Tobacco and Beverage Pairings
-
Kevin Godbee - May 20, 2010
- 6 min read
By Russ Ouellette
A favorite pipe and a treasured tobacco can be wonderful companions, and they’re often enhanced by the presence of a nice beverage, but we often don’t give much consideration to what we’re drinking in combination with a particular tobacco blend. Interestingly enough, I often get the question, “Why is it that I’ll occasionally get a bowl of tobacco that doesn’t seem right?”, and most people believe that the problem lies with that particular bowl not being mixed very well, or a problem with the pipe being smoked. My first question in reply is- “What were you drinking while you were smoking?”, as most people give little thought to how much impact the taste of an accompanying beverage can have on the flavor of the tobacco.
For many years, cigar dinners have been popular, and one of the intriguing aspects of putting one of these events together is figuring out what drinks go well with the cigars being offered, or vice versa. A few years ago I was offered the opportunity to lecture a culinary class at a state university about conducting dinners of this sort or how to recommend a cigar to a patron of the restaurant based upon what the customer is drinking. In the course of putting the lecture together, I came up with a general approach that can easily be adapted to pairings with pipe tobaccos as well.
My first “rule” of pairings is: Match the body of the drink to the smoke. If you are smoking a deep, rich Balkan-style blend, then you want a full-bodied libation to counter-balance the smoke. It’s necessary to do this to avoid having one or the other dominate your experience. A light white wine will not provide enough substance to even be noticed while enjoying a Latakia or Perique-heavy blend. To balance out, a Port or Bourbon would be a better bet. Are there exceptions? Of course. If you just want something to quench your thirst or cleanse your palate while trying a new blend, something easy on the palate and innocuous like water, seltzer or tea will be fine. And it’s certainly okay to have a cup of coffee with that first bowl of the day, but when you want that full sensory immersion experience, following this guideline will help.
To help with your choices, we need to understand what body is. There are sparkling waters that have a vanilla flavor to them, and there is vanilla custard. They’re both taste like vanilla, but the intensity of flavor is so much greater with the custard. There’s the defining note- the depth or intensity of taste.
Rule #2 is quite different than rule #1, however. There should be a significant contrast between the flavor profile of what you drink versus what you smoke. If your tobacco is sweet and tangy (like some of the McClelland Virginias), you would get the most out of the pairing if the beverage is dry and smooth (along the lines of a Merlot). The contrasting flavors will enhance each other, as it becomes easier to taste sweetness immediately after being exposed to sour or bitter flavors.
Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to identify elements of taste than it is to determine body. Salty, sweet, bitter and sour are easy to pick out, so figuring out a contrast shouldn’t present much of a problem. To measure body, a frame of reference is useful. Think of a dense, dark fudge cake. The flavor is deep and rich, and the concentration of chocolate is intense. That’s an example of full body. On the other end of the spectrum, you have something like cucumber – a flavor that registers lightly on the tongue, and it usually fades quickly.
Let’s take an example: You load up a bowl of Greg Pease’s Ashbury, which is a light to medium-bodied blend. It is smoky and savory, but not overly sweet. To accentuate the tobacco’s nature, a medium-bodied drink with some sugariness and a tang would work well, such as a golden or spiced Rum, or a glass of Riesling. If you want to avoid alcohol, a white grape juice, cocoa, a light-roast coffee with a touch of cream and sugar, Earl Grey tea or even a soda would work.
The way to approach pairings is usually to start with the smoke and then pick the beverage. To determine the body of a blend, understanding the intensity of the component tobaccos is a good place to start. Some tobaccos that tend toward light to medium body are: white Burleys, lighter Virginias, Carolina, Maryland and some of the lighter Orientals. Medium bodied leaf would include: medium Burleys, red and brown Virginias and the majority of Oriental and Turkish. Full-bodied varieties would include dark Burleys, Latakia, Perique and a lot of the strains of cigar leaf. Obviously, the combination of these different tobaccos will lead to varied levels of flavor depth.
Once you’ve determined the body of the blend, you’ll want to find drinks that share a similar body.
Here’s a very basic list:
– Light bodied- Water, most teas, flavored waters, clear fruit juices, most lager and pilsner beers, many dry white wines, light rums, gin, vodka.
– Medium bodied- Enhanced teas, most other fruit juices, most amber and red beers, most ales, heavier white wines and blushes, golden Rums, lighter Scotches and Whiskeys, lighter liqueurs and cordials, most mixed drinks.
– Full bodied- Medium to dark roast coffees, dark juices (grape, dark berry), Stouts and Porters, dark Rums, full, peaty Scotches, Bourbons, deep red Wines, Port and Sherry.
Once you’ve matched the bodies up, just try to get contrasting flavors, and relax for an enjoyable time. As with just about anything that involves taste, going slow always seems to help. Sip and savor the drink and puff lightly enough to keep the pipe from getting too hot as this will produce the best and most complex flavors.
Now, with all that being said, the most important thing is for you to enjoy yourself. If you like to have a cold, light tasting beer during the summer, it doesn’t matter what you’re smoking if you’re satisfied. The main purpose for doing pairings is to maximize the nuances and subtleties of both the beverage and the blend, but the bottom line is your enjoyment. After all, these are adult choices we make to help us find some delight in our everyday lives, and those choices are individual preferences that personally please us. When I’m really concentrating on the blend I’m smoking, I will try to follow these guidelines so I can pick up on the little things in the experience, but when I’m smoking while doing other things, I tend to drink what I prefer at the moment.
Whatever you do, have fun!
|
Russ Ouellette is the blender/creator of the Hearth & Home series of tobaccos for Habana Premium Cigar Shoppe and www.pipesandcigars.com in Albany, NY. He has been a pipe smoker and blender for over 30 years, and enjoys feedback from the pipe smoking public. You can reach Russ at russo@pipesandcigars.com or by calling 1-800-494-9144 on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 9 am to 5 pm and Friday from 1 pm to 5 pm. |
Written by Kevin Godbee
11 Responses
Smokingpipes.com Updates
24 Fresh Brulor Pipes |
3 Fresh Lasse Skovgaard Pipes |
3 Fresh Ser Jacopo Pipes |
2 Fresh Tine Balleby Pipes |
New Cigars |
Recent Posts
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! Or perhaps it is that sense of satisfaction knowing and appreciating you made it to another day. With the world in a kind of rinse-and-repeat history, reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, it is perhaps a good moment to remember some of Pipedom’s philosophers whose cogent thoughts brought light to clear a path in the mists of confusion and confounding opinions. Ok. No gloom and doom. Just some down-home thoughts. Think of times in the past when history was running off the rails. It took our pipe-smoking thinkers (the mind workers of the world) to speak of better pathways to more light. Think for a moment, with a pipe in hand, these wizards of the world and word: Albert Einstein, J. R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edwin Hubble, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, and Jean-Paul Sartre. All learned and enlightened. They offered wisdom instead of storms of meaningless roads to nowhere. All while smoking their pipes! Maybe especially with the help of their pipes in the art of thinking and philosophy. Recall the words of Mr. E=MC2 when he said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” Amen and amen! Dealing with world-rattling events takes a calm and objective view of things, to the Pundit’s way of summing it up. You just don’t go messing around with quantum physics without a calm and objective approach, methinks. Or as the extraordinary physicist Robert Oppenheimer said after he and a team in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Labs developed a way to split atoms into bombs during World War II. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer referring to the development of the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It must be pointed out that Oppenheimer was more of a cigarette smoker than a pipe smoker. Nonetheless, pipes were part of his personality. Now, if you have read some of the great authors of the past and present, their pipes were always nearby. Reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a three-pipe problem at times. S. Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre require time with your pipes to reflect on the existential problems and solutions these authors provide in learned novels and other narratives. Or take Edwin Hubble and Bertrand Russell, philosophers of another world. Pipes are required for reading. The quantum lode of ideas Pundit is attempting to sort out is that our pipes are relaxing and stimulate our thoughts and creativity. Especially in these last months of the year. Many times Pundit has had that light bulb flick on while smoking my beloved pipes. And friends in Pipedom, it ain’t easy to turn on the lights in Pundit’s rock pit head. Now it’s time for a quote from a Pipe Smoker of the Past. Shelby Foote was born Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., and died June 27, 2005, in Memphis, Tenn. A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
Russ,
Thank you for this wonderful, most informative post! You have provided us with a much needed perspective. For years I have tried to find the right pipe tobacco to smoke with vodka Martini’s and Gin Martini’s. I found the perfect cigar (it took years to find it) for my taste (the Fuente King T). I would love to hear yours and other readers choices for the perfect pipe tobacco Martini pairing.
Thanks again, Russ. It was great to see you in Saint Charles.
Best regards,
Brad Starcevich
(Silvercloud)
Great article that is full of information Russ!
I know of a few drinks that I like that go well with certain types of blends, but now I have this info to help expand my tobacco and drink pairings.
Excellent article that simplifies an otherwise bewildering array of choices and combinations. Thanks.
Great article. Very interesting and informative. Thanks for the contribution.
Thanks for the interesting article. I was most interested in what you had to say about “body”, a rather illusive term. I tend to define “body” as “mouth feel”. I’m no expert taster (or drink pairer), but I notice some tobaccos have a mouth feel that is missing from others. I use the analogy of Coke and Diet Coke: they both have the same basic taste, but the Coke (because of the sugar?) has a heavier mouth feel (“body”) than the Diet version. Cuban cigars (even the cheaper ones) have this delicious, heavy mouth feel (different from strength) that other Caribbean cigars don’t have. In pipe tobaccos, Esoterica’s Penzance has a delicious mouth feel (almost like eating a well-cooked steak) that is missing from most other blends. Call it “body” or “heaviness” but it’s not “strength”, at least to my palate. You can have a STRONG tobacco that is still “flat” in the “body” department.
Very good article . Thanks Russ for taking the time to answer a question I hear a lot .
I have been practising the contrast method for years myself when smoking latakia blends. A light Cidre or a lighter semi sweet wine calls out the hidden sweetness of the originally tough and rough smokey latakia blends. I can also reach this result with Latakia and coffee or strong tea both white with…Strange but it works…Although i dont smoke too strong latakia blends mainly English mixtures but still I say it works. Or a sweeter Kriek with a middle English…and so on.
Russ, you are a treasure. It is great to have your perspective here at Pipesmagazine.com..
Great article. I often enjoy a single malt while I puff my pipe; Lagavulin is my favourite and I highly recommend it.