Don't hold your breath though!
I have no idea when I'll get to them. Based on the last calculation, I have about 800kg of wood from various places, just sitting and waiting to be distilled. But like I said in the other thread, right now I'm more focused on
getting wood than
cooking wood.
A bit off topic, but I thought I'd share something about Sinesis wood.
Adam, who of course admires Ensar and his products, privately asked me if I honestly think its true what Ensar stated somewhere about intrinsic animalic notes existing in Chinese oud. i.e. he thought it
had to be from soaking/fermenting/rotting the wood, and could not intrinsic. I smiled, went to my oud shelf and brought out my Laotian Sinesis test batch.
Exactly the same raw material as Lao Chen Xiang and Mai Wan Lao, but the closest thing it smells to is Ensar's Yunnan 2003 (I even brought that out and swiped it on Adam's hand to compare).
Guess what... this was a zero-barnyard oud. No fermenting/rotting or anything, and yet packed with animalics. Its actually quite amazing that all 3 of these oils were distilled from the very same wood. I'll try to remember to throw in a sample in your next package @bhanny.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Sinesis (Burma/Laos/China) and Malaccensis (of Malaysia) wood provide THE most scent possibilities. So whereas Lao Chen Xiang opens with cherry marmalade, the trial batch smells like a dinosaur's musk sack (if they had musk sacks!). Its like a pheromone bomb.
I've tried very hard to educate consumers about the different types of animalic notes (good soak-triggered barn, bad soak-triggered barn, and intrinsic animalics), but so far, for some reason, a lot of people don't like hearing about it......?!
Intrinsic animalic notes include: musk, civet, castoreum, and hyraceum. Very VERY different from the well-known barn of 'barnyard oils'.
In short, to Adam and to everyone else I say: yes, animalics CAN be intrinsic in Chinese and Indian species of agarwood.
Here's something you can do yourself to figure out what sort of animalics are possible to extract from a batch of agarwood: roast a chip (high heat) until no more smoke comes out. Now flip the chip and heat it some more.
This is when the animalic notes come out. And if a distiller knows what he's doing, he can cajole these notes out of the wood (and even decide how intense the animalics should be). For me, its always about capturing the same amount of animalics in the oil as you would experience when heating the raw wood.
Hm... I'm now wondering if I should do a special Gaharu-members only pre-release of a future Indian oud,
Fera.
Being from the far north reaches of India (close to China) it has the animalics of Chinese oud. Its a clean zero-barn oud (same region hence same overall profile as Lalitya), but smells like it has ton of castoreum and hyraceum macerated in it.
