Hearth & Home: Black House November 2017
-
Kevin Godbee - Nov 6, 2017
- 6 min read
Kyle Weiss
It’s almost “that time” of the year. Good, good: you caught my sardonic inflection there. I can almost smell it from here, the blissful sprawl of over-eating (and cooking) things a semi health-conscious fella like myself should not, the swimmy-headed relief of warm toddies, good wine, and neat whiskies, and the wafts of Latakia. The leaves have been raked and the blankets pulled out, with recipes and cookbooks being considered. It’s a ritual many of us go through each year, married or single, family or solo. Even if we put on a good front, I believe very few of us actively enjoy, at least not in its entirety, the thought of chaos in both the home and places of ill-shopping repute. For at least a month, if not two, there’s the need to escape being festooned in garish colors, assaulting spice smells, screeching from children and crazy kinfolk. …
…which brings me to Hearth & Home’s “Black House.” A lot of hubbub surrounded this tobacco when it first came out–I know, I read a lot of the cynical debates and wild cheers of “Seven Fifty-Nine!” which rang from the digital bell towers of the Internet some years ago. I was just starting to come into my own as far as pipes were concerned at that point. I think I bought one tin and was given another, as both are stamped from about that long ago. The tins read:
“This blend is a tribute to a great tobacco of the past. Made for a 2011 contest, it was judged to be the closest overall to the dark Balkan-type mixture it was designed to emulate. We hope you enjoy the memory. Russ Ouelette, blender.”
I cannot say for certain what the Sobranie 759 Balkan mixture was all
about–I never smoked it. I’m damned glad in a sense, because I really missed out according to the happy codgers out there. Once again it left me not yearning and pining for something that will never exist again, with everything paling in comparison, and I am free to use my senses rather than a foggy abstract to figure out what exactly is in front of me. No reference point means no expectations one way or the other. If H&H’s Black House is indeed the closest thing to what the younger generations of pipe smokers only can hear about anecdotally, I should be in for a real treat.
A cat-food style of tin is used for H&H’s Black House. I’ve come to really appreciate this particular style of tins as they seem to hold up to the rigors of ageing. Their seals are physical rather than contact-pressure surfaces, and aside from occasionally bowing at the top and bottom causing stacking issues, hold up to the rigors of moving them around if needed. Opening the tin reveals attractive confetti representing nearly every hue imaginable of tobacco: light and bright, cocoa and brown, black as tar. The tobacco in the tin smells of citrus and figs with a typical Latakia undertone. It’s a chunkier-cut tobacco, not sticky in the slightest, and is a little on the dry side.
First quarter of the bowls after lighting become quite flavorful. The drier tobacco takes to a flame without hesitation, and the Latakia is first to greet the senses. There’s a slightly spicy and pleasant bitterness to the tobacco, and the retro-hales are enticingly complex. After a few minutes, though, a lot of the “first light” qualities start to diminish. Behind them, up until the halfway point, a lot more of a typical Oriental spice lingers on the tongue and lower palate, along with a just-right amount of what I believe is a Cyprian Latakia. This is not a particularly sweet tobacco, but it has occasional hints of dandelion bloom and honeysuckle in the upper palate. This goes well with the fact that this is not a tobacco that yields thick smoke, in the sense that it is not meaty rich. Smoke volume is acceptable, though!
At the halfway points of Black House, I’m left wondering where my experience went. The tobacco kind of muddies into itself. It doesn’t become unpleasant at all, but it does loose some “oomph.” I found allowing the pipe to go out, relighting and tamping woke it up again, however it didn’t always carry on for too long. The nose of the flavors turns somewhat yeasty, and the Latakia still lending a bit of its smoky touch, which keeps me entertained to some degree. I tried quite a few pipes while going through this tin of tobacco, and all of them seemed to lend a different attitude–my favorite was the cob. It thinned out the smoke and the mouth-feel a tad, but I felt like it opened up more of the subtle flavors, especially after the halfway-mark.
Three-quarters to the end of the bowl I seemed to routinely get an ashy, almost charcoal taste from the tobacco. As one of those that not only smokes the tar-laden, dog-ends of cigars, I look forward to the end of bowls of any given tobacco with the hope of richness and crescendo. Black House fizzles more than pops. This seemed to happen to a greater degree in my smaller pipes, to which I am more partial given the rich and heady tobaccos I typically enjoy. I fixed this at times by doing something I almost never do: at around the three-quarters mark, I loaded up a little more tobacco upon whatever is left, and I have let it go completely out. I pretty much had a second bowl on top of the first. Like twice-cooked pork, it gave it a whole new dimension and at that point, finally, I was able, if not unfairly, to get my tail-end experience. There routinely came a salty and savory point which made me happy–even the citrus I experienced in the beginning seemed to remain for much longer. Much like finishing a bowl of collards and grabbing the bread and sopping up the pot liquor, if there’s not a little something extra at the end, I get grouchy. Not this time of year, no sir. I shall have my drippings. Nicotine in this tobacco is just shy of moderate, and I successfully paired good medium-roast black coffee and lighter scotches quite well with Black House.
One important thing as a taster and tester of tobaccos is I never leave the folly of my own human error out of the equation, regardless of a tobacco being celebrated or something unknown or unappreciated. Each time I have a tobacco that does not fulfill, I subtly adjust what I’m doing. I try smoking in different environments. I switch pipes. I try different ignition sources. I try a beverage. It isn’t at all scientific, as anything with enjoyment rarely is: it is experimentation. It’s the overall seeking of a feeling and satisfaction that is being sought. Much like driving, conditions may vary. Unless something is broken in the operation, the operator must be aware of his own interaction with any given thing.
Hearth & Home, Russ O and Black House deserve a nod, not only from me but those who have come before me that know it well. Perhaps better still, an honorary nod need be given to the 759 which inspired its creation in the first place. Granted, my tins had a little age on them, and that may have had something to do with it, so your mileage may vary. My final, personal verdict is it’s a good Balkan tobacco. It lacked a bit of the nuts-and-guts of other punchier tobaccos I prefer, and it gave some interesting flavors when played with a tad. I wouldn’t consider this an “all-day” smoke, but it’s not too difficult to enjoy, and it is easy to mess around with. I won’t cry myself to sleep at night if I can never get it again, however, of the two tins I have, they will be smoked and enjoyed. Is it worth the hype? Will it hold up to the rigors and stresses of upcoming merry months? I’ll let you be the judge, overconsumption of eggnog notwithstanding. Happy pre-holidays, everyone–it’ll be over before you know it.
Written by Kevin Godbee
1 Response
Smokingpipes.com Updates
24 Fresh Brulor Pipes |
2 Fresh Tine Balleby Pipes |
8 Fresh Claudio Cavicchi Pipes |
9 Fresh Ashton Pipes |
6 Fresh Savinelli Autograph Pipes |
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.
Thanks for a well written and nicely illustrated article. I especially appreciated the tip on top-loading fresh tobacco over the dottle. I tried this with a different blend and it was pretty good!