Nine stages
Three years to grow.
Three years to grow.
Fourteen hours to burn.
Every step below happens in India, by hand, with named suppliers. Nothing here is a metaphor — this is the actual sequence, in order, with the temperatures and the losses.
0Indian states involved
Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh.
0Hours in flame
Cumulative across all nine firings, per batch of Navama.
0Bamboo culms burnt
One per firing. There is no way to reuse a culm.
0Surviving yield
A kilogram of raw salt becomes 190 grams of violet crystal.
Peak, final pass
1,580°C
Salt melts at 801°C. We go nearly twice past it.
The hands
Nobody here is
Nobody here is
a stock photo.
Eleven people make every batch. The kiln has one master firer, and he decides when the ninth pass is finished by the colour of the flame, not by a thermocouple.
The result
Nineteen percent
Nineteen percent
of what went in.
That number is the entire reason this costs what it costs. Batch 09 is open now.