Brunei Kynam Soil

‘Soil’ agarwood simply means agarwood that was buried underground before being dug up and cleaned.

When you hear ‘soil’ agarwood, it could mean good or bad.

For example, a large chunk of the oud chips sold on the market are soil pieces from Maroke. These batches are widely available in oud shops around the world because they’re among the cheapest to acquire.

Like with aged oud oil, the age itself doesn’t tell you about the original quality of the agarwood the oil was made from. Likewise, you’ll find poorly resinated aquilarias underground. There might have been a flood or a mudslide that buried resinated and half-resinated trees alike.

That a tree was found six feet under doesn’t automatically mean it’ll be resin-packed or that it’ll have any resin at all.

But here’s why the hunt for soil agarwood is so exciting – and potentially profitable. Older trees grew in different conditions compared to today. There’s also the generational aspect of mother and grandmother giants that are rarely found alive today, which possess different traits than younger oud trees growing now. So, there’s a chance that you’ll unearth a giant aquilaria that was buried fifty or even a hundred years ago…

But more than a glimpse back in time, there’s a chance that some of the trees are underground because they were so resin-dense that the tree did not survive, fell, and eventually became part of the earth – and that you have a chance to find this treasure a hundred years later.

Soil agarwood has garnered such a reputation that people deliberately harvest and bury agarwood trees (for a few months or couple of years) simply to claim that their wood is ‘soil’ agarwood.

As you can imagine, unearthing soil agarwood is incredibly labor-intensive. The work is mostly done by hand deep in the swamps, hunters neck-deep in the mud, and the chiseling for resin is much more tricky than working on a fresh harvest.

Much of the soil agarwood you hear about is Vietnamese red soil. I suspect we’ll also see more soil agarwood emerge from Sri Lanka in the coming decades as trees and harvests that were lost in the terrible floods in 2017 begin to be recovered…

But ‘Brunei’ is a label you rarely see for any agarwood. As for sinking soil kynam chips, that’s rarer than rare. In all my years in the field, I’ve hardly come across any, and the little I have myself is what I’m making available here to you.

These soil chips don’t look like much. If you didn’t know better, you’d think these are reject pieces, while in reality quality soil agarwood is as precious, if not more so, than kinam.

Creamy with a smooth Bruneian sweetness, this medium-pitched, dry-piercing spiciness gives you a raw taste of Kyara de Kalbar. 

Above: Soil Agarwood vs. ‘Regular’ High-Grade Agarwood

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