Sultan Mustafa

Sultan Mustafa was distilled five years ago, right alongside Sultan Ahmet. The batches of Brunei and New Guinea agarwood was split in equal ratios, and the overall setup was the same. The critical difference was that Sultan Ahmet was copper distilled, Sultan Mustafa—steel. That means it's less floral, with a more incense-centered profile. Copper generally amplifies auxiliary notes and adds a floral tenor where steel substitutes the added flavor for a more polished resinous core.

Along with Sultan Ahmet, this was always going to be the crown of the Sultan Series and for the last three years I’ve been thinking of what to write about it when I finally did decide to pull it out from my stash for release.

During this time, there’s been a lot of talk. About oud and art. About how the quality of the raw materials impacts (or doesn’t impact) the quality of the oil. And there’s been all that talk about how to ‘make oud cheap again’. 

This oil should clear up any confusion.

Nu-perfumery is all about creating an oud scent so utterly mindblowing and unique there’s no saying ‘this reminds me of this, that or the other.’ That’s what the Sultan Series has to say. These oils carry my signature, my team’s very life blood. The physical lengths we went through to make Sultan Mustafa isn’t something anybody just does to make a bottle of ‘affordable’ oud. The fatigue and disregard for counting pennies and pounds only hits you afterward, when you see your greying hair and you check your bank balance and realize what you’ve done. And you think, ‘How can you put a price on this?’

What I went through doesn’t matter. I’ve come to know this. How Kruger and Seng and the rest of the gang spent their days and their nights at the boilers doesn’t matter. How we took agarwood like this:€‹

and this:

and this:€‹

and this:€‹

– and just ground it up to craft Sultan Mustafa… doesn’t register with most folks. The sheer lunacy of distilling such wood only hits people who know exactly what that wood is and how much it costs and what you could get for selling it off as burning chips instead.

And then you’ve got people saying it’s all for nothing…

‘Distilling such wood hardly makes a difference. Most people can’t even tell the difference. You’re wasting your money, and an awful lot of super wood people could be burning – where they clearly can smell the difference compared to lesser grade agarwood.’

I beg to differ.

You CANNOT distill Sultan Mustafa from wood other than this grade. You CANNOT get its penetrating beauty without grinding up thousands of dollars of incense. There’s no way to create oud oil of such aromatic clarity and pristine resinous awe by settling for less. You simply cannot put a Bentley emblem on a Kia and call it a Bentley. 

This oud debunks all the bull and shows you that talk is just talk. When it comes down to art… & quality… let me see anybody one-up Sultan Mustafa!

The excellence of the wood is the single most important factor in crafting quality oud oil. The ability to select the correct combination of different strains takes skill. The ability to then transmute that wood into Sultan Mustafa takes artistry and that’s what makes Sultan Mustafa a work of vision, not an ‘affordable’ product manufactured for consumption by the masses.

I’ve sent samples of Sultan Mustafa to fellow artisanal distillers and they’ve been unanimous in their praise. But what should strike you most is the foolery of thinking the details don’t matter. Take Sultan Murad…

It was a groundbreaking distillation. It marked the inauguration of that blue-green oceanic incense tune all the New Guinea Sultan oils have been playing flawlessly.

Now, get this:

The New Guinea component of Sultan Mustafa cost 6.6 times MORE than the wild New Guinea wood that went into what many believe to be a near perfect distillation (Sultan Murad). Then there’s the Brunei component (hand selected and flown in from Brunei) specifically for this distillation. At this stage you might ask ‘if the details don’t matter, why bother?’

If this could all have been done by sitting at home ordering some random batch of wood and ‘commissioning’ a distillation over the phone, why sleep on the floor beside the pots for 52 days straight? Why bother radically changing the boiling temperature on day 24? Why keep an even closer eye on the beaker at sunrise on day 40? Why pay three years worth of zakat before releasing this oud?

I could tell you Sultan Mustafa is just about the finest oud oil you’ll ever smell (it is). I could tell you this is the peak of the Sultan Series (it is). I could tell you, hate it as some may, that a bottle should sell for more than it does (it should). I could tell you there’s no way I could make it again (I can’t) and that if there’s one oil from the Sultan Series you should get, this is hands-down it. 

But all I want to say is that the details matter, and Sultan Mustafa is definitive proof.

So, you’re free to get your affordable oud from any of the thousand shops that sell it. Or you can get Sultan Mustafa, an oil that if I were not obliged to, I would not sell. A piece of art as irreplaceable and – don’t let anybody tell you otherwise – every bit as precious as a Picasso.