Lockdown Curls

We prepared these shavings while on a crazy trip to Vietnam in November 2019, right before you-know-what.

On our last day there, after sorting and packing the various batches of oud, we split up. I was getting ready to head to Taiwan, while Kruger and Coburn were first taking a bus to Cambodia before meeting up with me a few days later. 

In a turn of events, the bus left before Adam could get on. As the bus left the station, he ran next to it like in the movies, but the driver refused to stop. Thomas got into a fight with the driver because of it. The driver threatened to throw him out.

This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that between the three of us, we were carrying super precious agarwood, all going to my Sifu’s distillery in Taiwan. Loaded under that bus were thousands of dollars worth of wild Vietnamese shavings.

Thankfully, about an hour later after Thomas’s pleading, the bus driver half-stopped for half a minute on a long bridge leading you out of Vietnam to let Adam, who’d spent an hour chasing the bus on a scooter, back on.

They crossed into Cambodia at night, where police officers inspected passengers’ bags. The two of them had some explaining to do when the officer unzipped a duffle bag full of…… “what is this!?”

This was just the start of that trip. (You may have seen some of what we’ve shared of the journey elsewhere…)

The shavings you see here were meant to be distilled alongside the other batches we painstakingly hand-carried to Taiwan that year. After apportioning and grinding everything, and calculating which batches go into which pots and for how long, we ended up with a small stash left over.

No worries, we thought. Imagine what these shavings would smell like if cooked in our custom-built distillery in Cambodia. We’d simply bring them there on our next trip, not long after getting back to Jordan this time.

There was no next trip.

We had barely made it back before we found ourselves under house arrest.

China only now says it’s over.

Since then, the shavings have been a treat at the atelier, where we’ve been fumigating the office with the smell of Nha Trang 2.0 or Guallam No 2, or who knows which oil these shavings would have been turned into. Sinensis distilled in Cambodia? 

I’ve been using this word a lot so far – ‘shavings’.

If you’d been reading up on oud and distillation, you’d have heard this term repeatedly. So-and-so once used sinking-grade shavings to distill an oud. The sweet spot for quality:yield ratios is to use the best shavings. Quality shavings are hard to come by. What’s better, chips, powder, or shavings? Most shavings aren’t a uniform grade. And so on.

Shavings here mean the chiseled fringes of the finest agarwood. Shavings can be good or bad, well-prepped or wasted. None of that matters. Whether these are oud chips or oud shavings or shavings that ought to be dust does not matter.

Smell it. 

Heat up these curlies like we’ve been doing at our atelier and all that matters is the first-rate scent of super fine Vietnamese oud. The smell of what if?

What if Corona never happened? What if we went back to Cambodia to do what we had planned? What if we ended up blending the sinensis with crassna or even some New Guinea for a co-distill done in Koh Kong, with its red water?

Instead, here it is, raw. The oud that never was, destined to fade as wafts of smoke you bliss out on, you perfume your home with, you think “can olfaction get any better!?”

And you’re thankful that the pots were fully accounted for that day. That they brought it back all the way to Jordan that year. That you can see and, most importantly, smell what makes a good oud so good. 

For those who are getting their pitchforks ready: Despite what you may think, the highest-grade shavings don’t have to be black in color. That could be telling, but it’s not a must. Shavings don’t have to be powdered, even though sometimes that helps. And as you now know… shavings don’t even have to be distilled! 

These twirls will teach you a lot. But they don’t have to because what really matters is this: Good oud smells sublime. So, light ’em up already, will ya!