Oman Luban

Oman Luban runs its distillery from 412 Mutrah Souq, in the historic waterfront market of Muscat's old quarter — a working link back to the centuries when Mutrah's harbor was itself a stop on the frankincense trade route. The resin it distills still comes from Dhofar, roughly 1,000 kilometers to the south: tribal harvesters in the Dhofar mountains cut the bark of wild Boswellia sacra trees with a traditional blade called a manqaf, letting the sap ooze and harden over several weeks before collecting it. Each tree yields around two kilograms of resin a year and is then left to rest for two years before being tapped again.

The raw sap is packed into 40-kilogram sacks and shipped north to the Mutrah distillery for refining and hydrodistillation: a single 40-kilogram batch runs nine to ten hours at atmospheric pressure, yielding an essential-oil recovery rate of four to six percent. From that process, Oman Luban sells Boswellia sacra frankincense essential oil and frankincense hydrosol, keeping the harvesting tools and method unchanged even as the resin travels the length of the country — from Dhofar's mountain groves to a distillery inside one of Oman's oldest working souqs — to reach the still.