Sinharaja X

Some folks would stop at nothing to see you forfeit your profit, flush years of experience and hard work down the tubes, to offer them a bottle of top notch quality oud at cost price… The cost of the raw materials only, that is. Who cares about time, knowledge, family-time forfeited and such trivial add-ons, after all?

……Aaand, then they’ll insist they can still find it cheaper – direct from the distiller!

This oud is dedicated to them. Consider this ‘direct from the source’. Our input, travels, time, experience, and whatnot, basically pro bono. We request only one thing, please: a modest commission to help us cover our airfare going back and forth to Sri Lanka, hotels, food, and basic operation costs.

You have to see it to believe it. Sri Lankan distillers and jungle folk live on a different planet, and their market causes instant brainfreeze. 

The prices are so out of sync with the rest of the oud world, you’re paying four, five times as much for the same grade wood elsewhere (and these’ll be much cleaner and scrupulously chiseled and separated). In Sri Lanka, any batch of wood can easily contain 4+ distinct grades, from straight-up bunk to AAA, but gets sold off as one (at the value of the highest grade, of course).

The Sri Lankan market makes me think of car prices in Singapore… for the price of a low spec Kia, you can drive an E-Class in the States. In Ceylon, you have to pay incense-grade oil prices for grade C oud oils. Even the ‘higher’ grade ouds still contain a good dose of inferior wood.

For Sinharaja X, we cleaned up the mess, removed all the harsh elements, the crude set-ups. We improved the cleaning and categorization process, then improved the sorted material by almost 20%, substituting genuine incense-grade materials in place of the ‘log’ agarwood commonly used.

Distilling logs lets you say you’re distilling incense-grade wood because the ‘skin’ of the log has some patches of resin. But that makes up a minuscule percentage of the total batch that ends ground up in the pot. All the guts and insides of the logs contain oil-grade wood with zero resin (See below). That’s like having a bicycle next to a V12 Lamborghini at the same show!

Logs are fine for making oud oil – it’s still oil-grade wood – but it’s a far cry from INCENSE-grade!

In other words, you’ll get plenty of ‘pretty’ notes, flowery notes… and yes, even woody notes in log-distills. And here’s a secret: Using white wood is actually a key ingredient in the recipe for bringing you these pleasant auxiliary notes. Ask any experienced Thai distiller about it; they’ve perfected the art of mixing different grades. They all add a dash of white wood to sweeten things up and make the oil more commercially appealing – i.e. more Western. (Cause yes, the tangy sweetness also works wonders in blends.)

But never confuse woody notes for incense notes, and never confuse the flowers and the fruits for the scent of resin. Don’t confuse oud for Oud. Sinharaja X packs plenty of flowery goodness… but all that is just mist covering a mountain of resin, which clears to reveal exactly the quality agarwood that went into the boilers.

With Sinharaja X, we want to put the Oud back in oud oil. Aaand we want to make a point.…

Are we underpricing this? Absolutely. Instead of the dodgy log extraction that goes on, this distillation sucked out the resin from carefully selected batches of incense-grade Walla Patta chips and select high quality logs – all carefully talored by EO. No bunk, gunk, or white wood added:

Actually, come to think of it. We could have probably found cheaper tickets had we booked in advance, and could have saved by doing the 3 hour trips to the distillery in a tuk-tuk instead of a car. Not to mention all those Pina Coladas on the beach at sunset. So forget our commission. We should have known better.

The truth is, this oil would sell for $600+ anywhere else. It’s yours for less than half that, direct from Ensar Oud & Co. No half-baked incense-grade-when-it’s-not-really-incense-grade materials. Basically, from where we’re standing, it’s yours for the grabbing. #Making that PR Statement Again!

Limited supply! Ships April 30th.