nicotiana

I filled up a Rossi Vitoria — solid pipe, good beater, won't win any beauty contests but smokes like a charm — with a mix of Engine #99 and Black Irish X sliced, then took off on a lunt.

The world was asleep, as it should have been. A few more empty beer cans littered the streets, not to mention the masks, gloves, and condoms. The only other fellow out was the newspaper delivery van.

I am from the old school that says that the best way to welcome a year is to start it off with something that needs doing, so today I am going to renovate something someone else made in tribute to someone ancient and increasingly relevant. Past and future joined.

In a bowl of English tobacco. After I rounded the curve between the old city, the new suburbs, and the new city, all of which reach their tendrils into our little neighborhood, I came home across the abandoned field by the old school, and right then it hit: the caramel point, or the moment when enough tobacco gets melted in the bowl to turn its sugars into caramel and give up its nicotine freely.

Like all good Englishes, this one went from gingerbread to mulled wine to molasses in flavor. The sun rose, and I went home.

I make no secret that some blenders deserve worship in my world. Per Jensen at Mac Baren/Sutliff, Bob Runowski, Craig Tarler at C&D, whatever wizards run Gawith Hoggarth, the Esoterica guys, and a few others... all nerd-warriors who make the really great stuff. They deserve praise, and I tend to check out their blends even if I am not certain that I will be inspired by them.

As part of my working through the Mac Baren catalogue, I found Golden Extra, and just about immediately fell in love. This is the holy grail of aromatics: mostly white Burley, a little Virginia added, and topped with a sugar, cocoa, and vanilla confection that is far less goopy than most aromatics, but imparts just as much scent and flavor. The room note is spectacular on this one. It tastes like a Burley marshmallow, and the room smells like roast marshmallow after you smoke it. Women and Apple users beg me to smoke this around them.

It has small amounts of nicotine, so for me it is a better weekend tobacco than a work tobacco, but it pops out of the bag or tin as a ready-rubbed flake with big chunks of flake, some sugars glistening on the surface. Consequently, you fill a pipe by pushing this stuff in until you meet mild resistance, then flattening the top. Thanks to the sugar, it lights up like a Vietnamese village during a napalm strike. You can smoke this with your brain off and still enjoy it.

It seems like the anti-apotheosis of what I would normally smoke, since I favor high-nicotine full-natural blends like Cube Cut Burley or Kendal Dark, but it is so easy to smoke, such a pleasant experience, and so much admired by bystanders that I always keep some of this around. Another solid win for Mac Baren, and, well, who doesn't like marshmallows on a campfire?

From the notes to Gawith Hoggarth Black Twist Sliced:

This is the version of Black Irish X that has been sliced into fine, dime-sized, coins.

The popularity of black twist tobaccos always struck me as a mystery. They are thick, rubbery, and hard to light, but when you do get them going, they produce pungent olive oil tinged smoke which clings to everything. Misanthropes may delight in driving everyone away, but this seems to have little utility for the rest of you.

One thing that came to mind however was that, in the old days, it was relatively common for people to have custom mixtures or to brew them up themselves, starting out the week by mixing a few things in an old tin and carrying that around. People were less self-conscious, then, so if it worked, you went with it and hoped your friends did not notice. Black twists make excellent mixers, adding both strength and body.

As I was sitting there, staring at the lump of oily tobacco in the tin tray I use to mix up stuff for smoking, it occurred to me that these flavors might work quite well with an English, which would be good because most Englishes are a bit wimpy. That is, they taste great, but they are low in nicotine, and tend to have less of an intensity of flavor than a pumpkin spice style internal harmony. But if you added black twist?

I figured I would try it. I have been mixing Nightcap and Irisk Cask (née “Oak”) to produce a kind of savory long-burning blend, and so having the Nightcap lying around, I rolled some Black Irish XX sliced between my palms until the shreds fell off into the ribbon cut tobacco below. Hauling out an old Peterson, I stuffed the briar bastard with this mixture, lit it up and then went off to get something out of our backyard shed.

As it turns out, this type of mix works well. Very well. The rough edges of the black twist just about disappear, since the spicy mixture swallows up the oily barbecue flavor sort of the way pumpkin pie dissolves that putrid squash taste in waves of cinnamon, ginger, allspice, cloves, and a pinch of white pepper or cayenne (you'll thank me for this). On the other hand, the English grows bolder. This is the Britannia that is going to rule the waves! Full-flavored, since the black twist makes everything stronger, it gains a spicy molasses flavor, and makes it easier to light this otherwise near-impregnable leaf heap as well.

Did I add that delicious nicotine has come back into the picture? Nightcap does not do badly, of course. With this however I get that nice full and warm feeling with a clear head that a good nicotine buzz will do. I can count the individual leaves of grass from a mile away, and each one tells me its story. Colors are rich and vibrant again, and I can hear the little birds singing. Maybe that last one was just the ceiling fan, but you get the idea. That wimpy English becomes a spitfire.

Perhaps this explains the popularity of this tobacco. Crafty life-weary Englishmen would buy the same gingerbread tobacco as their compatriots, then duck into the loo to chop up some black twist and mix it in. Since burning Englishes smell like the aftermath of a white phosphorous attack on a fat camp, no one notices the pungent contribution of the black twist, a tobacco originally designed to hide flatulence in close-packed elevators. They could have their tasty Englishes and those Pictish savage nicotine bombs as well. At least, this is how I'm going to smoke Englishes from this day forward.

Lore consists of time-honored knowledge and rumor, mixed together and fighting it out. Sometimes it takes the form of handy phrases used in reviews like “an all-day smoke.” What exactly does that mean?

In conventional parlance, you have to assume that your reader is a customer and the customer is an idiot. You widen the envelope of anticipated intellectual ranges simply because if you design things for idiots, in theory, even the intelligent cannot hurt themselves with them.

Through modern history, the ideal customer — an average, and just as misleading as these always are — wants a mild smoke, low in strength, that smells good in the room after smoking. While not everyone cares about this, the plurality of buyers do, at least according to advertising lore (which is separate from but overlaps with pipe lore because pipe tobacco is usually a product).

For this reason, sellers concocted the phrase “an all-day smoke” to mean a blend that was meek in flavor, mild in strength, and not terribly stinky. In the vernacular, it also means a blend that is easy to smoke, meaning that you gravity fill the pipe, tamp lightly, light and go to town. People want a brainless smoke because most of them are doing something else while they are smoking their pipes.

Now, this may not apply to you. It does not apply to me, although I like the designation of an all-day smoke to mean something that I can enjoy all day, meaning that its flavor is not one-dimensional and it does not require particular primping and priming to make the stuff burn. For me, the archetypal all-day smoke would be Prince Albert: easy to dump in a pipe, light, and enjoy for bowl after bowl.

However, that all-day-ness varies with time and place. In 1960s England, much as in parts of Northern England today, working men and professional men loaded up their pipes with those thick Gawith Hoggarth style ropes and plugs. They cut off shavings with their pocketnives, scooped them into the pipe and topped it with the dust, then took a match from the fireplace and gave the heap the coal good and hard. They would smoke like this all day because in the frenetic environment of the UK, a stiff blast of nicotine, tea, and whisky kept people functional. After all, these are the guys who, before we got them into business suits, spent all day heaving claymores at each other and starving the Irish.

In other places, it means different things. Peter Stokkebye makes a series of “national blends” like Amsterdam and Norwegian. I imagine that in those places, people smoked things like those, which are relatively mild and sweet (both are excellent blends). In France, people bought little grey boxes of “capporal” tobacco that is basically dry white Burley, then fired it up and wandered around through thick clouds of oily smoke. Rural Americans smoked the same twists they chewed and spat to kill off the bugs. There is no one truth for everyone.

This means that your “all-day smoke” depends on who you are, where you are, and what you do all day. Today I'm blasting away on some edits, so my pipe blazes with a mound of Kendal No. 7. It's a mix of dark fired Kentucky Burley and sweet, vinegary bright Virginias. If you smoke it right, it tastes like spicy, smoky molasses mixed into honey, and you can light bowl after bowl, enjoying it while you get about the serious task of being alive.

Some weeks you are simply glad to make it through. It's the kind of day that I like to smoke Five Brothers, since it is both strong and weirdly nuanced. It is a tobacco where you taste variations within the flavor, instead of variations of flavor, and there always seems to be something different floating to the top.

I like to think that this comes from the individual tobacco plants, and their different soil nutrients and sun exposure (or possibly hopes and dreams, for you poetic types, but I have as much poetry in my soul as a grain harvester). You light up a bowl, and get that toasted wheat bread Burley flavor, but then there are little variations, a bit of sweetness, a dip in the graininess to nuttiness, and little glimpses into slightly herbal or vegetal flavors.

It's interesting how much it can surprise you. Also how relatively hard it is to smoke a dry tobacco like this, which you can really cram hard into a bowl without screwing it up, and how rewarding it is to get it right. Then, how much I'm going to enjoy smoking the rest of this pouch this weekend, since for some reason I go through Five Brothers rather quickly.

I always envied the guys who had interesting habits in buying pipes and tobaccos. I always wanted to try everything, but at the end of the day, I am a person who smokes pipes while doing other things. I do not sit aside after work and have a pipe to contemplate an obscure blend in a vintage pipe; I smoke normal pipes while working and rely on a steady stream of favorites, but will try just about anything new if I get a chance.

For many years, I would wait until the end-of-summer sales. Forget IPSD and Black Friday; the best sales came when the inventory was getting cleared out at the end of the quarter, before inventory and taxes and all the other things that make adults stoop a little more with each passing year. I knew what I liked, so I saved up some cash, bought enough to get the free shipping, and then packed the stuff away in the back of the closet in our guest room that I use as a tobacco and rare book depository.

Perhaps it helps to note that I have never intentionally acquired a rare book, but they come my way through friends and the endless yard sales, thrift shops, libraries, secondhand stores, and dumpsters I trawl. One of my most valuable books was stranded next to a dumpster when I found it; no one else knew how to look for it, since you need to know what you are looking at to recognize its value. The same is true of pipe tobaccos.

I hauled out a tin tonight, after a bit of a battering week, since I relish the flavor and strength of Irish Flake. This is a tobacco for people who smoke the way the office drones drink coffee, which is to say that it is bracing or at least, will wake you up and keep you focused. I think many of the older tobaccos were like this, at least the oldest of them, because all of the advertisements during the sloppy bourgeois 1950s emphasized how mild, gentle, fragrant, and generally untobaccolike those blends were. The effect is like a cup of spoon-seizing coffee with a shot of liquor poured in, which is about the only way I can enjoy hard liquor because the stuff still all tastes like cold medicine to me.

Irish Flake, like most of the classic UK plugs, flakes, and ropes, consists of a mixture of light, sweet Virginias and dark fired Kentucky Burley. New, it has that campfire smell and a citrusy tang. Age it a bit, and the Virginias mellow to something more like honey on wheat bread and the dark fired Kentucky Burley loses its smoky flavor and becomes spicy and nutty instead (as if that wheat bread had almonds in it). I am not sure that the aging process gets radically different after five years, but it also does not get any worse. You could dig out a 1940s tin of this stuff and probably experience roughly the same thing that a ten-year-old or five-year-old tin would be like.

The blackish flakes are dusted with a little bit of what some call plume, a crystalline substance which appears to be what is left off the flakes off-gassing (remember that early 2000s trendy word?) as they lose their ammonia and their sugars ferment or caramelize. The Virginias get darker and the dark fired Kentucky Burley gets lighter in appearance, but also in flavor, leading to a greater balance and interplay between the two. Since they are now closer in flavor, they clash a little bit more, with one on top and then the other, which gives this blend a great internal texture.

It's weird but I find myself completely contented with a tin of this stuff. That is, I open one, and then I smoke it, and a couple days later — about two hours a bowl, two flakes per bowl, five or six bowls a day — it has vanished and I am sadly looking at the shine of empty tin. I can't think of a higher complement to a blender than that weird forlorn feeling one gets when it is all gone. With that in mind, it's time for a walk around the edge of the woods to see everyone out on a Saturday, because they too will not always be here in this state of mind and I want to enjoy it for as long as possible.

Throughout pipe-smoking history, blenders have bragged about how “mild” their blends are. As usually happens, this measurement consists of a combined assessment of strength and flavor.

People, as it turns out, like tobacco mixtures that taste like their favorite foods and do not put them on the floor (or in a Zen state) with nicotine. Your average smoker kept his pipe lit for much of the day, and wanted an “all-day blend” that did not aggregate nicotine to the point where he felt dizzy and needed to slurp on a mint or drink a sugary beverage.

This presents no problem to me because I want these people to leave the high-powered tobacco blends alone so that I can consume them. As a working smoker, or someone who is usually on the job or fixing up stuff around the homestead while I generate thin trails of blue smoke, it helps to have a stimulant effect, like caffeine, but without the jitters.

After all, a stack of Irish Flake smoldering in a big briar bucket will not throw you off much if you are in motion, forcing people and objects into functional arrangements, and hammering on technology or old fences that just refuse to listen to reason and be useful. It might knock you flat if you smoke a bowl a day while relaxing in your armchair and watching Netflix soap operas, however.

In my view, however, people who are smoking for a hobby or pleasure alone worry too much about high nicotine. It is a pipe; you can put it down if you feel the spins coming. Take a sip of water or a nice sugary drink, or suck on a mint or other candy, and you will be fine in just a few minutes. However, you want to let that pipe sit still for another half hour to let your body process that nicotine surge that you got.

Breath-smoking helps with this process because while you get more nicotine this way, you get it slowly and steadily, so there no (or at least, fewer) jagged ups-and-downs that can suddenly hammer you with a blast of powerful alkaloids. If you huff and puff like the guys on your favorite videos — breath-smoking produces little smoke and looks unimpressive on film — you might run into unexpected trouble.

But for those of us who like high-nicotine blends, breath-smoking lets us enjoy these in a steady place of mind where everything makes sense. I have known how many stars are in the sky, and felt the looming satori as life revealed itself as a self-assembling puzzle. Then I swigged some sweet tea and sucked on a mint.

This is never a bad experience, but you learn how to listen to your body when it starts to sweat around the collar, get jumpy, or have that churning in the gut which says that you are on the precipice of the mountain of nicotine madness. Like I said: you can always put down the pipe. You are not less of a man, or a woman, if you do. You are a sane animal responding to the needs of your body.

My first experience with high-nicotine tobacco came courtesy of what became a favorite, Royal Yacht. I liked it so much I even went with a nautical theme for a few years, buying ascots and captain's caps for when I would light up a pipe, but after the men in white suits showed up I quickly ceased and desisted. People told me when I first acquired this storied English leaf that it would put me on the floor, possibly kill me, and if not, I'd wake up in a drum circle chanting “hare krishna.”

If my hand trembled a bit lighting up that first bowl of Royal Yacht, it was remembering the advice I had gotten. Clearly the abyss yawned beneath me now. Instead, I fell in love with the blend, and found myself reaching for it when I had to go clean the gutters or do other unrelenting work. At that point, I reached the next stage in my professional life, and soon the gold and crimson tin became a fixture at my desk.

In the bigger scheme of things, Royal Yacht is not all that strong; it dopes out as “medium-to-strong” on my primitive chart. The non plus ultra tobaccos would be those Gawith Hoggarth pressed dark fired Virginias, Cotton Boll Twist, maybe Five Brothers, Irish Flake before they neutered it, and the much-loved HH Bold Kentucky and its full-bodied cousin HH Old Dark Fired. With these, be careful if you are afraid of nicotine sickness. Remember that you can always put down the pipe, and have at least lukewarm water and a mint on hand.

Today I fired up a huge bowl of Cotton Bowl Twist mixed with Brown Twist Sliced, using some Amphora Original Blend for “kindling” or lighter tobacco to get these dense, oily ropes burning. Well through my second now, I am nearing the end of some labors that I had been resisting, and can report no demise, at least yet. It is a flavorful mixture, with the Amphora sweetening it, and perfect for a day like today when I try to fix the world, or at least everything in my world. But just in case, I have a linty mint in my pocket.

I went a bit hog-wild this afternoon. Sunday is my “spill jar” of everyday tasks, so I come into the workspace to get a little bit of everything done so the week hurts less.

Earlier today, I discovered a new favorite blend. Savinelli Juno, blended by Mac Baren, is kind of amazing. Not “kind of,” actually; it is solidly amazing.

To make this blend, they press red Virginias and bright Virginias, then mix in more red Virginias to bridge the gap between the two. This creates a nice stewed berry flavor, with an effect like aging or fermenting, where the different flavors of the Virginias merge into something that is not too sweet, but has depth and nuance. This might be my go-to for fancy Virginia flakes.

Now that the day has gone down a bit, I cracked open a six-year-old tin of Burley Flake #1 which exuded so much fast-moving air that it felt like a small bird flew into my hand. Instantly the room filled with the smell of Perique, sweetened by age and married to the Burleys through the Virginia sweetness.

Of course, it took no time to load that up... how can one resist... and to place a flame to the heap of crushed loose flake, both dry and dripping with a sugary liquor. The Burley flavor hits first, but then a smoky undertone emerges and within that the sweetness appears, gently at first but then it takes over like an occupying army. The second half of the bowl is always a pleasure.

I'd have a picture, but there are some things in this world that I do better than anyone else, some that I can do passably for income, some that I can fake my way through, and some where the results are just laughable. Photography belongs to the latter, so unless you want dark, blurry, and out-of-focus photographs of a chaotic office with a recent coffee spill and brand new burn mark on the carpet, I am really of no use.

This topic has come up in conversation a few times, not just here but on a mailing list or two (low tech is the new high tech), and it intrigued me. We know that Virginias age well, but Latakia might lose something. How much? And would it matter?

To test the question, I hauled out a ten-year-old tin of Villiger 1888 Early Day, basically an Early Morning Pipe clone that also leans toward Presbyterian territory. It was a favorite and I greedily hoard the tins that remain, although since my accounting system consists of buying stuff frenetically and then tossing it into the cellar at random, I have no idea how many remain.

I hope this sets your minds at ease: this blend smoked amazingly after this time. The Latakia was slightly muted, but this is a low-Latakia blend, and there was still plenty of flavor. I don't know how it would be at twenty years, but it lost the dusty and herbal flavor, and retained a rich, chocolatey smokiness which is more like walking into an old hall where they have had fires for centuries. The Virginias improved massively, mostly because the bright Virginia lost its acid and ammonia flavors, and melded nicely with the red and brown Virginias for a smooth continuum of sweetness like an apple donut, with just enough spice and warmer grain flavors to make it interesting. The Orientals retained their sweet-sour song, but lost some rough edges, and the whole blend married so well that it was like smoking a home-made sassafras or mead.

I'll try some of the other blends, but this is consistent with my observations so far. The Latakia loses some of what makes it such a divisive condiment, namely the pine and herb smell and the dusty smoky spark. Instead, it gets dark and moody, and I like it better this way, especially with the Virginias in the background with their seemingly infinite depth of light bready and sweet flavors.

As I say often — I insert this here for context — smoke what you like, and like what you smoke. Blends are great off-the-shelf and improve somewhat over time, but it is not necessary to age. This blend was good when it was new and is slightly better now, but from memory, not that much different than it was with a year or two of age. Aging blends has its place, but like many things on the internut, it can be another form of “unobtanium” that just makes you feel bad instead of enjoying what you are smoking. To me, that seems like missing the point of smoking a pipe in the first place.

Over the past couple years, I have discovered a few blends that rise above the standard, even if right now most blends seem to be of fairly decent quality. These come from all walks of life, and no list of this type is exhaustive, since there are always other good things to find out there:

• Savinelli – Juno: so you are sad about the McClelland Virginias being gone, and you try this. It has the same rich malty sweetness, softness, and depth of flavor in these flakes of pressed red Virginia, most of it double-pressed to cause fermentation in the leaf.
• Peter Stokkebye – Amsterdam Shag: at your local HEB (and this is the only reason to go to HEB) you can find this blend, which mixes dark fired leaf and Virginias in the Dutch tradition, for a sweet and spicy smoke that may be designed for cigarettes but works great in a pipe.
• Amphora – Kentucky Blend: the time-honored combination of bright Virginias and dark fired Kentucky Burley takes on a new dimension here with this sweet, smoky, and molasses-rich ready-rubbed blend.
• Robert McConnell – Paddington: if the new Royal Yacht has you down, try this mixture which stays closer to the traditional formula for that legendary blend. Rich Virginias with a honey-wine flavoring pushes this close to a vaper in flavor.
• Savinelli – Essenza Cipriota: perhaps you miss Frog Morton. Following on the heels of Solent Mixture from Mac Baren, who also produced this blend, this light and bright aromatic English brings floral and fruit flavors to a mixture light on Latakia but full of Virginia flavor.
• Sutliff – 507-C: giving a blend an industrial name like “507-C” helps it slide under the radar, but these venerable Virginia slices gain fans regularly for their light, crisp, and honeyed flavor. Needs about six months in the jar.
• Robert McConnell – Scottish Cake: imagine a vaper made with dark fired Kentucky Burley that through prolonged pressing makes the Virginias sweeter and denatures the smoke of the dark fired leaf to replace it with a little spice, then adds Perique.

I've never been good at sales (“you think it sucks? Well, I wouldn't buy it then, even at a discount”) but these are my recent discoveries. Maybe you will enjoy them as well, since there's enough variety for anyone, and all of these are high quality leaf intelligently blended.