nathanupchurch.com/content/blog/silvertip.md

title	description	date	tags	synopsis	imageURL	imageAlt	mastodon_id
Silver Tip: an Incense Build Featuring Osmanthus and Mastic	I make a fresh, sweet, and green incense build reminiscent of the flavor of white tea	2024-09-20	Incense Incense Making Incense Builds (Recipes)	I make a fresh, sweet, and green incense build reminiscent of the flavor of white tea.	/img/testAsh.webp	A small tin labelled 'test ash' beside a small glass jar containing matches.	113173725532729481

If my memory serves me, some time ago I tried a stick from Yi-Xin that contained osmanthus flowers and mastic gum. I recall enjoying the combination, so when I found a bag of dried osmanthus on sale while doing some online grocery shopping, I set out to make something using these ingredients.

Having read that osmanthus, like lavender, was one of those few flowers that could be used successfully in incense, I was brimming with confidence as I ground them finely and made an attempt at a batch of sticks containing 19% of the powder. The result was ghastly. At this percentage, alongside that characteristic beautiful fruity fragrance was a proportionate helping of the acrid scent of burning plant matter. Following this failure, I put aside my hubris, opened my tin of 'test ash'¹ and began testing incense powders comprised of differing ratios of osmanthus and base-wood in a series of trail-burning tests, eventually finding that a ratio of 10% osmanthus to base wood seemed to return a reasonably good fragrance in the burn.

Armed with this knowledge, I put together a build. The star aromatics sit atop a woody base of sandalwood and juniper sweetened by a touch of benzoin; the composition is slightly lifted with a minuscule amount of camphor, bound with guar gum and a little acacia gum. While also acting as a weak binder, the acacia gum is present to lower the burn temperature and strengthen the sticks.

The Build

Ingredient	Grams	% of Build
Juniperus Virginiana	2.6	35.62%
Santalum Spicatum	2.6	35.62%
Osmanthus Fragrans	0.73	10%
Mastic Gum	0.5	6.85%
Acacia Gum	0.3	4.11%
Benzoin Siam	0.25	3.42%
Guar Gum	0.25	3.42%
Borneol Camphor	0.07	0.96%

As with all of my incense, I extruded the dough into 2-2.5mm coreless sticks which I then dried on a mesh screen at room temperature and left to cure for a number of weeks.

Conclusion

The sticks this build produces offer a quiet listen, but I find it very pleasant. Something about the combination of juniper, mastic, and osmanthus forms a fragrance that's at once green and fruity, with a bright, peachy, stone-fruit note, all atop a woody base. After a couple of months, the camphor is barely there on the stick; whether it is present in the burn is difficult to say without trying a build sans borneol.²

My partner has a small wood-burning backpacking stove they like to use to make tea while camping. While I haven't yet had the pleasure, I have to imagine that making a cup of white tea on such a stove in a juniper forest would smell similar to the fragrance of this stick.

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1. I use the stick of a cotton swab to create a divot in the ash bed, which I carefully fill with incense powder to be tamped down, lit, and evaluated. When I'm done, I simply close the lid, shake the container, and drop it once or twice on a flat surface to smooth the ash and prepare it for the next use. ↩︎

2. Such a tricky ingredient, camphor. The tiniest amount can seem utterly overwhelming when blending or on a fresh stick, and as incense cures and ages, it seems as though it may or may not mellow out in the burn. ↩︎