100 Year-Old Chanthaburi Experiment

[Ensar Oud]

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.

Video best viewed in HD​

[video=youtube_share;ViMU4G77spI]http://youtu.be/ViMU4G77spI[/video]​

 

[Oudiferous]

Ensar, this is a very exciting project. I'm just curious how this wood stands in contrast to the kyara that japenese companies sell?

 

[Ensar Oud]

By far it is the largest risk I've ever taken to date, so for sure there's excitement. Though it's the kind that's admixed with unease, cold sweats and a racing heartbeat... Distillation is always a gamble. Distillation of incense-grade raw materials is one where the odds are almost always against you. But it's like the adrenaline rush of one who goes skydiving. You know it's insane yet you can't help it. The scent of the oil you can get is like a peek into the past; what did real incense-grade Cambodis of this calibre smell like? I mean, the ones we always hear about but never get to sample anywhere – namely because it's all Thai oils with Cambodi nicknames.

This wouldn't compare to Kyara – at least the wood didn't. The wood looked like some mighty Ogurayama to me. As for the oil, well what can I say, it's a green one, and mighty e-t-h-e-r-e-a-l... I'd hate to spoil everybody's fun and go launch yet another 'Kinam' or 'Kyara' something though, so I'm just going to pretend it doesn't have any resemblance to Kyara at all.

 

[masstika]

Ensar: Lessons from the Chanthaburi Experiment, Have you ever yet come to the point where you think to yourself that" "man...I went too far this time! I should have sold some of this wood as Incense and maybe just used half the precious materials in the Distill. I would have still gotten an amazing oil and made a handsome profit!" or such thoughts don't come to your mind? It would be interesting to run a blind test on 2 oils that Ensar Oud produce; one that uses the ultimate combination of materials such as Sultani and Qi-Nam and the other with the same excellent materials just in lesser quantities and let the distillation of the second get tweaked to compensate for the lesser materials. Would our noses be able to pick the difference and would the difference be so great as to justify the higher cost due to higher risk and cost posed by distillation 1? On the other hand, I think this is like when they asked the mountaineer why do they scale those mountains and his answer was "...because its there".

 

[Ensar Oud]

Masstika, the 'blind test' that you are suggesting has already been done – with the Khao Yai Experiment. If you recall, from the posts and videos that we published during that distillation, we used part wild incense-grade, part cultivated (though also very high quality) materials. Anyone who possesses both Khao Yai Experiment and Qi Nam Khmer will attest that, although a supremely ethereal oil, Khao Yai lacks the pure burning king super smoke that Qi Nam Khmer embodies. Although both lovely oils, I would guess that if given the choice, you'd opt for Khmer?

Now, from a more pragmatic angle, to gage the sheer loss we are facing here, you can run the figures this way: the logs used in the 100 Year-Old Chanthaburi Experiment were just over 9 kg. Suppose the hard external shell was 30% of that. That comes to about 3 kg incense grade chips, which converts to 300 packets of 10 grams each, easily sellable retail at $350 apiece (or, in a year or two, considerably more than that). How much does that come to? Believe it or not, it comes to $105,000! That is the kind of wood this was. With the 5 tolas we got, even at $2,500 per quarter tola, we are already facing a $55,000 loss in profits. Not to mention the flights back and forth, the distillation costs, the transportation, the food, and the sheer man labor that went into producing these five tolas of oud oil. (I am assuming you now understand how stupid this is, and how foolish we feel for doing it?) To answer your question: YES, we went too far this time, and ground up $55K into fine dust, and burnt it up in smoke, tired ourselves dead, squandered several kg of fine incense grade wood – and got one sick oil to show our grandchildren when we tell them this story!

 

[Oudiferous]

Ensar, why/how did 8 tolas get burned in the distillation process?

 

[Ensar Oud]

Ensar, why/how did 8 tolas get burned in the distillation process?

I thought that for once I could 'supervise' the distillation long-distance, spare myself the hassle of flying out to the distillery just to collect 10 tolas of oil, save on travel expenses, time, and so on, and so forth... To be sure, I paid for it dearly enough! The lesson I learned once again, is that these things cannot be put on autopilot, or managed in absentia. You simply cannot manage artisanal oud extraction long-distance, no matter how well you know and how much you trust the distiller.

Just as realistically as you might trust your child to a babysitter and expect that they will stress over her as conscientiously as you would, so can you trust your artwork to be executed at the absent hands of others, who are most often too busy with the worries and concerns of their own internal narratives. Everyone is the hero of his own story, and no one is going to step out of that role to be the hero in yours, even with the best of intentions. The brains are all wired differently; the distillers, each and every one of them, have unique blood pressure readings, serum glucose levels, LDL/HDL cholesterol ratios, IQ scores, not to mention radically different levels of OCD! Lesson learned. To read more, visit my Blog.

 

[Thomas S.]

OOoooohhh... the Kyara LTD Centennial... my wallet bleeds, but my heart sings with joy and anticipation...

I thought that for once I could 'supervise' the distillation long-distance, spare myself the hassle of flying out to the distillery just to collect 10 tolas of oil, save on travel expenses, time, and so on, and so forth... To be sure, I paid for it dearly enough! The lesson I learned once again, is that these things cannot be put on autopilot, or managed in absentia. You simply cannot manage artisanal oud extraction long-distance, no matter how well you know and how much you trust the distiller.

Just as realistically as you might trust your child to a babysitter and expect that they will stress over her as conscientiously as you would, so can you trust your artwork to be executed at the absent hands of others, who are most often too busy with the worries and concerns of their own internal narratives. Everyone is the hero of his own story, and no one is going to step out of that role to be the hero in yours, even with the best of intentions. The brains are all wired differently; the distillers, each and every one of them, have unique blood pressure readings, serum glucose levels, LDL/HDL cholesterol ratios, IQ scores, not to mention radically different levels of OCD! Lesson learned. To read more, visit my Blog.

 

[d.dog]

Ensar, Thomas, I've spent a couple days with the BORNEO 50K. I can't believe Kyara de Kalbar is better than this? This 50K is a serious perfume all by itself. I wore it out in public today, when I was in an enclosed or semi-enclosed area, I had a couple males & females ask what I was wearing, some of the ones that didn't come up to me were turning their heads I never got this much interest with my perfumes. The heart of this oil is amazing, I get a nice powdery light floral incense scent I was trying to capture before my accident. I gave up perfumery for a little while, I find it hard to believe your Kyara de Kalbar has a nicer powdery scent. I'm not good at writing I don't do your Borneo 50K justice, Thanks & nice work!