Sri Pada

We just missed the boat on the heyday of Artisanal Oud oils from Sri Lanka from 2016 – 2018, but as with everything, the cliché that what goes up must come down holds firm.  Sri Lanka being such a small island, these oils certainly became very hard to procure over the years.

Certainly, from 2018 when Al Hashmi was founded, we could not really offer such an oil as didn't have the contacts, the distillation know-how let alone the expensive distillation equipment we now have, nor we did have the right network to be able to source and have them have them distilled.  This is also some sort of response I guess for those who think that vendors simply “resell” oils.  If it was that simple, we would have offered Sri Pada years ago! 

So we missed out on all that at the time and it's been a personal regret of mine ever since.  In my opening sentence above, I mentioned gravity as a metaphor, because we might have just demonstrated anti-gravity in the oud world as we never expected to be able to make this type of oil, let alone more than one of them. 

As we as we mentioned in our blog on Sri Lanka last year, we found a section in a forest that was previously untouched and managed to find some amazing trees. Photographs of which are on our blog. We've had to age this oud for at least a year, but it's come out as a magnificent oil, which revives that Walla Patta hallmark that I describe as sun sunshine in a bottle - a Malinau Borneo-esque, floral and tropical fruit vapour.  Not just any fruit, but the most the most glorious tropical florals that you can imagine, with an oozing sweet resin that harbours a very faint hint of a woody underbase.   

These kinds of oils are just not available any anymore and I certainly have not come across any for a long time. Not a single off note in this. Just pure unadulterated sunshine. The intensity of the oil just doesn't diminish for hours. It just goes on and on and on. An incredible shimmering, sherbet fizziness floral that envelopes your nostrils and transports you to another place.   

I try to avoid the fact that I am smelling this from a tiny sample vial - I don't have a 2.5g gram bottle.  And we don't have our own full bottles of many of the highest-grade ouds we sell as the batches are quite small.  You might think that we have, lots of bottles in the back, or spare ones that we kept behind for ourselves. 

Unfortunately, the reality is because of our small batches, batches, we simply can't afford to.  For example, if a typical batch is 10-20 grams, taking away 2 x 2.5g for myself and Ahmad would leave 5-15g… impossible to justify let alone afford. So, maybe I might just treat myself to a gram for this oud as I cannot get over how good this oil is.

2.5g bottle depicted is for illustration purposes only 

Both 1g and 2.5g bottles are available to purchase.