I bought a mix pack of five from eBay for £1.50, which is a little expensive. I know there's a junk shop in my High Street (Rochester) which also sells them, so I might have got them cheaper there. Except, the junk shop really is a junk shop - it's rather smelly and scruffy, and run by odd people, so going in there isn't a pleasant experience.
The sticks are very long, with a longer than average handle area. I find such long handles a bit of a nuisance, as I have a dragon incense burner, and long sticks tend to both droop, and extend beyond the ash carrier, so I have to break off at least half of the handle. The sticks tend to smell of apple and cinnamon - there are other aroma notes as well: toffee, honey, spiced fruit, polish, etc - but the signature aroma is apple and cinnamon. There is a muddy brown masala fragrance powder mix on a charcoal base, and it looks as though the stick has then been dipped in a fragrance oil.
The company claim that the burning aroma is the same as the stick aroma, but I'm not finding that to be the case. On the stick the aroma feels mainly natural - though with furniture polish notes that hint at synthetic perfume. When burned, synthetic notes come to the fore, and the smell is like stale cheap perfume and aerosol room freshener. I burned all five with little significant difference between the aromas when they were burned. They are not top quality, and are not for me, but I'm pleased I tried them.
Date: Sept 2013 Score: 20
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You were a little more forgiving than I was in my review haha (https://nathanupchurch.com/blog/an-evening-with-americas-best-incense-wild-berry/) In the selection you got, did you also notice that some of the sticks appear to be machine extruded and some powder coated? I found that quite strange as they presumably produce all their sticks in the same place, and they are all dipped.
ReplyDeleteI love your review. It's good to have someone who can actually write, reviewing incense. There is a professional verve and focus to your articles.
DeleteThis is actually an old review from 2013 that I split out from another page, so I don't recall much about these sticks. I'm not that surprised that there is a difference in production method. The blanks are very cheaply made in Asia - possibly in Thailand: they have the profile of sticks made in Thailand. It would be more expensive to have them made in the US. Wild Berry would buy the blanks by the ton, and then fragrance them in the US. The fragrancing part doesn't take long. They would be plunged, a hundred sticks or more at a time, into buckets of fragrance liquid.
Wild Berry may be buying from one supplier, but that supplier may be sourcing from different factories, which would result in differences between sticks.
My "prejudiced against perfume-dipped incense" comment probably needs explaining. over 90% of incense made in India these days is perfume-dipped (or perfume poured or perfume sprayed - different methods are used). Some sticks are bare charcoal (and there's a fascinating prejudice against charcoal sticks which is a whole rabbit hole of its own!) while some has a coating of powder. People see the coating of powder as a sign of quality incense, and generally term it masala incense. Much modern Indian "masala" incense is finished off the same way as the bare charcoal sticks or the Wild Berry sticks. It is dipped or sprayed with perfume. But folks are OK with perfume-dipped incense when it looks like masala incense. It's a little more time-consuming and expensive to put that powder coating on the sticks, but it is worth it, because the powder coated sticks can sell for considerably more than the bare sticks (both in India and the West). Often there is no essential difference between a perfume-dipped stick and a "masala" stick with a fluffy powder coating, but people feel the masala looking stick is quality, while the bare stick is crap.
DeleteWhat matters is not how the stick looks, but the care and quality that has gone into its manufacture. There are decent quality bare sticks, and there are crap powder coated sticks.
The very best sticks have been made with quality ingredients and fixatives. Fixatives such as frankincense, benzoin, vanilla, gum Arabic, halmaddi. And they have the fragrances (usually these days - cough, cough - perfumes rather than ground down solids) folded into the paste, rather than added externally. But folks do like to have a scent on the stick (candle makers call it cold throw and hot throw) as well as a scent on the burn. Indeed, for many people, the scent on the stick is the most important. Wild Berry know that, and focus on it. And incense connoisseurs also like the scent on the stick. So the powder that is applied to the finished masala stick will be fragranced. The best makers are able to make a stick that smells nice when cold, and also smell nice when burned. Those sticks tend to be the ones I like the most, and top my charts. And they tend not to be the bare sticks, because the bare sticks usually just have the one fragrance - both cold and hot. But this is also true for much "perfumed masala". They also have the same fragrance which has to act as both cold and hot scent. And when that happens, the makers always focus more on the cold scent than the hot scent. It makes commercial sense.
So, my comment about prejudice is more about judging the incense for what it is, rather than for what you think it is just by looking at it. Does that make better sense?
Thanks for the compliment, that's very kind of you to say. Interesting point about the blanks; I thought I saw a video of someone doing some kind of powder-coating in what looked like their US warehouse on the company YouTube channel. If I recall (I actually sent the rest of the sticks to Irene, so who knows, maybe she'll decide to shunt them over to you once she gets sick of them lol), most of the sticks looked machine-made, so maybe those are the ones they buy from Asia and the powder-coated ones are only made when needed to tide them over between deliveries or something? It would make sense for the powdered sticks to be made in their facility as they could produce them without having to invest in machinery.
DeleteOn prejudice - yes that makes sense. I think I am actually on your side in that perfumed incense based on charcoal often tends to smell better than sticks using wood powder; there just seems to be less opportunity for off-notes this way, especially that burning-paper note you sometimes mention in your reviews. That said, I would say that I genuinely am a little prejudiced against perfumed incense in general; I usually prefer and seek out incense that derives fragrance predominantly from 'whole plant' (as they say) ingredients and I am often a little disappointed when even rather good sticks have that perfume-like projection and clarity which betrays heavy use of oils or other concentrates, natural or not. For example: Gyokushodo's Suzaku, which I think is a great stick and I burn all the time. But I recognize that this is purely a personal preference stemming from all sorts of complicated thoughts and feelings, and it in no way reflects on the quality of a stick. I am also slowly starting to explore more unabashedly perfumed incense these days as I recognize that it suits certain use cases better than the rather quiet Japanese sticks I most often enjoy.
DeleteI'm currently really enjoying exploring the resin-on-a-stick type incenses that have taken off in South America, and are now spreading all over the world. The Pure Yemen sticks are particularly fascinating, and would be right up your street. And of course Jeomra's wonderful sticks made in Germany. I think that is the direction that genuine connoisseurs should be following - resin incense sticks.
DeleteExample:
DeleteJeomra's Natur Pur Weihrauch Rose