Lessons in Incense Making

June is going to be a busy month here at The Scented Djinn Apothecary. I've set a plan in motion to make no fewer than three distinctly different incenses each month, as well as four perfumes a year, and soap to fill in the gaps, starting now. One or two of the new incenses will be offered up immediately after they dry, and the remaining incense will age a while before being offered. Now is the time to start the amber base for the future fall and winter perfumes too. The reason for the hustle is 1, I am a notorious procrastinator who needs a plan, and 2, I'm going to be away from the Apothecary starting July 4th through July 20th but am toying with the idea of keeping the shop open for orders to fill when I return. Two weeks may be too long to do that, though, and I know that I will be wiped out when I return, so that plan is still in the pondering stage.

I've just about finished The Ram Incense. I'm rolling it into spheres as the last time I made these fat disks using a moon cake press and I got more than one complaint that, though the scent was fabulous, as usual, getting those incense cakes to break took a hydraulic press and a lot of patience. As pretty as those Ram moon cakes were, they just aren't worth the hassle. 

Making incense is a lot -- a lot-a lot -- like making perfume. You need bases, or extending notes, heart or core materials, and enhancing or top notes. The way they present, however, is not the same. When I say bases, I am not talking about joss or makko or whatever you want to call it -- the binder or filler or scentless woods that a lot of incenseurs use to bulk up and provide binding to their incense. No doubt binders are necessary, however, they shouldn't be relied upon entirely just to fill space and make your incense batch bigger, you see? I worried about this using the bourbon oakwood barrel wood itself in Bourbon & Firelight Incense because I wasn't sure it was aromatic enough. To correct any lack of scent in the wood, I added back into it both a strong tincture of B.O.B. and the evaporated extract. Loads, in fact. This bolstered the 'bourbon' part of the incense. The next thing you need in incense is the core, the theme, what is the point you're trying to get across? The mood? In this case, the core and the base were the same -- bourbon. So more B.O.B. was added, along with a few other materials (rose in particular) to fill out that profile. As for top notes here, I suppose it would be the rose/rose petal powder as everything else in this incense is dark and woody and sweet -- tobacco, vanilla, patchouli leaf, sandalwood powder, aloeswood powder. The trick, if it can be called a trick at all, is fermentation. Once the liquid portion of the incense is added in, it starts a bit of a fermentation period. The fermentation time can last from just a few hours (no fewer than three) to days, weeks, months, or even years, so long as the temperature is cool enough to prevent mold from developing. Sometimes, to speed up a short fermentation time, I will add wine to the liquid portion of the incense. The types of incense that really go through fermentation are those like Kyphi which has both fruit and wine in their composition. These never really 'dry', per se, not like plain powder incense do. Their core is still going through the fermentation process, all the way up to when they are burned or warmed. This is why that fresh batch of Kyphi smells different after a few months or years in storage, and more likely, it smells better after a longer fermentation period. Do you know what they say about fine wine? The same goes for these types of incense.