Incense needn't be expensive, and some cheap incense can be heavenly. There are various forms of incense.
Resin
The oldest form, and still for many the best (and usually the cheapest as you are only paying for the ingredient not the processing, packaging, branding or advertising which can make some incenses unnecessarily expensive), is
pure resin, such as
frankincense or amber. As there are no binders or woods, you get the pure scent, but you need either an
electric burner or a
charcoal disc to burn the resin.
Dry blends
Other old, simple, and cheap forms are dry blends. Fragrant ingredients are ground down to powder and blended. These are generally these days made by wiccan folk or witches. They also need burners or charcoal. They tend to be created for the
therapeutic, spiritual, or ritual aspect of the ingredients rather than the pleasure of the scent, so are to be experienced out of curiosity rather than pleasure.
Bukhoor
Another ancient method is Persian incense called bukhoor. This is
agarwood soaked in fragrant oils. It is exquisite. This also needs a
burner. You can't really say you've experienced incense until you have tried bukhoor.
Dhoop
Moving a little forward in time we have the dhoop form of incense. This was developed by priests in India. Fragrant ingredients are ground down, and then mixed with binders and wood powders and rolled into tube or stick shapes. This method was passed on to other Asian countries such as Tibet, China and Japan, and that is the main incense method still used there. These dhoops vary in style, and can be quite subtle and profound, as with some of the finer Japanese and Indian dhoops, or quite earthy and herbal, and like the wiccan dry blends, are intended mainly for the therapeutic qualities. Tibetan dhoops are mainly medicinal, though some like their earthy rugged spice.
Agarbathi / Joss sticks
Around 1900 in India the bamboo method was introduced. This enabled incense to be made on a larger scale, as bamboo stick incense required less training to make. The bamboo stick itself is neutral, and just holds the fragrant paste. There are three forms of bamboo incense - some have just a dhoop paste rolled around them, so they are like Japanese incense, but with a neutral bamboo core, others have a basic dhoop paste rolled around them, and while still wet the stick is rolled into a powder of fragrant ingredients (a masala) - these
masala or natural incense sticks are highly regarded in India and by many incense lovers around the world, yet these are also not expensive. The most prized masala incenses use
halmaddi, a binding resin which has fragrant qualities of its own. The final bamboo stick type is what the Indians call
perfumed, and the West calls perfume-dipped. They are bamboo sticks with an unfragranced charcoal or wood powder paste which are dipped into a scent. The scent can be essential oils, and such perfumed incense can be very fine. But sometimes the scents are cheap chemical blends. The blends themselves may be acceptable, but the main drawback to this method is that chemical scents evaporate. This may have been what has happened with your Hem incense. It is not the bamboo stick you can smell, but the base wood or charcoal powder. Some incense companies will use good quality charcoal or wood powder, but some, like
HEM, will use the cheapest. A company like
Goloka (which only make masala incense) uses coconut husks as the base burning material as this does not give off any bad aromas, and does not harm the atmosphere as does wood or charcoal. They make very fine incense. Not expensive. And all the money goes to help women and children in India. Some masala incense will also be dipped in fragrant oils. And some masala sticks will be machine made. The essential difference between natural/masala incense and perfumed/perfume-dipped is that in perfumed, the scent is coming entirely from the liquid scent or perfume, while in masala it comes from the solid ingredients which may be augmented by essential oils.
There are lots of incenses to explore. Japanese tends to be expensive, so that is not always the best place to start, though Nippon Kodo Morning Star is a cheap and accessible incense.
Many people find Satya and Goloka incense to be highly enjoyable, and those are cheap. If you're in the UK I would highly recommend Gokula incense. This is high quality masala incense imported into the UK by Mukunda dasa, a Hari Krishna monk. He does samples at rock bottom prices.
Gokula incense samples
