Mustaqbil

In the local dialect ‘Intimung’ is the name used for Malinau, home to the Kayan Mentarang- one of the largest natural jungles still remaining in Northern Kalimantan. Intimung means beautiful, orderly and excellent – an apt description for our first Organic Malinau Oudh oil; Mustaqbil.

Malinau oudh is higly sought after. It was only a couple of decades ago that wonderful and enchanting beauties were easily sourced from this region. That is no longer the case with both targeted agarwood hunting and mass indiscriminate logging making it is extremely difficult to get decent raw material from this region. The little amount of agarwood now procured from this region often smell of decaying wood and damp socks – the cloying sweetness sticks to the palate and is not very attractive and leaves one in pain and memories of what used to be.

As we have been leading the charge on distilling the highest quality organic oudh, it was in late 2017 that we toyed with the idea of giving Malinau organic oudh a run in our pots. Knowing what the wild agarwood scene is like up in the north of Kalimantan we didn’t build our hopes up high.

Onto our scouters we went, looking for organic growers – as you would guess there aren’t many who do it correctly over here but after months of searching we found a grower who was running a similar arrangement to what we are used to seeing in India where small time village farmers grow oudh as an investment among their crops, when the tree is old enough and well infected by fungus due to seasonal floods, then a local trader will come along and offer the farmers cash for the tree. Why not apply a model that worked for decades?

The oldest tree in the farm was selected and cut down for distillation One of the most enchanting organic oudhs you will have put your nose to – MUSTAQBIL is about oudh art, it is about the game changing skill and experience that Al Shareef brings to oudh distillation. You can click the reset button on your olfactory expectations, Mustaqbil is the future of organic distillation, not just a new chapter, but a whole new book.

Mustaqbil opens with a deep dark green bamboo woody note that has a bitter-sweetness to it, a note that is usually found in the high end Chinese oils that are found with Taiwanese collectors. The lush velvety liquid gold releases waves of oriental satisfaction with every shimmer, powdered dry berries on the skin followed by cherries, vanilla and camphor. Green mango pulp, freshly ground clove with a touch of flowering apples. At this point Mustaqbil is a complete perfume – it is mind blowing , beautiful and extremely satisfying. The dry down comes after a few hours, imagine you have a bubbling oudh chip, where the resin is over flowing and at the same time there is the green juices from the leafs providing a lovely coat – instead of smokeness you get whiffs of what could be described as green resin. It is a complete mind bender.