If you've tried high-end agarwood from the Japanese houses, you'd be familiar with their packets of chips which normally come as square, nail-size pellets:
Top shelf agarwood chips from these houses used to sell for about $200 per 10 grams. I say 'used to' because they, too, have not been left unaffected by the rapid disappearance of high-grade wild agarwood. A few months ago, I received a packet of the same kind I used to buy, except the chips no longer compared to what I used to get in the early-mid 2000s. I wasn't surprised. Instead of premium jinkoh wood, the square pellets were now kien.
Some years ago, I bought a log of agarwood weighing around 1.5 kg from who used to be the main oud supplier to Ajmal back in the 1990s. He’d been distilling oud oil and collecting agarwood for close to forty years when we first met, and he boasted a collection of logs that had yet to be hollowed out and processed, with the resinated shell still completely intact. A rare find.
The fact that the tree was over one hundred years old when harvested made it even more wondrous. I achingly wanted to get every piece in his possession, but he was only willing to let go of one of the smaller logs, which is still on display at my home. Understandably so. If I were him, I wouldn't have given up that log even. Having stood in front of, and stared up at the majesty of an ancient agarwood tree, you get goosebumps to know you own such a stunning log that dates back to the 1800s.
I visit this distiller every time I come to Thailand. His wife brews an interesting cup of coffee and I always leave having learned something new about the craft of distillation. Like his wife, who keeps asking us if we'd like more of her coffee, it's become a routine bout between us where I beg him for the wood and he sympathetically says, 'Better luck next time!' Late last year (2012) I paid him another visit and again tried my best to get those logs from him. And voila!
Look closely and you'll see where those square bits of Japanese agarwood chips come from. If you take the shell from all these trunks you've got yourself a lifetime supply of ancient agarwood chips, hard-resin you burn directly as incense. And that's the only thing that anybody will ever do with this quality wood. The outer shell will be used for burning, while the inner wood will be used to make oud oil. But not this time...
Any connoissuer of Japanese Incense, when they see such chips going into a grinder is going to think something is wrong (i.e. with the distiller's intellect…) Today, this wood would command anything between $350 - $500 per 10-gram packet in the agarwood connoisseur's market. Calculate, and you'll see that there's no way that we can hope to acquire anywhere near a single gram of oil per 10 grams of wood. In fact, we won't even get a single bottle of oil per kilogram of wood!
In effect, what we're doing is to buy 2000 ten-gram packets of Baiedo's premium agarwood incense range (such as Hakusui and Ogurayama) and then instead of pulling out the burner, we dump it into the boiler! This is, according to everybody in the oud producing world you will ever meet, nothing short of insanity.
So why are we doing this? Why not use the wood as incense and try to attain the same effect we do with oud oil? We could. But we'd all have missed out on the miracle. If nobody ever did this, ouds like Royal Kinam, Oud Sultani, Qi Nam Khmer, Kyara de Kalbar, Oud Royale, Oud Nuh, Borneo 3000 and Kyara LTD would not exist. These days, every Jack and Joe can set up shop selling oud oil. But oud of this calibre, produced from true incense-grade agarwood… nobody does this except Ensar Oud.
We need to go on producing these ouds, no matter how absurd it sounds to others, because there's a genuine need for them. You can go to the local high school to hear some tenth grader's rendition of Thelonious Monk for their annual talent show. But if you want to be genuinely moved by the power of a composition, you drive passed the high school and off to Carnegie Hall. Whoever has realised that nothing but the finest incense-grade distilled oud oils will do, these are the oils for them.
The logs are getting distilled as you read this. We'll keep you posted.
Top shelf agarwood chips from these houses used to sell for about $200 per 10 grams. I say 'used to' because they, too, have not been left unaffected by the rapid disappearance of high-grade wild agarwood. A few months ago, I received a packet of the same kind I used to buy, except the chips no longer compared to what I used to get in the early-mid 2000s. I wasn't surprised. Instead of premium jinkoh wood, the square pellets were now kien.
Some years ago, I bought a log of agarwood weighing around 1.5 kg from who used to be the main oud supplier to Ajmal back in the 1990s. He’d been distilling oud oil and collecting agarwood for close to forty years when we first met, and he boasted a collection of logs that had yet to be hollowed out and processed, with the resinated shell still completely intact. A rare find.
The fact that the tree was over one hundred years old when harvested made it even more wondrous. I achingly wanted to get every piece in his possession, but he was only willing to let go of one of the smaller logs, which is still on display at my home. Understandably so. If I were him, I wouldn't have given up that log even. Having stood in front of, and stared up at the majesty of an ancient agarwood tree, you get goosebumps to know you own such a stunning log that dates back to the 1800s.
I visit this distiller every time I come to Thailand. His wife brews an interesting cup of coffee and I always leave having learned something new about the craft of distillation. Like his wife, who keeps asking us if we'd like more of her coffee, it's become a routine bout between us where I beg him for the wood and he sympathetically says, 'Better luck next time!' Late last year (2012) I paid him another visit and again tried my best to get those logs from him. And voila!
Look closely and you'll see where those square bits of Japanese agarwood chips come from. If you take the shell from all these trunks you've got yourself a lifetime supply of ancient agarwood chips, hard-resin you burn directly as incense. And that's the only thing that anybody will ever do with this quality wood. The outer shell will be used for burning, while the inner wood will be used to make oud oil. But not this time...
Any connoissuer of Japanese Incense, when they see such chips going into a grinder is going to think something is wrong (i.e. with the distiller's intellect…) Today, this wood would command anything between $350 - $500 per 10-gram packet in the agarwood connoisseur's market. Calculate, and you'll see that there's no way that we can hope to acquire anywhere near a single gram of oil per 10 grams of wood. In fact, we won't even get a single bottle of oil per kilogram of wood!
In effect, what we're doing is to buy 2000 ten-gram packets of Baiedo's premium agarwood incense range (such as Hakusui and Ogurayama) and then instead of pulling out the burner, we dump it into the boiler! This is, according to everybody in the oud producing world you will ever meet, nothing short of insanity.
So why are we doing this? Why not use the wood as incense and try to attain the same effect we do with oud oil? We could. But we'd all have missed out on the miracle. If nobody ever did this, ouds like Royal Kinam, Oud Sultani, Qi Nam Khmer, Kyara de Kalbar, Oud Royale, Oud Nuh, Borneo 3000 and Kyara LTD would not exist. These days, every Jack and Joe can set up shop selling oud oil. But oud of this calibre, produced from true incense-grade agarwood… nobody does this except Ensar Oud.
We need to go on producing these ouds, no matter how absurd it sounds to others, because there's a genuine need for them. You can go to the local high school to hear some tenth grader's rendition of Thelonious Monk for their annual talent show. But if you want to be genuinely moved by the power of a composition, you drive passed the high school and off to Carnegie Hall. Whoever has realised that nothing but the finest incense-grade distilled oud oils will do, these are the oils for them.
The logs are getting distilled as you read this. We'll keep you posted.
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[video=youtube_share;ViMU4G77spI]http://youtu.be/ViMU4G77spI[/video]