nicotiana

Longtime readers may recall that for this pipe smoker at least, no blend satisfies quite like the legendary Irish Flake. During the early days of my pipe smoking, this blend was obsessively overlooked by the pipe-smoking literati and nomenklatura of the day since all you can say about it is that it is a typical UK flake: a mixture of dark fired Kentucky Burley and bright Virginia, it delivers a sweet-sour-spicy-smoky mixture that might also knock you flat.

Tobacco blends like this tended to be strong because UK plugs, flakes, shags, and curly cuts were generally designed for the working smoker who whether he was building walls, watching the big board in a nuclear power plant control room, herding sheep, or shooting at colonials and antipodeans, needed something somewhere between a pleasant smoke to make it through the muck, smoke, and fire and a bracing jolt of a beverage that kept him awake. Irish Flake obtains both credentials: it tastes a bit like dark roast mocha sweetened with honey, and will open up those eyes with a long-lasting, highly flavorful smoke.

Stirling Flake, which was the version of Irish Flake made by Kohlhase & Kopp back in the 1990s, gained its name after the contract for manufacturing passed to Scandinavian Tobacco Group. The original blenders gave it a new name and released it under their Rattray's label, allowing us to continue to enjoy the older version, which is sweeter and also a little bit stronger, possibly a nod to more middle Burleys or Virginias padding the current STG variety. It aims less for well-rounded flavor that a sweet-sour contrast between the lemony bright Virginia and the rich, chocolate and coffee notes of the dark fired Kentucky Burley. If it is like other Rattray's blends, it also probably has a fair amount of added sugars, giving its sweetness a boost.

K&K has a mixed reputation for this reason. Their blends show great finesse but often have too much sweetness that is not from the tobacco itself, making them less than ideal for daily smoking. When you stick a pipe in your mouth with the dawn and remove it only reluctantly to go to sleep — although by legend some smokers can smoke when they sleep, this requires the use of an E-Z chair or other non-bed sleeping arrangement — you want less burnt sugar gunk in your mouth and will over time find the cotton candy flavor of roasting sugar to be less than appealing. Luckily, in these richer blends it is basically undetectable, so the sweetness here may simply be some nicely fermented Virginias.

A blend like this reminds me of the silliness of the current age. This absurdity transcends politics, religion, whatever; it is a zeitgeist of being in denial of reality because we fear being insignificant, mainly because when you are politically equal, all the great peaks have been conquered, and life consists mostly of purchasing decisions, people feel as if they are lab rats more than rugged individualists. People fear reality and want to live in fantasyland. They'll scapegoat anything like they attacked smokers back in the day.

In reality, you are most likely to die from car exhaust or the terrible food or even just existential misery at your sad cubicle job to which you commute for two hours to drive around the vibrant ghetto and the industrial wastelands that dot our nations but since they are “job-creators,” would be forgiven even if they re-enacted the Holocaust nightly with orphans as victims. Everyone fears the loss of what little they have, even while they try to pile up enough wealth to escape.

We could not face the fact that democracy does not work so well, that free markets beget dangerously powerful corporations, that diversity means we are all at each others' throats, that organized religion hides the bad within the good by forcing them to obey dogma, that unless we give plants and animals rights we will exterminate them, or that allowing individual liberty means unlimited human growth which dooms us all. Whew, that sounds darker than it is, but let us just say that there are no new problems nor new solutions, only non-solutions that people like which eventually destroy us. We the people are our own problem and the more we try to make things better, the more we make everything worse.

They started by scapegoating smoking. People thought that the reason they were all dying of cancers involved the smoke in their offices, so the pipes and cigars smoked got booted and everyone else clustered around the electric meter out back, smoking quickly twelve times a day. Now they have even eliminated those, so people have turned to a myriad cocktail of SSRIs, vaping, grocery store wine, prescription opioids, legal weed, and kratom to keep their mellow. We had something less destructive, but that upset people, so instead we got the really bad stuff with even worse stuff coming.

In a sane society, you would find Stirling Flake at every corner store. You would pop in, pay a few bucks for a tin, and then remove a single flake, fold it lengthwise, twist, and insert into your pipe. The struggle here is getting the pipe lit, so you do the old char the top and then let it dry out for a few moments before mashing it slightly to expose the dry leaf, then lighting it three times in a circular motion until it really glows. The trick to UK plugs et al. is to give them the gas like mad on that second light, then to do only light relights if you do so afterwards, since you have already kindled up enough that it will take easily.

Most of us, however, start out with gentle lights and slowly work our way up to blowtorching the crap out of the tobacco heap as the bowl goes on, since the “[beep]ing [beep] won't stay lit” (hint: it rhymes) and that makes us mad and sad because we are not getting delicious tobacco. Instead, make sure that whatever wad you pack slides easily into the pipe and requires no cramming, then char it and tamp lightly, not compressing it at all, before you give it the fires of Hell just once. You will have a lengthy and pleasant smoke after this point.