Does Pressing Tobacco Blends Improve the Flavor?

The main difference between packing the tobacco tightly in the jar vs. leaving some air space or packing it loosely is the amount of oxygen in the jar. Packing it tightly will reduce the amount of aerobic fermentation, so you'll get more anaerobic fermentation. Is it better one way or the other? That's strictly a personal call. The flavor difference may be very noticeable to some, not so much for others.
Russ

I'm no blender, but I've always thought of compacting leaf under pressure, into plugs, as sort of the ultimate blending technique, maybe along with stoving of various kinds. I consider my simple home "mixing," putting together a base leaf or two, and a condiment or two, as not exactly blending, just pipe smoker whim. But the idea of putting chosen proportions in a jar with room for some air as an actual blending option somewhat fascinates me. Hey, even I do that. The idea that packing tight with much less air, and packing loosely with some air, results in two different flavor profiles is fascinating.

Packing tobacco into a jar is not to be confused with pressing a plug or flakes. It takes relatively little pressure to pack a jar tight by hand or even with the BaccyPacker caulk gun technique as compared to the pressures under a hydraulic press used for plugs. I pack jars tight to remove oxygen, not to meld or extract flavors, although I expect that melding/extraction may be happening to some degree.

I pack tight. With most ribbon blends the ratio of jar size to tobacco weight is 2:1. A 4oz jar will take 2oz of tobacco, an 8oz jar will take 4oz of tobacco, etc. This results in a tight pack, of a density similar to tobacco packed into flat round tins. I'll leave about 1/4" at the top for a little air for the critters to do their thing before they croak out from lack of oxygen. Seems to work well.

You need to talk to mawnansmiff Jay he does a lot of tobacco pressing

And apparently had good outcomes

Kind regards

George

Yes.

Providing different conditions to promote certain strains of microbes over others, thereby changing the flavor of the tobacco smoke is an untried idea as far as I know. In the microbrew world this characteristic of microbes has been exploited extensively, even by using the yeast found in the beard of the head blender to culture one kind of beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Beard_Beer

With Lambic wild yeast is allowed to ferment the beverage, as opposed to cultivated strains as used in most other beers.

As tobacco is grown in many diverse regions of our globe, I would think that various strains of microbes could be identified that could be safely and beneficially cultured in tins during packaging. This would be akin to "bottle conditioning" beers. Different strains could even been marketed to help spurn sells in our gimmick loving market.

When packing my bailtop jars with rubbed out flakes I tend to compress them as hard as I physically can by using my thumbs. This is not due to a desire for less oxygen in the jar, it's simply down to economics on my part. The more baccy I can cram into a jar, the less jars I will need over time.
With that in mind, Dan's 'BaccyPacker' is an ideal way to achieve the same result.
Regards,
Jay.

"but I bet that even with the tightest hand packed tobacco, there's still plenty of oxygen in the jar."
I'm inclined to agree. Compressing 250g of rubbed out flake by hand compared to the same amount compressed in my steel press, it takes up four or five times as much space...that is just air.
Regards,
Jay.

I have over 250 lbs of mixed loose packed and some tightly packed, and if someone can taste a difference, I will give it all to them. Anerobic, aerobic, schnazerobic, who cares? No one can tell a difference. It's all in the head.
I do notice that my loosely packed tobaccos gets a tight, vacuum on the lid that stays concave until I open it. But, my tightly packed tobacco seems to fluctuate in being sealed and not being sealed, and they also tend to ping and pop with the fluctuations of weather.
Physicists be damned. It's all in the taste buds. If there was a significant difference, people in the business would have already looked into it.
Hell, for hundreds of years, NO ONE USED JARS!!! They just let it lay out on the ground and flipped it with shovels every now and then. General stores just wrapped the twists in paper. I've seen my family and neighbors save crops until the next year by digging a hole and emptying the barn into it, and covering it with burlaps until the next year. This was common practice when the markets were down one year. You would save the crop in hopes that next year the money would be better. Now, grown men are all hand wringing and sweating over how to put it in the jars. Ha ha, sorry, I am just finding it amusing.

I pack jars as tightly as possible to prevent tobacco from losing any moisture. I'll let the tins worry about fermenting.

Ref. Cosmic, no one used jars. I was reminded at a whaling museum in New England that the standard packaging for tobacco among square-rigger sailers was a cloth bag. I guess those old wooden ships provided a touch of humidity, but no, they didn't use jars. Likely jars would have broken with all the knocking around.

Hell, for hundreds of years, NO ONE USED JARS!!! They just let it lay out on the ground and flipped it with shovels every now and then. General stores just wrapped the twists in paper. Now, grown men are all hand wringing and sweating over how to put it in the jars. Ha ha, sorry, I am just finding it amusing.

Click to expand...

Fair enough, but folks weren't cellaring 250lbs for their personal use, neither. Maybe they had more than one or two pipes, and maybe they had a bit of rope or two that would suffice for a few months. Cellaring? Who would bother with that? Aging tobacco for years before smoking? What kind of idiotic nonsense is that? Anyone here remember back a few years when an email from Robert Germain was posted in which he wrote that his products were ready for consumption upon release and to stop "fapping about" with all this aging nonsense?
Aging is the rage. Vintage tobaccos are the rage. People discovered that tobacco blends change with age and some people decided that they like the nature of that change.
So we "cellar", a fairly recent affectation, or practice, or sickness, depending on one's point of view. And with that comes the question of how best to preserve the tobacco for hitherto unnatural lengths of time. Tins will fail over time, especially the rectangular and square tins. Maybe 10 years, maybe more, maybe not, but the contents will be drying out all that time. Tins are leaking from the get go.
Jars? Well, maybe, but seals aren't good forever, neither, so we'll do the best we can until cutter tops come back into use. Those were great for long term storage.
And how best to let tobacco age, something that wasn't even an afterthought until recently. Pack it tight? Pack it loose? Leave it in a pile on the floor? Bury it the backyard in a clay pot?

... it's simply down to economics on my part. The more baccy I can cram into a jar, the less jars I will need ...

Click to expand...

+1.
I don't notice a difference in packing tightly or less so, except in how many mason jars I need to buy. So I pack firmly with my fingers, thumbs and a bent spoon; I store at a ratio of 1:1, that is 1 oz of tobacco to every 1 oz of storage volume. With 4 oz or 3,5 oz tobacco tin, I will fit the whole contents into a 4 oz mason jar. Same with the 8oz volumes. I find it rather satisfying to stuff and pack a jar to its capacity.