Aging: Only Partially Nonsense

Pipe smokers face the problem, after the demise of culture, us citizens of the modern world really have nothing that bonds us except “I like money” and our fears of global conflict, local conflict, and personal insufficiency. This means that pipe smoking becomes a “hobby” instead of simply something you do like drinking coffee in the morning. We all drink coffee, and most of us have some way we like to prepare it, even if that involves sloshing some instant grounds in a mug of water before microwaving it and gulping it down in the shower.

Hobbies involve an almost fetishistic level of detail-obsession because the theory is that you do a hobby for fun, therefore it should be involved and give you something to talk about, which means that it rewards an explosion of detail and rumor-based lore, since those things intensify the seeming importance of a hobby. Most people live through their hobbies, since there is nothing “safe” to talk about at work except television (definitely not religion, politics, philosophy, history, or the arts; you know, those things that give human life a great deal of meaning) and we barely know our families, so it becomes time to find something to obsess about other than television. In many ways, the hobbyist response to modernity — including “postmodernism” — gives us some sanity back, since we get an actual area of our life and time in which we have some power.

However, that requires that we sort through all the lore to figure out what is nonsense and what is not. When talking with other hobbyists, one encounters a lot of bragging because everyone must be special in some way, and the best way to do that is to have or know something that others do not. Consequently certain high-priced pipes, unobtainable boutique tobaccos, and logistically difficult practices get discussed a lot because really, what is there to say about pipe smoking? “I like Prince Albert, I smoke it in a cob, and I use a three-pinch pack and breath smoke” is about as profound as anything else someone will tell you. It is difficult not to enjoy BSing about favorite blends or that one pipe you got out of a basket that just kicks immeasurable amounts of ass, but at some point, we have missed the boat when we use our pipe smoking time together to discuss pipe smoking too much.

To smoke a pipe is to never be alone. When I am on missions from our local church council where I volunteer in an administrative role despite being more in love with the old gods than the new ones, I frequently encounter one or another services where they tell me something will be ready in ten minutes or that so-and-so just stepped out and will be back in a few. The sane response is to rush outside and light up a pipe, at which point I am no longer alone or burdened by waiting. In my self-rationalization, I am no longer a slave to the schedules of others (which are in turn enslaved to the schedules of those other than they) who is wasting time waiting, but someone enjoying a pipe. Fact-checkers rate this as “Mostly True,” and I think it is the case. Far from being another nameless person wandering aimlessly through a miserable life, I am a person enjoying a pipe, and soon others will wander over to the new de facto smoking area where we can get to know each other. My time has gone from wasted to enjoyed, which guarantees more than anything else that whatever I am waiting on will show up faster. A watched pot never boils, and it appears the converse is true: ignore a pot long enough and it will boil even if you did not turn the stove on.

With a pipe, you are never purposeless, and you are living “the Good Life” as Plato called it, or at least a slice of it. The world tried to stomp you and you fought back with a small briar gadget you can fill with delicious tobacco and enjoy. Even if you remain alone, you are not alone: you are part of the community of people worldwide and throughout history who have enjoyed smoking various herbal concoctions as a way of making life more good. It is not simply “better living through chemistry” because the parts of the process are not separable; one enjoys the nicotine, but also the art of breathing to keep smoke rolling over the tongue, the fiddling with the pipe itself, and the cool stuff like lighters, knives, and pipe cleaners we get to carry around in our pockets. A pipe is always a project, so if the Assistant Vice President to the Vice President Assistant (AVPVPA) is late again, the pipe smoker can whip out that battered old Rossi and trim cake, clear the stem, maybe even break it down and clean it like a field-stripped machine gun, then load it with agonizing precision and get it lit just before the AVPVPA pulls into the parking lot in her secondhand Honda and gets out screaming that smoking is not allowed within twenty-five feet of the front door. Well, well... do you have a tape measure?

Some of the mystical gossip lore can get in the way however. Aging of tobacco never made sense to me in the form of carefully labeling little jars and storing them in some organized fashion. Pipe smoking is meant to be fun, damnit, and it is meant to be fiddly. I need to be able to dig something out, have no idea what it is, and enjoy the heck out of it anyway without treating it like a small business run out of the basement. Too much structure and you lose the serendipity which allows things to be fiddly, which ironically is the only one one really learns, because by definition before learning we do not know about what we are going to learn, therefore we do not know where to look for it. Pack a pipe differently, clean the cake in a new way, or mix up some old blends and you learn things. Haul out a textbook to know what your teachers learned and will stick by even as new information overwhelms them, but if you want to discover a new world, you have to embrace the randomness, chaos, disorder, and other fiddly things.

Around here pipe tobacco “cellaring” involves dumping blends in jars, optionally affixing labels that will fall off within a few months, and then bravely kicking open the door to the oversized walk-in closet that was constructed incongruously as part of the otherwise microscopic guest bedroom in order to find some place to thrust the new flat of jars and then flee before the heap of clothes, books, gear, heirlooms, and electronics comes crashing down on you and they find you four weeks later, smashed flat and slowly turning into human prosciutto. The good thing is that when new tobacco is needed, an adventurous hand can snake into the closet, grab the first thing that feels like a jar, and then withdraw before whatever gremlins dwell in chaos attack. You find some good stuff that way. Some of my favorite smokes remain unidentified, but I thank whatever idiot bought and stashed the stuff because much of it is quite tasty. At some date in the indefinable future someone will have to clean this closet, at least to get the dust out, and maybe to impose order on it. I pity the fool who is assigned this task, and I plan to flee the house the minute raised female voices suggest too strongly that I be the sucker who has to tackle those Augean stables.

Every now and then I find something that I can definitively date. In the bottom drawer of my work table, a place too low to use to store anything I need on a regular basis, there are a few tins that I stashed away because I really liked them at the time and was sad that my supply was limited. There is Royal Yacht in there (of course) and the old square tins of Irish Flake, although that group is dwindling, as well as a couple jars of 60-40 dark Burley and Golden Sliced, which turns out amazing after the sauce melts off and the Cavendish mellows over the years. Without cutting it with the relatively unprocessed Burley however it is over the top, a blast of anise and vanilla and maple that makes me think I wandered into one of those fast food lattes that have trendy flavors. My family are generally kind to me, and they know that my stash drawer is not holy — only reality is holy, and the gods within it — but that it is somewhat sacred, since there is both sadness and glory in there. Sadness for what has gone away to the land beyond death, and glory in reveling in their time because they really are some fine smokes.

One of these, the Villiger 1888 Early Day, never really interested anyone because they saw it as a generic light English blend. This genre, most famously populated by Dunhill Early Morning Pipe and Peterson Wild Atlantic, consists of Virginia-heavy Englishes that are correspondingly light on Latakia, delivering a sweet and light smoke that goes well with morning coffee and waking up. Too much Latakia will obliterate flavor, and yet without it, the Virginias dominate with sweetness and the Orientals fade into the background, so you get a slightly bitey Virginia blend. Latakia tames the Virginias and Orientals moderate their sugar-heavy flavor, which is why the English blend conquered the world but smoking straight Virginias remained rarer.

Summary: a good light English that focuses mostly on Virginia sweetness

Blends built around internal balance between different types of leaf create a lack of variety that leaves one little to comment on. This Danish interpretation of English tobacco aims for balance instead of clash, and the resulting harmony produces a dark chocolate woodsy taste and thick smoke in a clean-burning, moderately strong tobacco. Its faintly spicy but mostly simply rich taste lasts to the bottom of the bowl and leaves behind a strong but not unpleasant room note. While it lacks the internal contrast of a Dunhill brand, it approximates the same mixture with its parts working together, making it taste like a single flavor instead of a blend of randomly occurring flavors. It probably fits more in basements and man-caves, or outdoors, than in the living room, but it leaves behind a classic tobacco scent that you may remember from the barber shops and hunting lodges of your childhood. I consider this one extremely underrated, in that it seems to be less popular than other brands but turns English tobacco from a scattered experience into a hard-hitting wave of flavor with enough power to help you through the day.

In all fairness, the Villiger blend is a clone of the Dunhill favorite and has the same strengths, but per Peter Stokkebye, the blender, tends to take greater delight in the Virginias, especially the brighter ones which are cheaper and therefore beloved by blenders. The whole point of tobacco blending is to make something tasty, but as soon as you do, the bowtie people come in and ask if you could not shave just a few pennies off the cost per ounce, because that way, they can sock that money away for stock buybacks or vertical integration, which seem to be the two hobbies of MBA types. The more Burley and bright Virginia you can work in, displacing costlier leaf like Perique and Latakia, the more you get to move up the corporate ladder, and it has been this way for a century. For my own consumption, I brew up an American English which ends up being Virginia-heavy but has more Latakia than Early Day, something like this:

Stick this one in your pipe and you are due for a wild ride, since it is significantly above medium strength although not really a strong blend, and has a feast of different flavors. Sometimes I toss in some unflavored Green River Cavendish as well to give it the My Mixture 965 silken smoke effect, and when it has been a good month more of that delicious red or brown Virginia might make it into the mix. You can sprinkle it with Maryland (basically an orange Virginia, if that makes sense) for a mild citrus flavor, and toss in any of your favorite aromatic for that Frog Morton effect. Englishes smell terrible when they burn, but they are a good general tobacco to have, with the American English being stouter and smoother. You can substitute that great Cube Cut Burley from C&D for the unsmoked Burleys if you can find it on the shelves, and it slows down the burn even further, something that is useful when you are going to be outdoors and wind will periodically whip past your pipe.

This particular tin of Villiger light English was purchased in 2011 and probably dates back a few years earlier, since Villiger (the brand, not the blender) is good at selling little cigars but not as adept at reaching out to the pipe audience, which unfortunately for them was getting hipsterized and reaching out for more novelty blends than old favorites redone in a convenient form. The grim truth of tobacco blending seems to be that all of the major variations are well known, but that doing them right proves to be elusive as memory is lost between generations, the social capital equivalent of link rot on the internet. Most likely, this tin had a couple years of age on it when it came to me, and it has comfortably nestled into this drawer and waited for another decade and change so that it could be enjoyed in the proper light.

As written about before around here, this blend ages quite well: the Virginias get sweeter, the Latakia loses its edge and the somewhat soapy flavor it can have, and the Orientals go from a vinegar sourness to a light tangy flavor. Early Day always distinguished itself by being more spicy than smooth, sort of like toast with cinnamon sugar, despite working within the mellow world of the light English subgenre. With time, the spiciness becomes more of a cinnamon-molasses flavor rolling off the tongue, and the sweetness becomes more of a background flavor. But on the whole, this blend did not change that much. It has not changed much from where it was a few years ago. I suspect that the tin when I got it, other than having a little bit more Latakia punch, was basically how it is now.

Hobbyists idealize aging tobacco because it is something to talk about. They are not all wrong; your average blend with lots of bright Virginia gets a lot better after a year. At that point, however, the improvements seem to taper off. Maybe at five years you get the next peak. The Virginia blends I have kept for a decade do not distinguish themselves massively from where they were after a year or two. Burley blends lose a bit of the vegetal “Burley bite” but otherwise are about the same. Aromatics drop a lot of the top note, which makes them taste more like the Cavendish-Burley mixtures they generally are, which improves them a bit but will bother those who like the strong added flavorings. The blends that benefit most from aging, in my view, are the Virginia-Burley blends that aim for the mass market, like Golden Extra and Luxury Bullseye Flake, which are bitey like kittens on meth when they are new, but smooth and delicious after six months and glossily sweet at a year. In other words, fret not if you do not have aged tobaccos. You will do just fine.

As G.L. Pease writes:

But, after a couple months in the tin, even with ribbon-blended tobaccos, the various components will “marry,” will integrate into a more cohesive whole, rather than present themselves as individual aspects of the blend. Within one to five years, the tobacco will really begin to shine. Beyond this time frame, the changes are much more gradual. While the blend may continue to improve for years, even decades, the changes will not be as dramatic as they are in the first few years. Some people enjoy the exuberance of some blends in their youth, while others prefer the more mature complexity of tobaccos that have been aged for long periods. I recommend experimenting to see what suits you best with each blend or style.

In my view, what happens during aging is more than the blend marrying. He sort of hints at that here:

Tobacos that are pressed as part of their processing, of course, have an edge on those that are blended as previously cut ribbons, because the tobaccos have been given an opportunity to get to know one another more intimately.

As I see it, the aging process does what the harvesting, curing, sweating, and fermenting that all tobacco undergoes does, and what steam pressing does: it mashes and crushes the little cells so that the chemicals we do not want move out into the surrounding atmosphere, and allows the sugars to go through a process like carmelization that makes them taste less like white table sugar and more like a rich brown sugar or turbinado sugar. The acidic, ammonia, and vegetal flavors decrease as that stuff off-gasses, and you get more of what tobacco was always meant to be. No doubt it also marries the tobaccos to each other, but its primary utility is

Antiquarian blenders took care of this process by wrapping tobacco into ropes, mashing them in screw-presses, and then stretching them out in their basements in order to let them emit unwanted chemicals and gain sweetness. With early tobacco, this was not artisanal so much as necessary, because those varietals were closer to the natural state with more bite and vegetable flavor. They were also prone to mould or rot. Twisting them up in ropes, fermenting them as Perique, smoking them in the fields, bending them into infinity symbol shaped twists, or pressing them in steam-presses released these unwanted chemicals and let the blends sweeten to the point where they could be consumed, even if to nowadays pipe smokers the blends would seem a little rough.

Recently some samples came my way which were exceptional. The first was a GH Louisiana Flake, basically the finest Va/Per known to humankind, with fifteen years of age on it. Thanks to a kind gift from a correspondent, I was able to taste this one in the full glory of its old age, although I had a feeling this one is pretty good out of the box just slightly less sweet and with a little more acidity. A subsequent trip to the local tobacco shop confirmed this perception, even if it has taken me months or years to get to both samples. I like these mostly-natural flakes because they burn to grey dust and deliver constant pleasurable thin smoke for hours, which is perfect if one is engaged in doing something, even something sessile like watching television. In the same batch appeared a sample of C&D Opening Night, which is a mostly unmolested red-bright Virginia flake that is exceptionally sweet and easy to smoke, sort of like the other rough flakes C&D does such as Burley Flake #1, but because of the bright Virginia, is going to need at least a year in the can before it is less acidic than raptor vomit. In addition, I got to try a five-year-old GH Brown Twist Sliced, which was exceptional because the blend new is exceptional, with only a slight amount of added sweetness and crystalization visible on the surface. Nothing to shake at, and when combined with a reasonable amount of the Louisiana Flake, this produced a series of what may have been the best bowls smoked by this lone pipe smoker.

To smoke a pipe is to never be alone. You always have a mission to enjoy, but that requires being prepared and alert. More than an excuse to step out the door when life throws you wait times, you view the “adult” “real world” as the interruption to moments of joy, and when given a chance to wait, embrace it with a pipe. You are open to interacting others because if they have seen the world as you do, they will understand what makes you tick enough to be good acquaintances and maybe even comrades on the road through life. In the big calculus, this matters more than how long you aged your tobacco, how rare it is, and how expensive your pipe is. You are here for the comraderie and the isolation, because sometimes, you and your pipe must be brothers in arms on a lonely path. However, you are never alone; you are only temporarily separated from the others, and the next bend in the road will reveal the warm lighted windows of a pub, foaming with ale and spouting smoke, as the coins jingle in your pocket and a smile brightens your face. To smoke a pipe is to step off the road and onto the path, and therefore, to always be part of something larger than yourself, even if only in the smallest detail.