Grandawood in Australia is an AGARWOOD producer of plantation wood with a large data bank of wild and cultivated oils and they will test wood or oil from AGARWOOD for around $250 , the Canadian company I use also has a large data bank of oud . As oud becomes more popular in mainstream markets the need for testing has grown. As the market grows in the non traditional oud oil direction and the fermented oil market becomes less dominant in the overall market economy of oud , testing will play a bigger part .
Traditional oud isn’t going anywhere but as the western market grows and AGARWOOD oil use grows it’s growing in the western fashion that demands transparent clarity and clean smelling non fermented oud . To each his own and each market has its own audience and they aren’t the same and they don’t really cross each other very often.
some people can’t stand or understand fermented oils and other can’t see the beauty in unfermented oils . That’s why we basically have 2 markets in the oud world .
Very different customer bases between the two but I honestly love it all !!
Brother you know I have a lot of love for you and I don't want you to take what I say personally or the wrong way but I feel compelled to address some of the items as they aren't accurate.
Testing is independent of traditional style and non traditional style. It is also incorrect to equate fermentation to tradition that's just rubbish that was propergated online. Fermentation is a money making mechanism period has nothing to do with tradition.
This seems to continue to be an ongoing issue in the online scene where fiction and none fiction just get mixed up based on the confidence that it is said in. The two vendors who started that notion did so to scare people from exploring outside of their offerings.
Oudh is already mainstream. All the mega producers of ingredients from firmenich to givaudan purchase hundreds of KGs if not tones of oil from large investment distillers in Vietname, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, India and Indonesia. The most common ingredient in the last decade used regardless of perfumery brand is Oudh. Nearly every brand has an Oudh fragrance. I think if it gets anymore mainstream we might end up with Oudh toilet flush
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What is interesting and somewhat unfortunate these mega firms they are infact also buying the fermented stuff. Which is why some large producers in some locations still ferment. So the notion that this turning event led by western market will come and IT will bring testing and transparency is inaccurate and also offensive.
As you know from your industry esting does not equate to transparency. We can just look at the cannabis industry that you are in and the multiple long running fraud issues with testing labs. The DCC has tried updating their processes and standards but the experts say that the fraud from the labs continue.
When producing hundreds of KGs off Oudh from the same plantation testing becomes easy, very much like your cannabis. The labs will set up a template based on what you are producing, they will flag compounds based on your growing conditions etc and they will identify all the compounds in the oil, develop and blueprint and keep testing against it. This type of testing is meaningful.
On the other hand let's look at the example of when you get wood from overseas, and you do a small batch, say 50ml or 100ml, the labs run some tests. These test to the end user does not mean much. It will be symbolic but without value. As you the distiller will not have enough back ground details on the wood soil conditions to be able to answer or collaborate with testing results.
Moving forward testing for plantation and organic oudhs where the soil conditions and fertilizers etc is known and also there is some level of consistency.
Providing test results for small batches is misleading to the end user in a number of ways. Two oils from the same region will have different gcms results they will present a list of compounds and their rising times this won't tell the user much. If we really want to improve the industry then we need purity teste and toxicity tests, gcms isn't the right tests. Also the labs you suggest don't infact have any sizeable database for agarwood. What they have is subscription to the national chemicals USA database, and that database does not have agarwood specific details rather compound base informatics. For $250 you will not get a test that benefits the end user.
Were any of you guys around for the OG oud kurmudgeon, David Oller?
It was bananas during those early days… the only information was at a Yahoo! Group called “Alice’s Restaurant” and for a while one guy basically was in control the entire online narrative for anything agarwood related in the US.
Then this other guy came along and started dropping some serious practical knowledge about incense and oud…. It was a pretty positive space until those two had a schism, and it turned into this whole competitive online feud…. Some things never change! 😀
There was a wild time there where everyone was learning from each other, and everyone was excited about finally some information about incense and oud…people were trying to make different types of incense mixtures and working on methods for burning. It was a fantastic time… those early days when everyone had a fever to learn and there was lots of new information everybody was eating it all up and really supporting each other.
Whilst I missed the yahoo group as it had fallen the part, I got to know many of those OGs and they were pivotal in informing me about the online scene and encouraging me to come online as a source of knowledge and experience. I am still in touch with some of them. The key with that group of people was their attitude to learn and not business, whilst their was some amongst them that sold things to share money wasn't the motivation.
The online Oudh scene still suffers from some of those early conditions, and that is authority of information/knowledge. I wish we could come up with some tool maybe even AI that could filter out the BS.
Many of those OGs dont even lerk around the Oudh scene anymore, and that is very sad.
