Kyen

AZsmell

Active Member
#24
@Ensar I've seen mention about kyen. Somewhat confused about what it is, what exactly is kyen? Region, grade, age of infection?
I had to look it up too. Wanted to make sure he wasn't saying something like I have some lovely bouya wood.
Apparently kyen is a good thing. Would have been nicer if he said kyara.
Ensar can you explain kyen a little more? I found a thread on it but still don't get it.
 

Ensar Oud

Well-Known Member
#25
@Ensar I've seen mention about kyen. Somewhat confused about what it is, what exactly is kyen? Region, grade, age of infection?
'Kyen' is high oil-content agarwood. The phase the wood must undergo before progressing to either high-resin or… even higher oil-content wood. The stage of kyen formation entails the wood has already turned brown (or green, or yellow, depending on the species) and is replete with essential oil. At the opposite ends of the kyen spectrum you have either white, low-oil content wood, widely referred to by such terms as 'oil-grade', 'low-grade', 'kayu minyak', etc; and higher-resin, lower-oil content wood ('seah'), which we call 'incense-grade', 'double super', etc. For a quick visual demonstration, compare the picture @AZsmell posted to the one @Oud Learner shared previously. Notice the kyen striations have progressed to a darker resinous shell. This is the type of wood that would progress to become what we call 'super king', i.e. wood that is practically only resin (very low oil) and can be carved into beads, miniatures and other artifacts.

So far as distillation, kyen is the artisanal distiller's best friend and ideal raw material. It contains more oil than resin, hence the yield is excellent, the degree of 'insanity' required to distill it minimal, and the overall profile of the oil first rate. There are some notable exceptions to this, and we've touched on them before on some of the early pages of the "Let's Talk Oud" thread. Certain types of kyen are ranked as superior to even the blackest seah. On low heat, they yield a richer profile. As a general rule, kyen requires low heat to give off scent at all, while seah requires high heat. Put kyen on high heat, and you get the scent of firewood and burning oil. Put seah on low heat, and you get almost no aroma. Seah is very difficult to distill due to the higher-resin, lower-oil content – unless of course you employ solvent extraction such as CO2, butane etc, or bathe the material in certain chemicals prior to distillation. Ethanol is also a viable extraction method (see my Oud Resin page for more details).

The overall shortage of seah worldwide has led to a situation where kyen is being collected and carved as the new chen xiang. Kyen can be wild or cultivated, and is a phenomenon that occurs in all agarwood trees, irrespective of origin. The age of infection bit is tricky because even kyara, as discussed previously, is just another type of kyen (more oil, less resin). Generally speaking, you can end up with small patches of kyen anywhere between 3-5 years after infection, and it can take up to 7-10 years for the first layer of seah to form around the circumference of the trauma. There are some lovely types of kyen harvested from centennial trees, and I would classify the @AZsmell piece to be of the latter type.
 
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Ensar Oud

Well-Known Member
#27
I had to look it up too. Wanted to make sure he wasn't saying something like I have some lovely buoya wood.
I got a message last night saluting me for writing the 'post of the year' as they called it. I had to pause for a moment to process that. True enough, they'd thought I was being sarcastic. Nothing could be farther from what I intended. Just a simple congratulation. The wood looks very nice, and having a piece of Filipino wood is not something everyone can boast, including myself. I am not a fan of sarcasm. In the rare event that I succumb, you'll see me edit and re-edit until it has been excised from my record and only the crude, cold bits are left.
 

Ensar Oud

Well-Known Member
#28
@Ensar
If Kyara is considered a form of kyen, is there a seah equivalent type of Kyara?
Once we enter the realm of kyara, we enter a maze of hypotheses and contradictions. The highest grades are always soft and supple, the texture almost like cutting through very dark chocolate when you apply the scalpel. Seah is hard and brittle resinous agarwood, sometimes as rigid as crystallized black tar. Very different textures. There are hard resinous logs of kyara, but the resin is never as crude. Hard kyaras get an extra qualifier before the name, falling under a class called 'shin kyara'. Brunei Kinam is of this type.

The greatest impediment to applying the nomenclature is that 'kyen' and 'seah' are terms employed by distillers in Thailand to grade agarwood that goes into the boilers for oud production. Once something gets classified as 'kyara', the nomenclature is no longer applicable. In theory, and for educational purposes, the term does work. In practice, no one uses it.

For our illustrative purpose, kyara is some form of 'otherworldly-grade' kyen, where the maturation has taken a path of insane 'oilification' of the wood fibers rather than the standard hard resinification that occurs with common agarwood. We can illustrate even further by saying sandalwood is just another type of kyen. :D

A foray into the nearest closet produced these specimens:


Papua Kyen


Brunei Seah



Brunei Seah



Sumatora Seah


Vietnamese Kyara


I'll let you guess this one.... :)
 
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AZsmell

Active Member
#29
I got a message last night saluting me for writing the 'post of the year' as they called it. I had to pause for a moment to process that. True enough, they'd thought I was being sarcastic. Nothing could be farther from what I intended. Just a simple congratulation. The wood looks very nice, and having a piece of Filipino wood is not something everyone can boast, including myself. I am not a fan of sarcasm. In the rare event that I succumb, you'll see me edit and re-edit until it has been excised from my record and only the crude, cold bits are left.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge on this subject.
 

PEARL

Well-Known Member
#31
'Kyen' is high oil-content agarwood. The phase the wood must undergo before progressing to either high-resin or… even higher oil-content wood. The stage of kyen formation entails the wood has already turned brown (or green, or yellow, depending on the species) and is replete with essential oil. At the opposite ends of the kyen spectrum you have either white, low-oil content wood, widely referred to by such terms as 'oil-grade', 'low-grade', 'kayu minyak', etc; and higher-resin, lower-oil content wood ('seah'), which we call 'incense-grade', 'double super', etc. For a quick visual demonstration, compare the picture @AZsmell posted to the one @Oud Learner shared previously. Notice the kyen striations have progressed to a darker resinous shell. This is the type of wood that would progress to become what we call 'super king', i.e. wood that is practically only resin (very low oil) and can be carved into beads, miniatures and other artifacts.

So far as distillation, kyen is the artisanal distiller's best friend and ideal raw material. It contains more oil than resin, hence the yield is excellent, the degree of 'insanity' required to distill it minimal, and the overall profile of the oil first rate. There are some notable exceptions to this, and we've touched on them before on some of the early pages of the "Let's Talk Oud" thread. Certain types of kyen are ranked as superior to even the blackest seah. On low heat, they yield a richer profile. As a general rule, kyen requires low heat to give off scent at all, while seah requires high heat. Put kyen on high heat, and you get the scent of firewood and burning oil. Put seah on low heat, and you get almost no aroma. Seah is very difficult to distill due to the higher-resin, lower-oil content – unless of course you employ solvent extraction such as CO2, butane etc, or bathe the material in certain chemicals prior to distillation. Ethanol is also a viable extraction method (see my Oud Resin page for more details).

The overall shortage of seah worldwide has led to a situation where kyen is being collected and carved as the new chen xiang. Kyen can be wild or cultivated, and is a phenomenon that occurs in all agarwood trees, irrespective of origin. The age of infection bit is tricky because even kyara, as discussed previously, is just another type of kyen (more oil, less resin). Generally speaking, you can end up with small patches of kyen anywhere between 3-5 years after infection, and it can take up to 7-10 years for the first layer of seah to form around the circumference of the trauma. There are some lovely types of kyen harvested from centennial trees, and I would classify the @AZsmell piece to be of the latter type.
Aye Aye Skipper, thanks
 

5MeO

Well-Known Member
#32
Ensar - so is all agarwood either kyen, seah, or kyara?
That last pic btw is sandalwood no?

I have consistently noted that some of my finest agarwoods are the lower resin types that are very easy to cut with a razor knife.. Of course, sometimes the higher resin types are also amazing.. I have some sinking grade, quite black agarwood from Laos that does not smell very good - rather sour or something - while the king super A. hirta I got from Taha is extraordinary.. In general the dense sinking grade type woods smell amazing..

I would love to get ahold of some of this high grade soft kyara - all the types I have need to be sliced at with a razor blade just like other agarwood (though some are easily sliced, much like kyen).. Certainly a butter knife could not be used..
 

PEARL

Well-Known Member
#34
@Ensar I'll likely say something you've said before, please regard me...

The artisan imparts knowledge, and I appreciate it all. There are a few things I've seen written time and again that I recall. Some of the things I've read from the artisans in relating their stories is how they travel abroad to personally inspect the wood, sit with the wood, burn pieces from chunks, taste it, feel it, etc in selecting wood and assessing the grade. In my anecdotal evidence I've had dark, seemingly highly resinous chips be horrible; and some light, crumbly chips that didn't look like much have the sweetest and most profound, soul stirring and long lasting fragrance, Baieido's Vietnamese Ogurayama comes to mind. With wood there are all kinds of tricks from glue, wax, paint, etc to make them look a certain way, but IMO the best assessment is a 3D, in person, taste, burn, feel, etc assessment. We've witnessed issues in the past were an artisan "picture assessed" another vendors wood. In looking at just a picture of wood and being told what it is, I would have thought, other than the cut, that the wood @AZsmell showed and the wood @Kruger showed in the back to basics thread was the same grade, kyen. While I'm sure that you and @Kruger know exactly what you have in your hands, it's potentially misleading and highly problematic to "picture assess" another artisans wood based on a photo of wood that you admittedly can't boast having.

Food for thought...Are the artisans buying high grade wood to be used in distillation based on a picture?
 

Ensar Oud

Well-Known Member
#35
@Ensar I'll likely say something you've said before, please regard me...

The artisan imparts knowledge, and I appreciate it all. There are a few things I've seen written time and again that I recall. Some of the things I've read from the artisans in relating their stories is how they travel abroad to personally inspect the wood, sit with the wood, burn pieces from chunks, taste it, feel it, etc in selecting wood and assessing the grade. In my anecdotal evidence I've had dark, seemingly highly resinous chips be horrible; and some light, crumbly chips that didn't look like much have the sweetest and most profound, soul stirring and long lasting fragrance, Baieido's Vietnamese Ogurayama comes to mind. With wood there are all kinds of tricks from glue, wax, paint, etc to make them look a certain way, but IMO the best assessment is a 3D, in person, taste, burn, feel, etc assessment. We've witnessed issues in the past were an artisan "picture assessed" another vendors wood. In looking at just a picture of wood and being told what it is, I would have thought, other than the cut, that the wood @AZsmell showed and the wood @Kruger showed in the back to basics thread was the same grade, kyen. While I'm sure that you and @Kruger know exactly what you have in your hands, it's potentially misleading and highly problematic to "picture assess" another artisans wood based on a photo of wood that you admittedly can't boast having.

Food for thought...Are the artisans buying high grade wood to be used in distillation based on a picture?
Have you read the thread title?
 

Ensar Oud

Well-Known Member
#36
Ensar - so is all agarwood either kyen, seah, or kyara?
That last pic btw is sandalwood no?

I have consistently noted that some of my finest agarwoods are the lower resin types that are very easy to cut with a razor knife.. Of course, sometimes the higher resin types are also amazing.. I have some sinking grade, quite black agarwood from Laos that does not smell very good - rather sour or something - while the king super A. hirta I got from Taha is extraordinary.. In general the dense sinking grade type woods smell amazing..

I would love to get ahold of some of this high grade soft kyara - all the types I have need to be sliced at with a razor blade just like other agarwood (though some are easily sliced, much like kyen).. Certainly a butter knife could not be used..
Well, so far as a distiller goes, all agarwood is either: white wood, yellow (i.e. oil/kyen) wood, brown/black (i.e. resin/seah) wood. Then there's Kyara. Somewhere up in the stratosphere. Between the white wood and yellow, there's a separate category called 'lue' (wound) which refers to the first emergence of brown immediately surrounding the wound/trauma assailing the tree. Believe it or not, the first thing that occurs is brownish and not yellow (oily). Then of course you have all the different things that arise when you spread across different species. Like tigerwood, bark, logs (as a rule, kyen center with outer seah circumference, unless you get the really later stage logs where the seah starts to form 'tiger' patterns around the core (this wood's great for making beads).

Kyara is of course not going to be able to be cut with a butter knife. It's not that soft! :D
The texture does feel remarkably buttery under a scalpel though, much more like a supple resistance than the rigid fragility of coarse black resin. If you're ever in Singapore, we'll give you the royal treatment, including sampling various kyaras, super king batches, vintage Nha Trang, etc. ;)

Maybe we should move all the kyen talk to another thread? As I mentioned, I didn't intend to start a new kyen disquisition here. Nor is there anything wrong with having a beautiful piece of kyen, ever.
 

PEARL

Well-Known Member
#38
Have you read the thread title?
Some posts have been copied or moved here from the Filipina sinking from AA thread.
Yes, I’ve read the new title. My original post and @AZsmell photo in post #1 here now, was in the Philippine sinking-grade wood thread. The discussion was on sinking-grade wood, not kyen as you claimed another vendors wood to be. Now @AZsmell photo is in kyen thread, despite the original vendor never saying it was kyen, hence the potential to mislead, be problematic and a conflict of interest when one vendor assigns a grade to another’s wood from a photo, which was the point of my post.
 

JohnH

Moderator
Staff member
#39
Yes, I’ve read the new title. My original post and @AZsmell photo in post #1 here now, was in the Philippine sinking-grade wood thread. The discussion was on sinking-grade wood, not kyen as you claimed another vendors wood to be. Now @AZsmell photo is in kyen thread, despite the original vendor never saying it was kyen, hence the potential to mislead, be problematic and a conflict of interest when one vendor assigns a grade to another’s wood from a photo, which was the point of my post.
Yes, things went off topic and took over Rasoul's thread so some posts were moved here. I copied @AZsmell's post to here so the other posts made sense. The very same post remains on Rasoul's thread so that the original subject can be continued there. The conversation was there and it's now continuing here.
 

AZsmell

Active Member
#40
I was just sharing a pic of my nice wood. I never thought it would cause such controversy. Taha didn't make any outrageous claims when he sold me the wood and charged what I think is a very fair price. Let's not make this into something bigger. Let us enjoy the oud.