How to Make Powdered Incense

Incense has been used for centuries for healing, relaxation, ceremonies and simple enjoyment. If you love incense, eventually you'll want to make your own. Making powdered incense is fairly simple and has many advantages over buying prepackaged incense. By grinding your own powdered incense, you can get creative and make any scent, or combination of scents, that you like. Also, you can be sure that the ingredients are safe and don't contain any toxic chemicals that will be released upon burning.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Incense wood
• Incense resin
• Dried incense herbs
• Mortar & pestle, matate, or hand-cranked coffee grinder
• Bowl
• Spoon
• Airtight storage container

1. Choose the ingredients for your powdered incense.When you are first learning to make incense, you probably want to limit the number of ingredients to three or four, including at least one wood or resin as a "base" scent. One good way to start is by choosing a wood or resin scent that you know you love and then add one or two herbs to it. Many websites offer incense recipes that are useful starting points. Check the Resources Section of this article for a site that offers a list of ingredients, each with a link to scents that mix well with that particular ingredient. There really are no limitations to ingredients other than your imagination and personal taste.

2. Grind your ingredients.Start with dried herbs, then moving on to woods, and saving resins for last, grind each ingredient you chose in Step 1 using a mortar and pestle, matate, or hand-cranked coffee grinder. Keep each ingredient separate until the end. It's easier to grind resin last since it can be quite messy and time-consuming to clean your grinding tools after grinding the resin. Be sure to grind everything as fine as possible.

3. Mix the ground ingredients.The portions mixed together will depend on the ingredients you are using. In general, the stronger the scent of an ingredient is, the less you will use of that ingredient.Check the Resources Section for a website that has many incense recipes. You can use these recipes to get a rough idea of the proportion of certain ingredients in powdered incense recipes.This step may also require some trial and error. Just like with cooking, sometimes it takes a bit of experimenting to get a recipe just right. Use a spoon to stir the ingredients together, and then grind them together to make sure they are thoroughly combined.

4. Age the powdered incense.Although you can use the powdered incense mixture you just completed in Step 3, to really get the best, fullest scent you need to age the incense for a few weeks.Place the powdered mixture in an airtight container and store it in a dark, cool place for about three weeks. Your incense is then complete and ready to burn.

Tips & Warnings

• If you're short on time, or want an easy way to experiment with combining scents, purchase herbs, resins and/or woods that are already powdered and simply combine them following the last steps.
• Freeze resins ahead of time to make them easier to grind.
• Use the bowl, spoon and any other utensils only for making incense. Once you've used them for incense, do not use them with food.
• It may be tempting to use an electric grinder to powder ingredients, but resist the temptation. Electric grinders create too much heat, degrading the ingredients. Also, some incense ingredients, especially resins, may break electric grinder or food processor blades.