a year or so ago, when i first started geeking out on oud and going beyond the scent and more into the wood, distillation techniques, etc. my belief was the better oils came from higher grade wood. By grade here i mean traditional grading of wood for heating purposes. My belief was entry level oils where made from bunk wood (white) and lue (the immediate surrounding area of point of infection), mid-level oils made from incense grade, and super and as the prices went up so did the amount of seah (hard resinous wood with more resin than oil) and of course the top dogs made from sinking grade, king, baby king, etc.
of course, some rare examples would exist when an oil was made from a kyen grade wood (more oil than resin content), but the general rule of thumb was my belief that top dog oils are all from sick looking dark, resinous wood. this by the way, is utterly false.
NO oils are made from super king grade wood. Let's get that out of the way right now. I've smelled oils that I was told were made from sinking-grade wood, and I know my oud well enough to be certain my colleagues who handed me these oils were not lying to me. Even so, I am personally convinced these oils were made from the shavings
surrounding king super wood rather than solid slabs of the wood itself. One such oil is Oud Ahmad, which you ask about.
sure there are examples of oils made from entirely incense grade or better wood. or even entirely sinking grade, but these are exceptions. i am more interested in the general realm. i know this not only because of the year or more of learning, reading, researching but simply due to the mathematics of it. knowing the price of wood in the market, even wholesale, and even if procured a while back, even with highish 20 gram/kilo yield, and the price that they go for, the number still don't add up. they fall way short in fact.
When I say an oil is "incense-grade" I mean it is distilled from wood which, if ground up and molded into an incense stick, would give you an aroma that's markedly distinct from that of firewood. The overwhelming majority of oils I produce are made from such wood.
The lue and oil-grade distillations you refer to were done at one point in Thailand to keep artisanal oud within reach of most people. However, I stopped producing the organics that would retail at $165 and similar price points a few years ago, and most Ensar Oud oils produced today are done from wood my own teacher would be proud to compound and make incense sticks out of.
I now have a different outlook. I understand most distillers make oil from lue and white bunk wood around it. or what they call oil grade. maybe small inclusion of incense grade or just below it. higher resin wood yields less oil and the wood is so high in demand for carving, for being sold for burning, incense, etc. that no one except a fun small side project or in their right head would distill such grade wood.
You are 100% right. Most distillers make oil out of lue and very low-grade wood; tweaks, tricks and acrobatics are what keep the oils interesting. Not me. I've spent the cheap and the expensive sourcing true incense and superior grade wood.
The days of lue are long gone, along with Saumanasa and organic oud distillation. I'm doing some small experimental runs from wild oil-grade wood, to be perfectly transparent, and these are oils you will see selling for under $300, maybe even under $200, on my website. Or maybe you will not see them at all; time will tell.
You are right in assuming such oils make up the
bulk of the oil market, though, and that such oils can and
do sell for $750+ per bottle.
now some like taha say that they have found a way to distill the oil trapped as resin in such wood. others say that's not possible unless a chemical wash is done or the oil is first captured via extract, then distilled. it would be nice to get some clarity on this matter too.
It is not impossible to untrap oil hardened as oleoresin inside the wood if you know how to distill it. Oils distilled from such wood smell distinctly more resinous than those extracted from the common feedstock of "lue and white bunk wood around it" which you correctly assessed to be the staple materials for agarwood oil extraction, even in the so-called 'artisanal' market. Seldom do you come across a true incense-grade oil.
@Kruger and
@Ensar can you touch on oud ahmad for example. the yield ratio. how were you able to get the most out of that wood and justify distilling a grade of wood that it makes no sense, IF none of the oil trapped as resin was able to come out and end up in the final product. of course i am not trying to pry and ask you to give away any trade secrets or proprietary info.
Oud Ahmad was distilled in 2001, three years before I got into agarwood. I 'inherited' it from my venerable colleague who used to supply the UAE royal family. It is not my own distillation. Keep in mind, sinking-grade wood & shavings were plentiful and very common back in the early 2000's. Borneo 3000 was distilled in 2004 from such materials. So my colleague's claim that Ouds Ahmad and Salahuddin were distilled from sinking-grade wood in 2001 is entirely credible, especially given the matching olfactory profiles of these oils.
Back to the main topic: I feel this false rhetoric and story has stuck with most of us, b/c it is an easy straightforward way of understanding things (us humans like to categorize, compartmentalize the life around us to make sense of it) and some vendors fell into the trap of re-circulating the same story to justify their prices.... lets face it, if mr x sold us an oil for $750 and said is made from young infection or mostly lue and tiny bit of kyen/seah, vs. if we were told is made from half sinking material, incense and super category, we would gobble up the latter sotry and stay far away from the first story. is the same damn oil. but the story behind it makes us react differently. This doesn't take anything away from a distiller that can turn out an insanely layered and awesome oil via technique and what not from simple wood. it doesn't make me see he or she oils as any less. Only those that were holding tightly to a false belief that a $800 oil MUST be made from sick looking and awesome wood are kicking and screaming b/c their world is collapsed and they don't like to face the truth. Any more distillers can say about this would be appreciated.
I said something along those lines before, and it resulted in all-out war on this forum with several members either being banned or leaving as a result. It is not a question of wood grade. The minute you question a distiller's story you're questioning their integrity.
Take it from me, it's not about the consumer wanting to hear the crazy story. Whether most distillers cook lue or white wood or not, someone out there IS going to cook incense-grade wood. In light of such products being a reality in this market, no one is going to say "Alright, let's forget this incense wood story thing and get real. WE DISTILL WHITE WOOD AND LUE."
People are greedy by nature. And they're copycats. We like to do what others are doing. Conformity equates to safety in the psyche. People don't like to be unique. Uniqueness equates to aloneness and being the odd one out in people's minds, and they don't like to see themselves as the odd one out.
I bet you if someone took your advice and said it like it is, without hyping the stuff they sell, they'd find great success. Simply because of the originality of the approach. It'd be so interesting to see, people would doubt their sincerity the other way around, i.e. "You don't
really distill white wood and lue, you're just pulling our legs! We know you distill better stuff than you claim, only we appreciate your humbleness and your integrity, so we will keep supporting you anyway!"