Milo's Temple Coconut

  

Second review - scroll down for  earlier

The sticks are very crumbly, with huge chunks flaking off. I'm still learning about incense, so I don't know what has gone wrong here, but the melnoorva/masala finishing powder is coming apart from the charcoal paste. The charcoal paste is soft, crumbly, and a little moist. The paste is very bumpy and uneven. I suspect the fault is with the charcoal paste rather than the finishing powder, but that's just my speculation. 

There is a fresh, uplifting, slightly sharp, fruity scent on the stick, quite perfumed, with some awareness of coconut. It smells like a body spray liquid. The liquid before it is sprayed on the body. There's some awareness of alcohol. It's all quite fresh and moderately attractive in an everyday body perfume sort of way. And with that coconut and some vanilla to accompany it. 

The burn scent is clearer on the vanilla, and some scorched nylon as if the iron is too hot, a touch of wood, some old fish, and the coconut hovering around as though a mugger waiting for a victim. It's a curious scent, part attractive, and part odd almost to the most of ugly, but not quite. The coconut is interesting - not sweet and sickly, but woody and fascinating. And it gently infuses the room and the house with a rustic, hairy coconut scent that lingers for hours quite pleasantly. A somewhat fascinating scent that eventually I have succumbed to. The "flaws" are part of the attraction. 

Date: March 2025    Score: 27↑

First review

At the start of last year (2023) I bought a bunch of Milo's Temple branded incense from UK importer Craig, and I do intend to sit down with them and with Ramakrishna's Natural Handmade Incense as well as Shekhar's Natural Handmade Incense, as they all come from the Mapusa Municipal Market in Goa, the same original source as Happy Hari and Absolute Bliss - though Paul discovered that Rama was getting his incense from other sources, including Mumbai. I thought it might be fun to do some kind of comparison to see if there is any similarity. But I'm not going to do that yet, I have plenty of other stuff I want to do first, including finally finishing off the samples I got from Gokula in 2013 (yes, that's how far back my backlog stretches), and then exploring a bit further Pure Incense, the UK importer who uses the same source as Gokula: Haridas Madhavdas Sugandhi (HMS) of Pune, who supplies a number of UK and American importers, such as Temple of Incense, Bhagwan, and Prasad Gifts; and was also a source for Happy Hari. (It all goes round in circles doesn't it?) 

Anyway, I just grabbed this packet as I was looking for something different as I took a break from Gokula and HMS. I think this was the first Milo's Temple I burned last year, and I recall now that I was struck then by how rough the sticks looked, how lovely the scent was on the stick, and how some nasty fumes came off when burned. I think the mix went wrong on this one. The sticks look really rough and weird - very bubbly with off lumps and cracks and pieces flaking off. There is a chemical whiff on the sticks along with the very delightful coconut. The burn is hugely inconsistent - sometimes, sweet and divine, other times rather smoky and fumy, and sometimes quite ugly (especially toward the end where it becomes quite foul indeed).   

I can't give this a decent score. I have looked back, and I did report to Craig that there were problems with the Coconut, but it appears he didn't respond.  I will review another Milo's Temple before returning to Gokula and Pure's HMS sticks, as I don't want to have my only review of Milo's Temple to be a negative one. 


Date: Feb 2024   Score: 17

***

Coconut incense