A few months back, Milan Tobacconists started the rumor that Prince Albert was going away, spurring a search for a suitable replacement. It turned out that someone misread the notice, and while the 1.5oz packs of Prince Albert were discontinued, you can still buy it in the big tubs for codger scooping. However, one of the good things that came out of that was the discovery of similar blends, like one that sits halfway between Prince Albert and Sir Walter Raleigh, Mac Baren Symphony:

Summary: a medium-strength Burley blend with a mild chocolate flavoring

With “Symphony,” Mac Baren makes a blend that smokes like an OTC but tastes more like a European smoking mixture. Upon opening the tin, the scent of milk chocolate wafts upward. The first light squirts out a bit of this flavor, but it quickly melds with the naturally somewhat chocolatey Burley flavor, aided by the Mac Baren natural Cavendish in becoming a thick but soft smoke that is gentle on the mouth. Virginias hide in back, and are the weakest part of this blend, being sizzly with acid like PopRocks or Lemonheads, but they are a minor player and caramelize rather quickly, letting the Burley mixture take the lead. The malted flavor of white Burley and the richer, earthy dark Burley play together in this mix, producing a taste like roasted almond paste with a light chocolate-vanilla flavoring. Like the blends that may have inspired it — “Prince Albert,” “Sir Walter Raleigh,” and “Edgeworth Ready-Rubbed” — this blend lights easily and stays lit, delivers a medium level of nicotine, has a mild but distinctive flavor, and burns down almost completely to ash. You could smoke this all day and not only enjoy it, but probably never get bored, because within this simple chocolate flavor a tapestry of interlocking influences from Virginias and Burleys plays out like a rainstorm, with never quite the same pattern of drops but similar intensity from top to bottom of the bowl.

Savinelli – Brunello Flake

Yet another from the category of really nice smokes that could use a bit more nicotine, but there's no sense penalizing them for that; these are good blends. Savinelli Brunello Flake (blended, not surprisingly, by Mac Baren) seems to be one of those flake blends that seems designed for an easy all-day smoke:

Summary: a nice Virginia flake fortified by Burleys with a tang from Orientals and toppings.

Most reviews focus on this blend as a Burley flake, but it makes more sense to explore it as being something like “Erinmore Flake”: a Virginia flake with a lot of Burley and possibly Cavendish to soften it and make it burn less hot. The volume of smoke on first light suggests Burley, at which point the main flavors are the roasted almond of white Burley in the background with a gentle tang from the Orientals that melds into the topping like a chord, bringing out the floral, fruit, and berry flavors which mostly burn off after the first quarter of the bowl but remain as a sort of “spin” to the Oriental sweet-sour zest. Once the bowl gets going, the Burley makes more of its presence known, suggesting some fermented dark Burley as well, but then the sugars in the Virginia caramelize and that flavor dominates. At this point, the Burley warms up the citrus-honey-brioche taste of the Virginias while the slightly herbal ginger-like flavor of the Orientals guides the taste as a whole. Although pressed as a European-style hard flake, the Orientals (and possibly Cavendish) are drier than the Virginias, so these flakes open up easily and light without much effort. Like the MacBaren “Navy Flake” or “Erinmore Flake,” the bowl burns like an OTC and stays flavorful to the last bits, burning to a fine dusty ash.

This reminds me most of a blend with more Virginia, and stronger Virginias, that is not blended by Mac Baren, but has the same grab-and-go ease with rich flavor, STG Erinmore Flake:

Summary: bright Virginias dominates a mix of darker Virginias and Burleys to create a complex flavor.

Sweet and acidic bright Virginias lead the taste profile here, with the stewed fruit and malted grain taste of red and brown Virginias emerging later; the Cavendish must be a minor player, adding its softness, while Burley warms up the flavor. Like “Golden Sliced” and “Luxury Twist Flake,” this tobacco has been softened to a bready texture and is memorable for a sweetness that carries to the bottom of the bowl. Erinmore adds a coconut flavoring with something like apricot or berries mixed in, but this topping burns off relatively quickly leaving only a coconut-cherry aftertaste. What I like about this blend is that despite all of the above, there is complexity in this flavor like a good cocktail, with the synergy of the different ingredients fragmenting and then returning as the smoldering flame descends in the bowl.

While on the surface, Brunello Flake is a Burley flake, it really dopes out more like a Virginia flake stacked up with Burley and a touch of Orientals or Cavendish to make it lush and voluminous in smoke. The topping is strong at first, but increasingly mild, to the point where it becomes a background complement and guide to flavor rather than a dominant voice in itself.

Smoking Outside the Box

They always tell you to “think outside the box,” as if having everyone focused on non-conformity will result in anything but a new variety of conformity. So much of life comes back to the mirror image, where we are staring at a representation of ourselves, and trying to change how it looks, despite everything happening in reverse since left is right and right left.

In the case of today's blends, some of this thinking worked out well by approaching the conventional with new eyes, as if looking beyond the mirror to a portrait or scene outside the window for inspiration. Up first is Boswell's Christmas Cookie, a (successful) attempt to make an aromatic for those family gatherings:

Summary: a vanilla-caramel aromatic with light spices that you can smoke in a roomful of people without many complaints.

The Cavendish dominates this blend with its soft velour-like smoke and gentle sweetness, with a light Burley and some Virginia playing a backing role and mostly swallowed up by the topping, which mostly presents a caramel or sugar flavor with a smattering of spices, perhaps cinammon and nutmeg, behind a wall of what tastes like rum and vanilla. Since this is one of the better aromatics of my acquaintance, it accompanied me on a test run out in the “real world,” where people commented that it smelled like a very gentle version of an old-type pipe. Boswell's deserves credit however for making an aromatic that burns cool and lacks the stinging tongue nip of most alcohol/sugar concoctions applied to tobacco, and I could see mixing this with some stout Burley to smoke throughout any family gathering or holiday.

For this test, I chose the hardest setting: the parking structure at one of the locations where I work, which is six stories of concrete ugliness filled with car exhaust. Rats run in the gaps designed into the building so it will expand and contract with the heat, and not only do we get periodic rodent berries falling among us, but the entire place has a wonderful stench of varmint urine in addition to the car flatus and lingering fast food smells from the open trash cans. It sounds like hell, but it really is a delightful place, because by exiling the smokers out here, The Management (always lobotomized by their fear of risk and desire to participate in whatever the trend of the moment seems to be in the industry magazines) created a place for the interesting people: the outliers, outsiders, outcasts, oddities, dissidents, and social dropouts, many of whom originate in that intersection of intelligence and non-compliance which produces almost all of the independent thought in the office.

To post yourself out here is to provoke wrinkled faces and pinched noses because the normies have to walk past us unruly smokers to get to the elevators and stairs, and since the only way to have power in this world is to gripe about something, they react to the smoke as if they were hit in the face with a rotting flesh club covered in AIDS and Ebola-Marburg. However, no scrunchy faces greeted Christmas Cookie. Instead, they all sort of looked wistful, a bit nostalgic, and perhaps slightly disappointed that this was not actually a sugar cookie. Underneath the flavorings, this is a straight-up Cavendish blend that utilizes a good deal of mellow Burley and some Virginia, which gives the second half of the bowl a comfortable feeling of regular pipe smoking. Again, the triumph here is that it does not have the plastic napalm attack of your regular aromatics.

On the other hand, another sample that was generously sent in by a reader, Seattle Pipe Club Mississippi River Special Reserve, did not strike me as particularly pleasant in room note or worth smoking. It is sweet, and has a strong but random flavor, which achieves the “garbage plate” effect where you have no idea what you're wolfing down but since it's all covered in barbecue sauce it tastes sweet-sour-spicy-gooey enough that you think you love it. This blend fell short of the hype as usual, even if all of the influencers gave it four stars, as usual:

Summary: another Scottish blend that achieves the “garbage plate” effect but no particular flavor.

These blends remind me of postmodern novels. They start with a worship of Dunhill “My Mixture 965,” then take it in an American direction by piling in more Burley and larger doses of bright Virginia and intermediate Virginia shades (orange, maybe Maryland). Then they press it together. Like the postmodern novel, the more high concepts you throw at a book, the more it becomes like having a committee write it, and you end up with a simple conclusion at the end of a rambling but varied and pluralistic discourse. Similarly, this blend starts out promising until you realize that you are smoking an Oriental rug knitted of random tobaccos, at which point you simply pick up some “My Mixture 965” or “Red Rapparee” instead.

When I was less experienced, I used to love a garbage plate, especially after about eight beers. Fast forward and I am not impressed by the beers, very few of which live up to Sam Smith Brown Ale or even Lone Pint Yellow Rose standards, and doubly not impressed by the garbage plate, which is an ideal product because it is both high-margin and utilitarian. High-margin means that they make it from cheap stuff, and utilitarian means that most of us say “yeah it's OK if you like that sort of thing I guess” when asked in a social setting what we think about it. A good garbage plate consists of all the stuff that is on the edge of going bad, cooked up with extra fat, acidic tomato sauce, sugars, seed oils, and salt, all of which turn cheap food into a cheap dish that reveals itself as expensive when you look at what you could have had with the money instead. I would feel kind of stupid paying the high prices for Seattle Pipe Club, G.L. Pease, Cascadia Pipe Company, John Cotton, Briar Works, or other mainstream artisanal boutique blends: in each case, you are getting a garbage plate of random flavors or a known archetype done with a quirk or iconoclasm unrelated to quality of experience, made from the cheap leaf that some big house (Sutliff, C&D, Lane) has accumulated. Each of these are custom labels allowing these big shops to resell their cheap stuff at high markup, and this drives down quality by acclimating the pipe community to buying low quality at high prices. Who else did this? Well, American cigarettes sure seem to suck these days, in fact since about the mid-1980s, and yet they sell for an awful lot of money...

I notice that the latest Pipes and Cigars catalog shows a few closeout blends. The Cohiba and Drexel pipe tobaccos seem to be going away. These were the great hope of “buy low, sell high (with a buttload of advertising)” blending houses a few years ago. Someone found a way to get storied blends like Cohiba, Macanudo, and La Gloria Cubana to sign up for a release of pipe tobacco. Then they let the middle managers at it, so they came up with versions of Captain Black which taste a little bit like a cigar. Naturally, these blends failed. Drexel failed for the same reason the Villiger blends fail each generation, which is that they played it too conservative and simply aped existing blends. The novelty blends like Seattle Pipe Club play it too liberal, trying to stand out by being different and unique, but the Drexel, Missouri Meerschaum, John Bull, et al. fail by being too conservative and cloning what is known to succeed, at which point people shrug and keep smoking what they already like, since they have no reaosn to buy something new at a higher price that is basically what they are already smoking. They found a whole raftload of influencers to go on YouTube and TobaccoReviews and swear on their mother's glistening hemorrhoids that the new Macanudo was the best thing ever, or that Drexel VII was the vaper you needed this season... now they're back, but they're hyping Cascadia Pipe Company blends.

Speaking of which, please save us all from Cascadia Pipe Company (Scandinavian Tobacco Group) Campsite:

Summary: another $15 clone of what you can get for $10 in better quality.

STG figured out that they could take their ordinary blending leaf, trick it out by pressing it into a plug, and sell it for seven times what they could otherwise achieve. “Campsite” falls short of the full-press plugs from Mac Baren and Gawith Hoggarth, but does better than the loose sloppy plugs from G.L. Pease and the odious “kake” from Sutliff. I cut plugs into thin shavings, and in that form, “Campsite” lights quickly and settles into a nice easy place. You still get the acidity of the bright Virginias, unlike with a nice UK plug, and the flavor is thin, since the leaf is relatively young. The mixture of orange, red, brown, and bright Virginias does well but falls short of C&D “Virginia Flake,” which is also an acidfest but has a more naturally balanced flavor than “Campsite.” I see no reason to reach for this one again, especially at luxury prices, but it is not a terrible experience especially once I dump in enough dark fired Kentucky Burley to mute the raging sugar fire and vinegar blast of the bright Virginias.

You might see this as your standard Virgina plug: mostly bright Virginia, with enough orange, red, and brown mixed in to give it some depth of flavor, but at the end of the day you are smoking a honey white bread sandwich with a little apricot jelly on it, and the flavor does not change, nor does the faint bitterness of the acid which will also give you chemical tongue bite. “It's OK if you like that sort of thing I guess” is the best it gets, but for me, the question is what else you could have for that fifteen bucks, and the answer is a whole lot of better things if you like better things and believe you deserve them. If you hate yourself and want to waste your money, then rationalize it by praising the light sage and leather flavors of wine and aged balsamic vinegar (or whatever the influencers claim to be tasting today) of this blend, go ahead and do it. It is sort of like drinking cheap Tequila alone: you hate yourself and want to die, but you are going to get wasted nonetheless and still hate yourself even more in the morning, so you might as well go ahead and do it in order to get the fully pity and self-loathing experience. That way, you can go about the rest of the day knowing you have done your penance and suffered like Jesus or the workers of the world, therefore, you are now as much a victim as anyone else and are therefore entitled to whatever they're getting (probably a garbage plate).

If I were an MBA in the world of pipe tobacco, my goal would be simple: find a way to use the bulk Burley mixture and new bright Virginia as much as possible in a blend that could be sold at a higher price through advertising, influencers, and “quirks,” or oddities of added topping, format, and packaging. That would allow me to sell the stuff they make RYO out of — and not all of it is bad, since blends like Ohm Natural are pretty good, especially for the price — at the prices people pay for imported tobaccos like Samuel Gawith, John Aylesbury, Rattray's, Peterson, and Mac Baren's HH line. A few years ago, the wisdom in the pipe industry held that the holy grail was to make every new blend into a version of Lane 1-Q, itself a near-clone of Captain Black, since this was the big seller at the time. With the internet, people are more interested in what stands out instead of what fits the mold, so like the 1950s->1980s cultural transition, people want different, iconoclastic, unique, quirky, artisanal, oddball, and weird blends. To sell those, you need some stooge influencers to go out on YouTube and TobaccoReviews to talk about how your latest pile of bulk tobacco re-branded as something with personality is great.

These influencers do their “Hello Fellow Kids” routine and present the corporate stooge material as if it were something sui generis (a fancy term for “being his own man” or the like) and then all of the employees of these companies get the email and go out and upvote the stuff the influencers posted. Then all of the lonely people, desperate for attention, go out and buy the stuff, and since they have paid the money they want to feel good about it, so they go out on social media and ramble on about all the flavors they tasted and how good the stuff is. That, it is hoped by industry, will then con all the new-era smokers with beards and tattoos into buying the former RYO at boutique prices. The people in power, the same middle managers who made your life a nightmare during your first entry-level job, make “safe” and “uncontroversial” decisions based on what they read in the media, which they mistake for acutal public opinion.

The people in the boardroom have decided that pipe smokers are a dwindling group, so they might as well squeeze as much money out of them as possible, which requires marketing to lonely people who want to have 385 jars of specially labeled quirky tobaccos and fifteen $200 pipes with unique stories behind them, smoke twice a month but post four times a week about it, and then after a few years toss it all and move on to a new hobby. That way, industry finds a big group of people to sell to, gets its five grand from each, and then moves on instead of having to deliver good quality at a good price, which is cheap but does not justify having a bunch of marketers, copywriters, graphic artists, social media consultants, SEO experts, and most of all middle managers and lawyers around. They're “creating jobs,” you see.

For more, look to “Smoking Outside the Box.”

A few weeks ago, I found myself moving a familiar object when I heard a sharp snap and realized that my rope had broken and this large object was coming my way faster than I could probably react. Being a practical sort, I stepped aside, but I could not get my right arm out of the way. Consequently, I tore a muscle, apparently a relatively small one, but it has still been a bit of a pain waiting for the little steak-strip in my arm to heal.

More accurately, it has been a bit of pain. This meant that I was already in a bit of a disgruntled mood when I had to temporarily move my smoke spot and work area because of an update to my place of residence. All told, the crisis was not so bad, but I found myself in a garage with a borrowed window unit air conditioner, crouching sweatily over a folding card table with my laptop, pipes, and phone. Add a legal pad with a doodle of a pipe with smoke coming out of it and you have the full picture.

This means that my usual agenda of trying blends has been interrupted. Everything is in boxes; I cannot even reach my cellar, which many of you may recall is an anomalous walk-in closet in our guest room which is piled high with old clothes, obsolete equipment, books both unread and well-enjoyed, fishing poles, a kayak (there may be more than one, but I have not been brave enough to check), heirlooms, knicknacks, home canning experiments, shotgun shells, a broken treadmill from the 1990s, old model rockets, abandoned Walmart furniture, and oh yes, we cannot forget, a few dozen flats of pint-sized widemouth jars filled with interesting tobacco, albeit mostly unlabeled (or worse, labeled in a Sharpie'd scrawl using many long-forgotten abbreviations). I took a box of tins, pouches, jars, and gear off to my new home and here I have been, curled under the sign of blue smoke.

Luckily among those, I had a few squirreled away. It helped to know that I had something to look forward to, especially as this arm knit. I thank all of you who have mailed me tobaccos, music, and books over the years. I cannot overstate how much of a joy this has been. For me, smoking a pipe is like wandering in a field near the old neighborhood, which since all fields are connected (you may have to hop a freeway or two) opens the gate to more wanderings. Nothing cheers me up more than striking out into the wild with nothing but a pipe and a battered water bottle to keep me company. Fields, like life itself, reward those who believe in the goodness of life as a sacrament and immutable fact of existence, and their delights reveal themselves to those who seek them in the right frame of mind to notice these subtle joys.

This summer, like every one before it, brings a new type of bug each day. I visit the migrating birds, and sometimes say hello to the pikes which cluster by the warm water output of our local water treatment plant. I head to the neighborhoods on the far side of my local community to say hello to my favorite dogs, go deep on the sides of the bayou that winds through it to make sure that I have seen all the snakes that are sunning themselves, and wander to the local golf course pond so I can sing old Ramones and Black Sabbath songs to the turtles. They are very polite listeners, but as soon as my back is turned, they slip under the water.

Nature brings me in touch with the duality of this world, not between heavens and Earth, but between its literalist darkness and the hope we find in it. I recongize that those turtles, which are kissed by the gods with adorableness, live in an environment of natural selection. Like me, they die, sometimes suddenly at the hands of some predator. That is the darkness of life, I suppose: death, aging, helplessness, and the possibility that it all ends. This scares us more than any sane person would admit, since if we end abruptly with nothing to show for our experience of suffering and striving in life, it all seems pointless. I have cause to believe, and have to believe, that something more lurks out there. As one of the honestly heroic characters in movies says, life is an unconscious process that ends in the good:

True magic is neither black, nor white — it's both because nature is both. Loving and cruel, all at the same time. The only good or bad is in the heart of the witch. Life keeps a balance on its own. Whatever you send out there you get back times three.

In my heart and the innermost recesses of my mind, I believe that nature is both good and bad because it needs to in order to be good, and to provide me with afternoon walks in a cloud of Dark Bird's Eye, and to do the same for anyone else who seeks a world beyond the hand-to-mouth corporate existence and the quest for coolness that happens at the local hipster pub. When we escape enough advertising and humanity, we see life as it is, a festival of the fruits of the field and the flame.

Speaking of, I have been enjoying the Boswell's Northwoods aromatic English:

Summary: a crossover English aromatic which keeps its toppings mild enough to let the Latakia emerge at just the right amount.

Crossover English blends got huge with “Frog Morton,” but have been with us for some time, since they both spice up the aromatic genre and rein in the Latakia from being a flavor shillelagh that clobbers everything else in the blend. “Northwoods” comes to us from the Scottish tradition, since it has Cavendish mixed in, but also has a topping of something like rum, maple, and cherry. I detected zero “urinal cake” scent, but in my experience, anything fruity plus alcohol generates a little bit of tin note that might resemble one of those ubiquitous pink pucks. This tames the Latakia, which is here in generous but not excessive proportions, but also dominates the Virginias, which really shine in the second portion of the bowl. It feels like small amounts of Burley might be present as well. The topping takes the role of the Orientals, and instead drops in a fruity sweetness, onto which the Latakia rolls like fog over a cold morning lake. This brings out the woody and incense-like flavors of the wood and herbs used to fire cure the Latakia, but keeps them in proportion, making for a mild and satisfying English smoke. This might be too flavor-intense for an all-day mixture, but it is perfect for an early night reading session, which is how I prefer it.

Ever since I experienced Savinelli Essenza Cipriota I have been somewhat fascinating by the aromatic English. It is basically an English blend, optionally with white Burley and Cavendish, with some kind of topping designed to complement but not obliterate the English flavor. I know that Frog Morton and friends were popular as heck, and people love their Mac Baren Plumcake and Solent Mixture, but this was one of my first ventures deep into aromatic English territory. I could see smoking this every day.

Speaking of everyday smokes, let me offer up the Gawith Hoggarth Brown Flake for those who like really smooth and balanced smokes:

Summary: a good Virginia flake stabilized by Burley and given a slight smoky flavor by dark fired Kentucky Burley.

Every smoker will at some time fall in love with Virginias, the sweet leaf with overtones of citrus, clover honey, and almonds. By themselves, however, they burn hot and acidic until pressed and aged properly, and even then, can be one-dimensional. The best blenders introduce just a little bit of dark fired Kentucky Burley as occurs here to color the flavor a give the blend some strength, while using air-cured Burley to slow the burn and warm up the flavor, pushing it closer to roasted almonds and toasted barley. “Brown Flake” brings us the best of the Virginia genre with a gentle sweet flavor, but also uses Burley as a condimental ingredient to perfection. Unlike many flakes, this one takes to the match easily and burns consistently, leaving behind little dottle and speckled ash. It naturally cadences the pace of the smoker with its flavor, which rewards the draw achieved by breathing instead of rapid puffing of sucking. When the bowl melts down into its second half, the Virginias fully caramelize and a lemony molasses flavor takes over. Those who like vapers should consider this blend because it has a similar depth of flavor even without the Perique. Since this one clocks in at just about medium on flavor, strength, and room note, I could smoke this all day, every day and not feel slighted in the least.

I mix this with Brown Twist Sliced to give it some strength, but if I were just packing bowl after bowl while working at a desk, in a field, or on the road, I would simply go with the brown flake itself in huge amounts. It always tastes good, and its internal components keep each other from becoming too dominant, so you get this nice smooth flavor with lots of internal components that hold each other in check and complement each other. It's wonderful stuff.

At the end of the day, what makes me want to overcome injuries and get back to normal is that I like the normal. If you know where to look, the beauties of everyday life reveal their secrets, and the experience deepens like a ritual. Once this arm knits, I hope to explore more secrets hidden in plain sight and mundane mysteries camouflaged in the midst of the ordinary. I suspect there is a great deal more to find.