Baram Phasic K

As mysterious as kynam/kyara is, there’s a part of the story that seldom gets told.

When you flip a half-gram kinam granule between your fingers, do you know where exactly the piece comes from? You know it’s ‘kinam’ – but what does that mean? In which part of the tree did it form? Does most kinam in the world come from only a few trees?

In the field, a special few oud trees are highlighted as kinam trees. This doesn’t mean the entire tree is stuffed with kinam. In reality, the entire tree may only contain a few grams of full-fledged kinam or less. Sure, there are unicorn harvests where one tree gave us more kinam than entire jungles gave birth to, but most kinam is chiseled out of kinam trees that also contained non-kinam resin.

Just like a tree doesn’t just grow up and one day suddenly comes packed with seah (hard resin), kinam formation is a process. A very slow process, one we know little about. Cultivated kinam has proven this: all the theories about how and why kinam is created has produced wood that looks like kinam, feels like kinam, but when it comes to the smell… things take a turn downhill. 

Oud formation in any aquilaria, be it sinensis, beccariana, malaccesis, crassna, microcarpa or otherwise, follow the same trajectory: Lue (the first light-brown strains that develop right around the trauma that triggered the formation of oud) over time matures to kyen (high oil-grade resin – most kinam is a form of kyen) which eventually turns to seah (hard-resin – what you typically see sold as oud chips). And there are many micro-phases in between.

How kinam fits into all of this remains a mystery. But what the process tells you is that kinam, too, develops in stages. This means a kinam tree will have resin strains that won’t quite make the cut for kinam certification but certainly come close.

Because the tree oozes with kinam, the rest of the ‘regular’ strains will have a kinamic tinge to their fragrance, to varying degrees of course. Some are so kinamic only a veteran specialist could tell them apart from what ends up selling as ‘official’ kinam. 

That’s what you’ve got here. A single kinam tree that grew where Sabah, Sarawak, and Brunei come together. The certified pieces were sold off officially, while these are the pieces I call phasic kinam – beautifully kinamic with the bitter, medicinal tone that makes kinam clearly present in the fragrance – just not fully there yet, in the sense that even hard kyen technically isn’t seah yet, but at first glance might as well be.

The advantage here is that phasic kinam costs far less than kinam – less, for a scent that’s not far off.

Agarwood from this remote region is super rare to begin with. I remember the day when we found out that barely two years after we sold out of Baram Black, the retail price was now less than the replacement cost (i.e., traveling to the Baram river, meeting the hunter directly.) And if you’ve been on the lookout for premium, genuine oud chips from the Brunei border yourself, you’d know that there has hardly been any on offer anywhere.

If I had to sum up the smell, I’d say it’s proper entry-level kinam, simply without the tongue-numbing effect. Compared to even the super sinkers from Borneo, Baram Phasic K is a league ahead with its pollen-piercing kyara undertone that makes many other high-grade varieties smell bland.

Like I said, this batch is from a single kinam tree. Supply is limited.