nicotiana

Out on a mission in the world when my track ran close to the local tobacco shack, I evaded the parking goblins — this hoity-toity shopping center has started trying to bill people $2 an hour through credit card apps at the meters — and contorted my way into a parking sign just short of the warning signs at the intersection.

Tobacconists (this is the old school term for B&M or “brick and mortar” shops that sell pipe tobacco, cigars, maybe whisky and guns if you are lucky) provide a unique experience for those of us who are sometimes road warriors in our own region. Not every job is always done from a desk, and sometimes you end up cruising around git-er-done-ing even if it takes you many miles into the concrete, aluminum, and plastic wilderness of modernity.

Nothing compares to, when you have a half hour between attending to the crises of others, stopping by a cool, dark, and smoky establishment where you can pick up a little treat. You outgrew candy, food treats in general just mean dead calories at this point, and you own all the books you want to read, or at least most of them (current as of last Saturday). So you pull into the adult recreation center and look at tobacco.

Lately my tastes have run only to flake tobacco, which puzzled me. It started with a question by shop owner Diane Grace about how the Coniston Cut Plug being purchased would be consumed. Rub it out? No, even though “ready rubbed” may be the easiest smoking cut, since it burns slowly and yet lights easily; cube cut is a second place, if you can get a good cube cut like Cube Cut Burley, which if it were widely available would be my recommendation for new smokers since it smokes easily like a summer daydream. Cut it into cubes? Maybe, if there is a good knife and chopping block handy, which there almost never is. For whatever reason, flake smokes best to me in flake form, even if it takes more effort to get it lit.

Historical conjecture being fun, we can see why flakes came about. Crushing the tobacco, like fermenting cabbage to make it into sauerkraut, lets the annoying chemicals escape to the wind while making the leaf sweeter and stronger. Old school pipe smokers in a time before the ubiquitous ziploc plastic bag probably picked up an ounce down at their local in a paper sack and carried it around in their pockets. Flakes will endure that without terrible moisture loss, especially if you keep them together in a stack. These same sepia smokers probably lit flakes with kitchen or coal lamp matches or splinters stuck into the fireplace, so they had good quality big flame they could dip down into the stack of leaf, getting it hot enough to light.

At that point, the appeal of flake becomes evident. It smokes consistently; the flavor is roughly the same throughout as is the pace of burning, and you do not get the wet gutter of half-burned tobacco bits to which some ribbon cuts degrade as the flame crawls downward. It smokes long, even more if you breath-smoke it while clenched, which makes it perfect for long drives, walking through the woods, or cussing up a storm over some persnickety gadget that you have just about got working except for this one thing, oh, and that other one too. It tends to stay together so you have less of the cloud of ash flying around when you accidentally swing a pipe too fast. It also in my view produces less visible smoke and stench, so it is a good way to smoke a pipe where the background smell will not be noticed but abundant clouds of bountiful smoke will scare off the womenfolks.

On top of that, if you get a strong blend, flake smokes like a cigar and will keep you on your feet. This is useful when the day is cold or wet, when you are brain-fogged and sleepy in the way that even a hot bucket of bullet coffee cannot fix, or when you are dealing with the little not entirely unpleasant but not enjoyable either tasks that life pitches tenfold into any project. You keep that warm smoke rolling over the tongue and ask the nicotine angels how many demons can dance on the head of a pin, and soon you have secured the hoses and spliced the wires enough that it is time to move on to the next life micro-adventure.

My flake journey started with the Gawith Hoggarth leaf, of course, because Coniston Cut Plug is one of the best tobaccos known to humankind (and probably the aliens who keep visiting to see what civilizations dying of their own fear look like). It is formed of dark fired leaf, mostly Kentucky-style Burley but with enough Virginia to sweeten it, matched up in nearly perfect proportions. Yes, it has some of that clove, frankincense, rose, geranium, and souls of the dead essence that they spray on it, but the stuff is organic enough to not bother the nose and sinuses like the soda pop sugar soak they give the commercial blends. The leaf comes to you in long thin flakes, so the right move is to roll it up in little balls, squish them vertically from one side and then the other, and stuff them into the pipe so they slide in easily and have some breathing room on the sides. A moderately large pipe of this stuff will last you a few hours and end up with a faint taste of berries instead of the carpet shop and geriatric lady bathroom stench of the “Lakeland Essence” that burns off when you first light it.

As a self-proclaimed lazy hedonist dedicated to enjoying life and its mysteries more than slaving away at repetitive tasks for the sake of the economy, for me the process does not include the tamping light. You light and go. If the pipe goes out, then you can knuckle-tamp or otherwise push down whatever has risen up to meet the flame, but usually after a good solid light it starts burning and may only need a refresher fire to make sure you get the edges. Again, this works best with the breath-smoke and clench of someone who is doing something with the hands instead of relaxing at the local wheatgrass bar, so this will not be for everyone. Flakes are best in the field.

The flake journey picked up the pace when the next purchase tried out the “new” — Peterson reformed its blends a couple years back — University Flake in one of the battered Rossi Vittoria pipes that floated onto the pipe desk a few years back after a particularly good sale. They dialed back the strength a bit, which made this feel unsatisfying, but the basic flavor has a bit more Virginia sweetness now, making it a solid Burley flake with enough sweet-sour going on to avoid descending into the roast almonds on toasted wheat bread feel of a strong Burley. This tin met the qualifying test of being smoked without thought and appreciated doubly so after the fingers hit the bottom of the tin and groped fruitlessly for another flake, only to find that all had been consumed. If we rated blends by how little they made us neurotic, this one would rank up there as almost free of neurosis, but for this active and frenetic pipe smoker, it could use to rise a notch on the nicotine scale above medium-to-strong, which I associate with breakfast blends.

For years, its cousin Irish Flake has been a favorite around here, but as usual, the old ways were better, since over time complaints pile up until the people in charge make everything into the same old thing that gets the fewest demerits from those who like to complain. If you give a focus group any food, they will turn it into a version of a Big Mac or Budweiser given enough time, and you will want to find something else after awhile because the perfect balance of sweet, salty, and carbo-loading becomes unsatisfying because it lacks what inspires those complaints, character. Character means excess in the sense of being emphatic about certain aspects of personality, more than the gestures that novelists use in place of moral and intellectual maturation in their characters, and the old version of this blend was a grotty old guy who would fight anyone who wanted to turn up the heat because cold builds character. The ancient tins that the cellar metes out for pleasure on religious holidays (still not sure of the religion since the days are picked randomly) wanted to tell you a fish story, down five pints, and the go wrestle a boar. The new version would like you to step into its office to consider the architecture of downtown in twilight.

At this point the quest for flake hit high gear. With a head full of figures, my bedraggled flesh avatar wandered into the store after parking in the lot across the street where the first hour or so is free, avoiding the headache of the parking hall monitors and their esurient surcharges, the tin of HH Bold Kentucky practically screamed out to be selected for a pagan fire sacrifice, so for the entirely reasonable price of $16.75 (the Peterson blends are decently priced too at $18) it came home with me, or rather was opened with a locker key in the car and enjoyed immediately. This blend like the other UK-type flakes above consists of a balance between Dark Fired Kentucky Burley and aged bright Virginia, making it not so much sweet-sour as a constant Moby-Dick style contest between sweetness and that rich cocoa, coffee, and fire type flavor from the dark leaf. If you hand me a tin of this, you make a happy man, and the tins last a long time because the flake naturally smokes slowly with full flavor to the last guttering flame.

The parking authorities are worth mentioning because they are helping to kill that shop. The local tobacco shack suffers already from post-COVID pricing, with pipe cleaners now going for a painful $4.50, and the parking debacle drives away many of those who simply want to stop in, pick up a tin or bag to enjoy on the road as they wander through life, and make a little small talk before disappearing into the hazy grey miasma of the city. The guys that the stores focus on who show up to buy a couple hundred bucks of cigars and then sit around smoking them for several hours are not bothered by the additional six bucks in parking fees, but the casual smoker finds this disturbing, which may be why fewer of those are seen even during peak hours. Those guys, while not a yuge portion of the buying audience, are the lifeblood of these shops because they show up week after week, year after year, and others observe this, which draws community traffic to the shop. With luck the shack will make it, but inventory seems thinner of late, so there is some worry.

Flake tobacco will not be for everyone. In particular, if you are like this smoker-writer, it may take you months or years before you are ready to smoke it well, and before it is smoked well it hides its majesties and mysteries behind endless fumbling with a Bic lighter and a soaking bowl. Those who want to plunge into the Marianas Trench of flake smoking would do well to follow their gut. You look at the tobacco and see density; you will have to light it more, and most importantly, you need to avoid cramming it in there like a trash compactor load because it needs to breathe. Denser things go out faster, too, so it rewards the breath-smoke or at least slow steady burning, as you might expect looking at tobacco that sometimes resembles wood more than leaf. But in the end it is worth it, like many of these little challenges in life, because in the technique a skill of self-control is also learned.