For me personally, this would be the pinnacle of madness.
But it would absolutely be worth it.
To put things into perspective: Merauke woods, and Papua woods in general, are notoriously low-yielding materials. Even exceptionally high-grade wood may only produce around 1 gram of oil per kilogram of material.
With more ordinary grades, it can take 5–6 kilograms of wood just to obtain a single gram of oil.
And of course, a gram produced from these two categories is not remotely the same thing in terms of quality or value.
My current plan is to carry out four separate distillations, each lasting around 15 days.
That said, I could also take a different approach and create a Merauke × Irian × Papua co-distillation of sorts.
Something like a “Soul of Papua.”
I have been considering distilling several Papua materials anyway.
But even by my standards, that might be a little too insane once you factor in the cost of the wood, the caliber of the material, and the tiny amount of oil that would ultimately be produced.
At the moment, I find myself more drawn toward the idea of creating a once-in-a-lifetime distillation.
Just look at this Irian wood and imagine that all of it may yield only a single gram of oil.
Ironically, selling the wood itself at retail prices could generate ten times more revenue than distilling it into oil.
And yet, the temptation to discover what lies hidden inside it remains impossible to ignore.
