-
Kyle Weiss - Mar 12, 2021
- 6 min read
It surprises a few people when they learn I write my reviews in a small, outdoor space barely big enough to fit two folding chairs, attached to an expensive apartment not much bigger. My pipe tobacco “cellar” is a well-protected, medium-sized chicken yakitori box from my sous days. Maybe some believe a “pipe guy” is someone of…substance. My work van had its spare tire robbed by meth head neighbors over the weekend. I live a vagabond lifestyle fit for an aging millennial nomad, constantly moving to cheaper rents and for better pay. Or housing crashes and layoffs. I’m a writer, and I don’t know too many whose footsteps I’ve followed that lived an opulent lifestyle, or cared too much about keeping up with the neighbors. The bills are paid, however, and even in modern American asceticism, some gems are still available. Believe me, it’s not that bad: I’m far from miserable.
The chicken yakitori box was kind to me. In a flood of memories, an old Cornell & Diehl tin, the old-school type with the blue-and-white labels, peeks up at me from the bottom. It was one of my first brick-and-mortar tobaccos I bought from the now defunct Tinder-Box, before I started working there. It happened to be Yale Mixture, and the first tin I bought was in 2012. I smoked it and enjoyed it. The second tin I put away for aging. By “put away,” I meant forget about entirely. For a year or ten. The yellow tag on the bottom confirms it: it’s from 2010. I enjoy reviewing tobacco with serious age, as all tobacco notes and experiences are worthwhile, not just the newest, best and brightest. The surprises time gives can be rewarding.
It’s difficult to open a tin of tobacco that’s been left alone for a decade. Ten years is the difference between fifth grade and a junior in college, Windows98 and Windows 8, and three years longer than the average American marriage—but open it, I did. The smell inside after that long sealed up is intoxicating, even if the tobacco may end up being a dud. It’s an unequaled earthiness and deep, sweet purity that only slow, steady and decent aging can provide. The tobacco is standard C&D ribbon, which are on the thicker side, and it looks like a perfectly ordinary Virginia-dominant blend with some dark spots of Latakia mixed in. Nice to meet you again, Yale Mixture 2010: yep, the good news is, it’s definitely still tobacco.
I wanted to choose pipes that would really showcase the aged subtlety of tobacco. Especially one I’ve had history with when it was fresh. My starting lineup consisted of a drugstore cob I’ve had for just about as long as this Yale Mixture, a no-name billiard that has a long, skinny chamber, and a little pug-faced prince given to me by a Brit some on the forums some years ago. Yale Mixture even at this age packs just fine, and has an even amount of moisture. Sometimes aging tobacco can have moisture “settle” at the bottom if it sits still for too long, but fortunately that isn’t my lifestyle. It can also break down and get brittle, so in that this batch is holding up, I’m pleased.
The first puffs yield a smoky fig and pear attitude, backed by a very faint gingery spice. I’m already in love. I can tell immediately it’s not a particularly strong or vibrant tobacco, and the Latakia is just about starting to get to the point in aging where the smokiness disappears. What really disappeared were the rough edges I vividly remembered. In 2012, it could have been my tender tongue or inexperienced palate, but I know for a fact it didn’t taste this good. It was like having a second nice cocktail party where you just invited close friends, and not the coked-out party girls you met at your friend’s bachelor party last year. Yale Mixture gets very nicely mellow after 10 years of chicken yakitori cellar time.
Mid-bowl the Latakia tries its best to make a comeback. Anything aged with Latakia, other pipe people will probably tell you, the smokiness is more an idea than it is an up-front flavor. I don’t know the chemical science behind why the smokiness in particular subsides, but it really opens up Latakia for its background heritage as a true Turkish/Oriental leaf. There’s a gentle, tingly spice, some mouth-feel and body character, and sometimes even distant floral notes that the region is known for producing. In Yale Mixture, it is woven nicely with the Virginias. Yale Mixture is what I’d call an “American English,” because it is a tad more stout in some areas and thinner in others, which is very American indeed. The English like to use their Latakia for richness rather than boldness, and their Virginias for the vehicle for which it to travel upon; Americans like Virginias to frame sweetness and character. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, because variety is one of life’s pleasures. I very much enjoy American versions of English mixtures, and after a decade, Yale Mixture is some ivy league stuff.
The final stretch of a bowl of Yale Mixture gives a nice surprise: a beer-like, malted grains attitude. The Latakia is mostly spent at this point, and thus I assume the Virginias are the ones left staying late to talk. It’s very strange to describe a tobacco as hop-like, but here I am. It’s “hoppy.” It’s a light and pleasant bitterness with a touch of waxy tart flavors, and they were very hard to describe until I happened to be cooking with a cheap IPA for some barley stew I was making. Naturally, I took a sip while attending to the stew, and had to rush out to find my tobacco review notebook. The end of the bowl is where I frequently remarked how damned clean this tobacco smoked from start to finish.
Yale Mixture was a pretty rough introduction to my tobacco collecting and smoking once upon a time, and as you may have read, I was tickled by the revisit I had with it ten years later. It’s a good lesson for those of you buying two or more tins at a time of something you’ve never smoked, because if it’s a rough character now, it’s no secret aging is the finishing school that can solve a lot of this. Yale Mixture with a decade on it is wonderful. It has moderate nicotine, it performed effortlessly, and paired nicely with black teas, coffee and whiskey (like most English-style blends, if I’m to be honest). The mixture also hasn’t too pungent a room note to unsuspecting noses, either.
I may not live or retire like generations of the past, but as I like to say, I’m here for a good time, not a long time. I couldn’t afford it otherwise. This is why pipe smoking is so important to me, it’s one of the last rebellious pleasures that hasn’t been taken away or made so cost-prohibitive only the rich can enjoy it. Not yet, anyway. So be it a chicken yakitori box or a walk-in closet dedicated to all things pipe tobacco, go ahead: buy ‘em and possibly forget ‘em. Properly kept, it’s a kind of tradition for pipesters to discover a hidden gem they left for themselves to discover later.
Like most things starting out a little rough, including me, a little age, experience and a little time left alone can bring out some mellowing qualities and character, after all.
- Editor Rating
- Rated 5 stars
- Spectacular
- C&D Yale Mixture 2010
- Reviewed by:
- Published on:
- Last modified:
C&D Yale Mixture 2010 Pipe Tobacco Review
Written by Kyle Weiss
More Pipes and Tobaccos Articles
7 Responses
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.
Oh yes, unearthed pipe blends of yore have often provided smoking adventures for me. Sometimes the Latakia has left the premises. The dissipation of aromatic flavoring has been an incredible improvement. Virginias unfold into glory, and burley proves sturdy. In general, time has been more of a benefit than a diminishment. It is true.
From the pen of the world’s leading existentialist tobacco reviewer, a fine literary entertainment. Useful and relatable, too–[I]Yale Mixture[/I] was the first tobacco I ever bought by the pound, from Craig Tarler himself on the phone, although in my case it was displaced by [I]Ephemeris[/I] over the years. But this review prodded me to look in the darker recesses of my cache for something I wasn’t sure was there. Thank you, Kyle. I found two tins of the stuff with five years on them! It’s like a friggin’ gift!
[I]Ephemeris[/I]? I meant [I]Epiphany[/I]. cray
Just found a 3.5 oz tin of Rattray’s Dark Fragrant (in the d brown lab) that I laid down in 2011. I totally forgot it was in my tobacco humidor. Still sealed and like an old bottle of wine or a rare scotch I’m not sure I want to pop the lid! Decisions, decisions. I will cause you only live once.
Wonderful review. I have become kind of fascinated by aged Virginia/light Latakia blends ever since I found a jar in my closet with some Dunhill Standard Mellow from 2015. Yale Mixture sounds like a perfect blend to experiment with aging. I tend to suck at cellaring (I generally can’t afford tobaccos that I don’t intend to smoke anytime soon), but with C&D offering this in bulk, a couple of 2 ounce jars stuffed in the closet should be doable.
Great write up, a pleasure to read.
Thank you, fellas. There’s something unique about those tobacco tins that get put aside, or lost, due to disorganization, whimsy or even disinterest because at the time the smoke wasn’t too great. This is why I never have an issue buying more than one tin at a time: if it’s good, it’s good. If it’s not, the others can chill for a few years. If I detest it, I pass it on to either a good friend with bad taste or an enemy with good taste.
I believe I’m the •only• existentialist tobacco reviewer, much to the chagrin of the traditional ?