning and fully thought-out effect: to help people understand
why their oils smell like chocolate and animals (fermented, NOT rotted oud) or feces and carcasses (YES rotted oud), so they can have a deeper admiration for NON barnyard oils – by looking at the difficulty of procuring high quality agarwood, and then appreciate its truest essence.
Sans maggots, sans anything.
TRUE oud (per my definition) ain’t feminine or masculine or new age or old age. It is timeless, genderless and genreless. And in it, the hand of man is absent.
Borneo 3000 was the oil that first opened my eyes to this.
Okay, fine, fine, I’ll do it. Here are my wrists, drag me to the stand.
“And also oils like Imperial’s Ceylon Royale and Shareef’s Ceen and Adam’s Royal Vietnam and oh gosh dontshootmewoudja if I forgot any vendors / haven’t smelled oils from certain vendors.”
/facepalm
Get off your computers folks. Take a walk, smell the flowers. Maybe even let me bag you up and take you with me on the next hunt. Or at the very least… see an actual distillation before you make categorical statements that only demonstrate compound ignorance.
The well-known barnyard, although NOT always a result of rot, IS a result of fermentation at the very least. You can love it. More power to you. But… at least know what you’re smelling, and don’t fool yourself into thinking the wood actually smelled like that.
And this last short paragraph was the intended message, and I know many already understood that.