Bucolic Gold. Homemade Periqued Virginias

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chilllucky

Lifer
Jul 15, 2018
1,091
2,715
Chicago, IL, USA
scoosa.com
One of my favorite tobaccos of the last few years has consistently been Russ Oullette's "Arcadian Gold". It's a collaborative experiment between Mark Ryan of Daughters and Ryan Tobacco and he to process some Flue Cured Virginia tobacco by the same method Perique is made.

This summer I grew and air cured a couple dozen tobacco plants on some property in southern Wisconsin (see chilllucky crop 2019 thread). As part of that effort, I was introduced to a professional flue cured tobacco farmer who acted as a mentor to me during the grow. At the end of the season, he gifted me what he termed "a couple of handfuls of red cutters and tips".

What he actually sent me was nearly two pounds of some of the most beautiful teaching aids I've ever seen. It's a real boon to my education as a hobbiest grower to be able to feel and smell the best stuff of a professional field.

However, it's so much tobacco that I need to think of some worthy things to do with it aside from just waiting for it to mellow out and smoke it bit by bit. One of the things I am going to try is to press some in a vessel, shooting for the anaerobic fermentation of the perique process and some approximation of Arcadian Gold as the end product.
 

chilllucky

Lifer
Jul 15, 2018
1,091
2,715
Chicago, IL, USA
scoosa.com
Step one is to make the vessel to press in. Here's what I came up with as a scaled-down version of an old whisky barrel.6268

After doing some more "research" - which pretty much was just watching the C&D "opening a perique barrel" and The Tour of L.A. Poché from a New Orleans Pipe Show videos on YouTube - I realized that there is no real need to make this round, oak, or charred. It looks like the tobacco is completely wrapped in something (parchment paper, plastic, I don't know). I think they use the old whisky barrels for reasons of cost, history, and ease of removing the product by disassembling the barrel. As far as I can tell, and I admit here to no expertise, there is no interaction between the char, the oak, and the tobacco.
 

chilllucky

Lifer
Jul 15, 2018
1,091
2,715
Chicago, IL, USA
scoosa.com
Step 2 is to line the vessel with parchment paper and start loading in the tobacco.
6271
The Tour of L A Pochét video states that the tobacco is brought into order (made to have a high enough moisture content that it can be handled without crubling) stemmed, tied into hands, and laid into the barrel in a pattern of alternating layers.

What I've been sent is in pretty good order already. If Mr. Ryan humidifies his tobacco with anything besides water (sugar water, for instance, which might accelerate or catalyse the fermentation) I am missing that step. I am taking the stems out and laying the tobacco into the vessel in layers about 60 degrees to each other.
 

chilllucky

Lifer
Jul 15, 2018
1,091
2,715
Chicago, IL, USA
scoosa.com
Here's a picture of the tobacco before going into the vessel. There's about four ounces of the reds on the left, a piece of parchment paper, and about four ounces of the yellows on the right.
6284
I heard on a recent podcast interview with Mr. Oulette that he and Mr. Ryan had ordered 800 pounds of "golden flue cured virginias" for the first go of Arcadian Gold. The exact variteal, stalk position/grade was not said. It's inside baseball at the least, a trade secret at the most, so I don't expect to find out. This is what I've got, so it's what I'm using.
 

chilllucky

Lifer
Jul 15, 2018
1,091
2,715
Chicago, IL, USA
scoosa.com
From what I can remember from articles and interviews regarding Perique processing, you want it to press for "a while" at a lower pressure, then crank it up. Also, they take the pressure of "every once in a while" to take all the tobacco out of the barrel and repack it in a different order. For the air-cured variety that proper perique is made from the whole pressing takes about a year. For the virginias that Arcadian Gold is made from, "less".

Clear as mud, right?
 

chilllucky

Lifer
Jul 15, 2018
1,091
2,715
Chicago, IL, USA
scoosa.com
Got back into the shop after five days under pressure and this is what it looks like.
6861

No bubbles, no liquid pressed out, no change in color. I did some more reading and it seems like (blind leading the blind here) the tobacco needs to be wetter before pressing.

So I'm going to try to tease these cakes apart, mist all the leaves with distilled water, and putn'em back in.
 

greeneyes

Lifer
Jun 5, 2018
2,126
12,193
I think the fermentation you're achieving is likely considerably less than what we know (from accounts) to produce Perique. I conjure images of stewing, dark fermentative juices of a barrel of tobacco under pressure. There's something to be said to for a 'critical mass' of fermentable material, much like piles of chopped mulch when they begin to spontaneously ferment at their inner core and trails of steam, heat and moisture, escape. Not to say yours won't be tasty, but I think (as with many things) scale has significant effects on such things as moisture, heat and fermentation in general, such that smaller-scale experiments have quite different outcomes.
 
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