What is the Oldest Tobacco Tried from a Mylar Bag?

Actually, I have some ancient Captain Black (or some other drug store type aro, can't remember) and I have it stored in a mylar (plastic heavier duty) bag on a shelf at work.
I'm sure its at least 5 years old and it still smells good when I go near it. With enough polyglycol type stuff, I'm guessing it could be the same towards the next century. LOL

I've got 3 years in mylar and still tastes/smokes/feels great. I suspect that the only weakness is the zipper closure, which so far has not been a problem...

I have a pound of Penzance in the sealed mylar bags they came in. I can only assume the tobacco will be just fine. I haven't opened them and probably won't for a good long while.

I would think if you can smell it then something is getting out of the bag, but it might not be enough to dry it out.

Stonehaven from 2009. Smoked fine.

Rereading the epic "box pass" thread of 27 pages there is a lot of talk midway where they changed to mylar bags. The responses are one of surprise to have so much tobacco and next to no scent from the bags. I was sold and ordered bags the next day.

I'm sure its at least 5 years old and it still smells good when I go near it.

Click to expand...

If you smell it, then the seal has been compromised. You shouldn't smell anything through a mylar laminate bag. The weakness is, indeed, the closure. Although the Box Pass is holding up very well with the mylar bags, and indeed, there is no appreciable aroma detected when you open that big box o' baccy, I have discovered a few bad bags where the contents had dried. Upon closer examination, it was the ziploc seal that had failed.
You might want to talk to Sparks about mylar bags, too. He found some that were 5 mil thick and have a really good ziploc seal on them. The only downside is that they are entirely opaque. I guess that's good from a UV exposure standpoint, but I like to see what's in the bag.

I use 5 mil aluminized Mylar bags from Mylar Pro and they appear to have a very high quality ziplock mechanism. Of course heat sealing is recommended for long haul cellaring but these bags do a bang-up job even without the heat seal. I have a number bags with six months of ziplocked only storage on them and I can not detect any change in the moisture content of the blends I've put into them in that time plus there is no detectable odor, even with Lakelands. The ziplocks alone will probably not hold for years but I've yet to run across a solution for keeping one's on-deck blend rotation fresh that is demonstrably better than the Mylar Pro Extreme bags.

Just ordered me some

I tried Mylar bags after the last thread - you all got me nervous. I used an iron to seal them but I am more scared about the seal than I was about the jars. I need medication to calm my cellar paranoia. Figure I will watch them for a few months and revert to jars if I can't take it.

I bought a 1970's 7 oz. tin of Mac Baren Va #1 on eBay this year. Its tinned but not vacuum sealed. It was packed ina mylar bag with a twistie. It was literally in perfect condition. I was amazed.
Mike S.

The bags seem to have the advantages of price, taking slightly less room being somewhat flexible,

weighing a lot less on shelves and being shipped, and taking up almost no space when not in use.

If the seal isn't a problem, they seem preferable.

If the bag is heat sealed then it's liable to be a good long term solution. Bags do take up less room empty than anything else but once they have tins in them they actually take up considerably more room than just a naked tin. They also resist being stacked on shelves because they are so slippery and so must be kept confined in boxes or tubs. So they aren't entirely without downsides but I have discovered that bulk blends can be flattened out and stacked high in a Rubbermaid tub resulting in a fairly space efficient situation.

Just being able to pop an open tin into a bag, and know that it won't dry out, is worth the price of admission.

Added to this thread in order to share experiences on sealing bags, while I just started using mylar bags (food storage quality bags with foiled lamination) last year it has been a major win for me. If you will use the zip lock design (the ones without it are less expensive) and seal the bags just along the edge, even if you are using an iron, you can later cut across below the seal and still have the zip work when you open the seal.

Otherwise (if you stored a larger quantity than a week or so worth of tobacco) you can always iron it back shut again. I use quart or smaller bags in order to cellar a working amount of tobacco without having to reopen a large bag ( a point I picked up on the forum when I was using jars) It lets the chemistry lie undisturbed until you are ready to smoke most of the bag. The jars had quickly become burdensome, as noted above, as my cellar grew.

I ordered a few gallon bags with my original purchase and they held 5 round tins each. Probably overkill, but I did not have any other use for them after it all got going.

The mylar zip lock bags far out perform the plastic storage bags for temporary smoking storage also, in my home anyway.

When considering long term price increases for tobacco and the aggravation of discovering failure years later, the price of bags is relatively inexpensive. I cannot speak to storage condition yet but have no reason to doubt the results will be good based on the experiences of others so far. My decision to convert the existing jars in cellar to bags also did show the tobacco stored in jars had done very well for the most part. I had only started cellaring aggressively in 2013, so the jars were aged at most 2 years.

I ran across a bag of Tobac's Best from Tobac's News in St. Paul a few weeks ago. I haven't lived in St. Paul in over 20 years. Opened it and smoked a bit of it. Terrible stuff. I tried re-hydrating it and smoked a bit of it. Terrible stuff. Then I remembered why I stopped smoking a pipe 20 years ago. The stuff was terrible then.
So I can say that plastic bags are also effective at locking in lack of quality.

That wasn't a Mylar bag. Had that tobacco been in one, you would not have had to rehydrate it in order to fully appreciate it's awfullness.

Maybe mylar with a bad seal?

"Maybe mylar with a bad seal? "
Nah it's not likely. Not because a mylar bag seal can't go bad but because no blender of smokeshop housebrand stuff is going to spend the extra money on expensive mylar bags. The only blender of quality pipe tobacco using stout mylar bags, as far as I know, is Esoterica. I'm not counting the thinner mylar foldup pouches used by so many brands. Everyone knows about the pouches that U.S. brands like SWR, Captain Black etc. etc. come in but across the pond many reputable outfits use similar pouches. Most of those are not imported here but that may be changing. I just made a SP order and the freebie is a pouch of Mac Baren Modern Virginia. Or maybe not. They are calling it a sample, it's only 3/4 of an ounce, but the picture on the site looks like a conventional pouch. Might just be coming in a small baggie.