A soft, moist black masala paste hand rolled onto a machine cut plain bamboo splint, then coated in a brown wood dust or melnoorva which is both to stop the sticks or bathi from gluing together as they dry, and to give a pleasing and recognisable masala appearance. The wood dust has picked up some of the scent of fragrant oils on the stick - or may have been deliberately fragranced before applying. The scent on the stick is wood, orange, turps, bright, volatile, quite grounded and brown, fascinating, yet also a little off-putting.
The scent on the burn has much of the same qualities of the scent on the stick, and it does firmly but not aggressively inform the room and other areas of the house. The burn is steady rather than slow, but steady enough to allow a good range of fragrances to make an appearance. A really good flora incense - assertive, but not too heavy, and with some unusual deeper fragrances.
Date: Aug 2023 Score: 38
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Continuing my investigation into flora and fluxo incense, here's Padma Antique Flora Bathi. Made by Padma Perfumery Works of Bangalore who have been around since 1954. The box has the labels "Rudraksh Brand" and "From The Makers of Rudrakshmala", and in India has a recommended price of 40 Rupees (about 40p or 54 cents), and I paid 75p, which seems very fair. It's a rich masala incense soaked in essential oils. I was looking yesterday at Temple of Incense, a UK based company who import this sort of incense, and market it under their own brand name, same as Happy Hari did and Gokula still do. Happy Hari products can still be bought, and - like Gokula, they can be purchased for less than £4 for 20g - yes, more expensive than this Flora Bathi, and twice what you'd pay for a Satya in a local shop, but I feel a reasonable price for the quality. The Temple of Incense products are between £8 and £16, which seems a little excessive to me for a product which would sell in India for around 50p. To my knowledge, I've not had any Temple of Incense products, and those who buy them seem to feel they are decent enough and are happy to pay that price, so - fair enough. But when I have tried products which are priced high, I have rarely seen where the extra money has gone. And in regards to Indian products, it is always the Western based importers reselling the Indian made products under their own brand name that charge high prices. When the same products are sold branded by Indian companies and imported under the Indian brand name, the prices are always reasonable. The trick is to find who the supplier is, and buy their products as sold under Indian brand names rather than Western brand names. But, of course, the Western re-branders always keep their suppliers a secret.
This is a decent quality incense, and 75p is a bargain price. The oil initially suggests oranges, then the warmer tones of halmaddi and sandalwood come through. Very cosy and enveloping with a really cool balance between sweetness and wood. It is a very inviting and somewhat intoxicating scent with hints of vanilla and, oddly, banana. Oooh, so yummy.
On burning I am a little less enthusiastic, though I find this with many incenses. Sometimes the converse applies, that an incense is not impressive on the stick, but yields up delights when burned, however, mostly, I find that the greatest aroma delights are found directly on the stick, and some unbalances occur when burned - often the top notes vanish too quickly (as is the case here, I detect none of the delightful orange when the incense is burned), and the base notes may dominate. Also, if halmaddi is involved, then burning the halmaddi provokes a negative reaction in me which doesn't occur when the halmaddi is at rest. The halmaddi in these sticks is moderate, so while there is some prickling in my eyes and throat, it is moderate.
The scent is not strong, and unlike most masalas does not linger for a long time. However, it does certainly inform a room with its quite delightful warm scent. Mostly soft woolly sandalwood in a sort of, to be quite honest, generic masala scent. There is little that is distinctive or especially wonderful here, but it is certainly a damn fine incense, and one I will be ordering again from Poppat, but not the single pack, but the pack of 12 for £6.99 - such a bargain!
Date: Sept 2021 Score: 35
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| Flora, Fluxo, and Supreme |
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Hi Steve, I've tried the Padma Antique Flora Bathi. It is a decent stick especially for the price, but it is in no way comparable to the Happy Hari or Temple Of Incense lines (TOI). These 2 are on another level altogether and represent, IMO, the best incense made today. Are they worth the money? That is a question one must answer for oneself. If someone is not familiar with these brands, it is probably best to order their sample packs to get a feel of what they are offering. Not everything TOI has is to my taste but I would certainly buy some of their sticks again as there are some that are really fantastic. Burning HH or TOI as daily burners can eat up your budget very quickly so using other more affordable sticks makes sense for many users.
ReplyDeleteHopefully, when you get to try Elif India's Floras, you will see the difference between sticks like Padma's and many of the other low, low, priced Floras on the market. I am able to smell Elif's sticks hours after burning with their rich champa-like aromas. They are also very good value and they make their own, not re-package a generic product.
https://elifindia.com/
DeletePlease tell Umraz that Jeff in Bangkok referred you. Along with your purchase, ask her for any samples.
Incense sellers are no different to any other seller. I remember some good advice years and years ago regarding wine, because there are some eye-watering prices attached to certain brands of wine. The advice was to start with the low cost bottles of wine, and then work your way up in price until the point where you don't notice the price difference in the taste. That point, of course, will be different for everyone. But there really is no point in paying more for a product where you don't notice the difference. Whether there is a difference after a certain price mark is always debatable. But when I read about the Judgement of Paris in 1976, I wondered just how much of the price in some wines was hype and marketing.
ReplyDeleteIn the beer market (another area I like!) there has been much discussion recently about the price point difference between cask ales and keg beers marketed as "craft beer". For the brewer and landlord, the cask beer is more costly as there is more wastage, and it is more difficult to store and serve. But at point of sale, the cask beer is cheaper. Studies have shown that this is because the cask ale buyer is more demanding of "an honest price", while the craft beer buyer is reassured that what they are buying is good quality, and better quality than the cask, because it is more expensive. This is true even when the same beer by the same brewer is sold side by side in the same bar - but one cask, and one keg. Now, the downside of that for the cask ale buyer is that brewers and bars want to sell keg rather than cask because they make more profit. So cask ale will slowly be pushed out of the market by craft beer, especially as the main buyer for cask ale are old men like me who are a dying breed!
What I have found in the incense world is that there are extraordinary bargains to be had, as incense is actually a delightfully cheap product - especially when it is all natural. Costs tend to go up with the more processing that can go on, such as developing and producing perfumes for the perfumed incense. Economies of scale mean that the cottage producer cannot compete on quality with the big companies when it comes to perfumed incense (it is not often I find really impressive perfumed incense from the small producers), but they can compete when it comes to masala incense using natural local ingredients as there is so little processing to add to the cost of the raw ingredients. However, you can add to the cost by using essential oils from the rarest and purest sources, Mysore sandalwood, for example, instead of Australian. Mysore sandalwood contains more alpha and beta santalol than Australian, and it is the santalol that gives the sweet buttery notes we like about sandalwood. However, you could opt to use Pacific sandalwood, which contains about the same amount of santalol as Mysore, and once burned smells the same, but is considerably cheaper. It's kind of like the Judgement of Paris.
Hey - Don't Believe The Hype!
Well, sometimes the hype is true. But it never does any harm to check inside the bag now and again to see if that's really a baby pig you're buying, or just an alley cat!
Your mention of Haridas Madhavdas reminds me of reviewing their Nepal Musk a couple of years ago in which we compared the same incense as branded by three different resellers: Primo, Pure and Gaura. The fragrance was recognisably the same, but the experience for each brand was slightly different. This could have been down to different batches, different freshness, or perhaps slightly different oils added at the end depending on the price point agreed. Two of us preferred the most expensive brand, one of us preferred the cheapest brand. All three of us placed the mid priced brand at the bottom!
ReplyDeleteGokula Gaura Nepal Musk
Pure Incense Connoisseur Nepal Musk
Primo Incense Nepal Musk
That kind of makes sense. There was certainly, for us, more similarity between Gokula (the cheapest) and Pure (the most expensive) than Primo (the mid-priced one we all placed last).
ReplyDeleteWere you told this information by the company, or read an ingredient sheet, or is it based on your experiences with Nepal Musk? That the company would use a better quality/more expensive oil for "Connoisseur" brands than "Standard" brands makes sense, and it supports our experience.
Just to add a tidbit of info to this discussion, Corey, the owner of Absolute Bliss tole me that HH and Madhavdas are two completely different lines.
ReplyDeleteORS listed the HH and TOI smell alikes which are several. Check the TOI reviews on their site.
The quality of Happy Hari incense varied a lot over time, so I think Paul used several different suppliers. I have a bunch of Corey's incense which I have been intending to review for a while. I started last week on his Bengali Jungle Fluxo Durbar, then got distracted by other things in my life, and also by the sheer headiness of the incense. I have to dig out my supplies of Sri Sai Flora and a couple of over heavyweights to compare.
ReplyDeleteA.R. Trading, who are the makers of the Padma line, also have another series of Padma Flora sticks called Rudraksh. There are 5 different floras in this series, Jai Ganesh, Dhand Laxmi, Maya Visnu, Namaha Shivaaya, & Durga Darshan. This series is also recommended as there are fragrances here that you don't usually find in other flora sticks. These were very inexpensive, halmaddi rich, and each different than the other.
ReplyDeleteIt's frustrating that there are so many decent Indian incense companies that are not exporting to the UK or US. We have a handful of importers, such as Aargee, who bring in large quantities, and to a certain extent influence what is bought and sold, as they distribute to most shops. I did explore importing myself and selling on eBay. I made some mistakes, but found it was worthwhile and developed some loyal customers. I'd like to continue doing it, but I am not as healthy and energetic as I once was..... :-)
DeleteBelieve me, it is worse here in Thailand. The selection is limited. I have to go online and find sellers in India. Floras are the biggest value in Indian incense. More makers are using halmaddi which enriches the fragrance and deepens it.
DeleteHalmaddi interests me, and I may buy some to find out what it is like. When I started this blog I knew nothing, and I have been learning as I have gone along. There was a lot of stuff written about halmaddi at that time which subsequent research indicated was inaccurate, so it is difficult to get at the basic facts. Sadly there hasn't been much serious academic research done on incense. The incense books I have are written by enthusiasts rather than academics - books I have near my desk: Incense and Scent - an attractive coffee table sort of book, written by Raje Airey & Charlotte Melling. Melling is a "stylist", while Airey at least spent "several years" in India studying meditation. There is some useful but all too brief notes on the history and composition of incense - the bulk of the book is about "fragrant moods" and "seasonal scents". There is no mention of halmaddi. The Book of Incense by Kiyoko Morita is about Japanese incense - no mention of halmaddi. Incense by Jennie Harding gives a brief overview, then mostly talks about ingredients, but mostly for making your own incense. No mention of halmaddi. The Complete Book of Incense, Oils & Brews is about making your own incense - it's for modern witches. I've tried some of these wiccan concoctions and they can be attractive (the best has been Djinn Incense by Underworld Apothecary), but are mostly rather random, and the aim appears to be more for the spiritual or medicinal qualities of the blend rather than the aesthetic. There is no mention of halmaddi. Incense by Gina Hyams is another incense cookbook. No mention of halmaddi. Incense and Incense Rituals by Thomas Kinkele is of course a famous incense text, especially for those in the West who like to make their own incense. It is a very fine book for details on individual ingredients, and it is one I consult a lot. But, though accurate and informative, there are few details on incense history or production in India. And, of course, no mention of halmaddi.
DeleteThe most accurate sources for information about Indian incense and the use of halmaddi comes from Indian documents I have uncovered, such as this and this.
DeleteMy understanding is that halmaddi is a resin from the Ailanthus triphysa tree. It is similar to frankincense and myrrh, but does not in itself have such an attractive scent, so has not become known for its scent. Rather, it became useful as a binding material. Other tree resins, such as frankincense, can also be used as binders to hold together the fragrant ingredients and the combustible ingredients, the wood dust and/or charcoal. As well as acting as a binder it does also add its own scent to the ingredients. If no scent at all is preferred, then incense makers can use a tree resin such as gum arabic. The tree from which halmaddi is extracted is a commercial tree valued for its wood. Poor halmaddi extraction methods was damaging the tree, so a ban was put in place in order to preserve the tree. The ban has now been lifted. However, a belief arose in America via some incense connoisseurs that the shortage of halmaddi was responsible for the decline in quality of Satya incense being imported into America. Research into this shows that the timeline is wrong, and that the real reason for the decline in quality of Satya incense was the splitting apart of the two brothers who had inherited the company after the death of their father: Balkrishna Setty and Nagaraj Setty. Balkrishna was in charge of production, and his incense continued to be fine. But Nagaraj had not been in charge of production. He was the one in charge of distribution. He was the one who exported Satya incense to America. He then started up his own production, and exported that to America under the Satya name, until Balkrishna took the matter to court. From that point all Satya incense is identified as to which brother is responsible (I always mark that on my reviews). To be fair to Nagaraj, his incense production has improved, and now there is no difference between the Satya products. That all this happened at around (but not exactly matching) the same time as halmaddi was banned and then unbanned led those American incense connoisseurs to believe that the reduction and restoration in quality of Satya incense imported into America was due to the halmaddi ban, rather than due to Nagaraj temporarily importing poor quality incense under the Satya name.
However, from that point there "appears" to have been a myth grow up about the value of halmaddi. I note that incense made for the West tends to have more halmaddi in it than incense made for the domestic market. But this is just anecdotal.
Anyway. That's my understanding of the situation, and much of that, as you will note, is conjecture. In truth I know little about the use of halmaddi in Indian incense, and whenever I enquire of Indian incense makers I get vague replies - I guess people want to keep their commercial secrets!
What is your take on halmaddi? You seem to put a lot of stress on it. What can you tell me about it?
correction: Dhana Laxmi
ReplyDelete