nicotiana

Last week at the local tobacco shack the owner, a patient and gentle lady, asked me if I rubbed out the Coniston Cut Plug I was buying. The answer is no, and the reason is that flakes smoke best if not rubbed out.

Such a statement will provoke controversy on pipe forums, but it is not my goal to tell you that you are doing it “wrong” by rubbing out your flakes. I do not care and I am not trying to control you; however, in my experience, flakes smoke best as flakes, but (and you knew a “but” was going to show up) flakes are difficult to light, smoke, and enjoy and therefore few get to enjoy them.

Let us see, you and I, if we can scrub our heads of preconceptions and live entirely not so much “in the moment” but in the experience of the present tense so that we can take a look at a flake. What do you see?

A flake consists of layers of tobacco leaves that have been pressed, either with cold presses or steam-driven heating, and possibly roasted or aged. These giant cakes of delicious tobacco are then sliced into thin strips. Those are then optionally sliced the other direction to make little tobacco pop-tarts that fit in your pipe.

This tells us that the dominating characteristic of flake tobacco is that it is compressed. You have to muck around with pipes a bit to realize that this means that as it it burns, a flake of tobacco will expand and slowly constrict airflow.

Loading

Your first challenge in smoking a flake arises when you load it into a pipe for this reason. You want to forget about “packing” and even filling, and think about a flake as something that should easily slide into your pipe. No further compression is needed or wanted.

All of my best flake smokes have come from bowls that, if I were to turn them over, would have probably fallen out on the grass in front of me. You want the different parts of the flake to be touching each other, but not crammed together, and the flake wad should barely touch the sides.

For ribbon flake like Coniston Cut Plug, it makes sense to tear off strips from the long side of the flake, wrap them in a circular fashion, and then squeeze until the different sides of the ribbon touch. Slide that into the pipe; it should go easily and barely touch the sides, leaving plenty of room to expand.

With the little pop-tart style square flakes, I tend to fold it over lengthwise, twist to expose the inner tobacco, then slide it into the pipe and leave even more room. These little tobacco wads expand quite a bit.

You may want to keep some of the “shake,” or little bits of loose tobacco at the bottom of the tin or bag, around so that you can pile it up on top as kindling. This makes it easier to get the flake below hot enough to ignite.

Lighting

Normal pipe smoking involves filling the bowl with loose tobacco shreds, compressing the top, sparking a “charring light” which causes tobacco to rise as it expands, then tamping and lighting again.

With flakes, you have a different situation. Your charring light has to go a bit deeper because the point is to make the different layers of tobacco swell in the flake, texturing the surface and giving it more area to ignite.

Then, your tamp needs to be more like a leveling off than compressing down into the pipe. Flake tends to expand more when lit, but collapse into dust when burned, so you can have a bit higher fill on the pipe.

At that point, you want to really give the pipe the coal but do so in a shallow but wide layer. You want the whole top of the tobacco wad to be on fire because flake goes out easily, being denser than regular tobacco. Think of trying to burn a roll of toilet paper versus a heap of loose toilet paper; the latter goes up immediately, but the former will resist your flame until you light it from the side and separate some layers so the fire has somewhere to grab hold. Do not ask me how I have experience in this area, I beg of you.

With a regular pipe-load, your goal will be to avoid getting it to burn too hot, but flakes tend to have more moisture, so you want to get that top layer a bit hotter. It needs to really be “on fire” as opposed to smoldering. It will quickly die down into a smolder anyway since flakes, like most compressed things, resist flame.

Smoking

If you can avoid packing too tightly and get the flake lit, you have a decent chance of having a good smoke if you manage to keep a steady draw.

Puffing, or alternating between no draw and a fast draw, causes the flake to flare up, then rapidly go out. This leads to relighting ten thousand times until you dump the bowl and go find some Prince Albert.

From my experience, the only way to smoke flake is the breath-smoking method. Clamp pipe in mouth, seal lips around the stem, and breathe normally through your nose. Every seven seconds, open the lips and the old smoke leaves.

Maybe this does not work for you. If that is the case, you may have to stop taking sudden draws and instead focus on long slow puffs, blowing out and then resuming. The less pressure you exert on the draw the better.

My favorite flake pipes tend to be light and moderately capacious ones so I can keep the stem in my mouth for a few hours while the flake burns down slowly. This means a steady dose of flavor and nicotine without constant relights.

Types

Flakes come in many flavors, with some using sugar additives like the delicious Scottish Flake or Navy Flake. However, that causes them to both burn hotter and be more acidic, which can result in burns on the roof of the mouth if you clamp.

Were I to nominate favorites, these would have to be the relatively unsugared flakes in the UK style such as Irish Flake, Coniston Cut Plug, and HH Bold Kentucky. American variants like Burley Flake #1 rank up there too.

Continental-style flakes like the Mac Baren and K&K offerings seem designed for use with pipe filters which cut down on the heat from burning sugar and the acidity. Dodge the first two puffs and smoke even slower if you can.

In my view, flakes get a bad rap because experienced smokers view them as elitey-petey, and yet few will tell new smokers what they need to do in order to avoid disappointing hot and wet flake bowls.

Some years ago rumor had it that a Nightcap flake was going to be introduced. I could go for that, but really I hope they make a Prince Albert flake so I can enjoy the slow boat to chocolatey Burley goodness.