Pelican Pipe Tobacco Review
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Kevin Godbee - Jul 12, 2018
- 4 min read
Kyle Weiss
The American White Pelican is a native migratory bird that courses its way through Northern Nevada in early summer. Like most living things, they’re not exactly suited to life here, and like all wayward travelers they use the scant resources and move on soon after. This is important, because as I write this review, a noisy flock of these misunderstood birds are cruising at about 13,000′ above me, and I am smoking the last of a tin of “Pelican” by Arango Cigar Company. Coincidence aside, I’m not a great writer, but I know this: when things lean toward the absurd go with it.
Arango’s Pelican touts itself an “English-Oriental” put together by J.F. Germain & Son. So it’s more an Occidental-Oriental, semantics aside. I chose to do this review only for the tin art, I’ll be honest. Butera had great images on a lot of their tobacco tins, and I’m glad Arango keeps to using them. Ever since I saw a video of a pelican swallowing a live pigeon whole, I’ve a new respect for an already strange bird. Pelican, the tobacco, was originally released by Butera, then was blended by a bunch of others (McClelland, Stokkebye), and a decade ago the whole Butera name and product line of pipe tobaccos were snapped up by Arango Cigar. J.F. Germain once blended this mixture for Butera, and now blends the mixture for Arango.
Opening the tin gives the eager smoker a fantastic whiff of the most basic and underwhelming English blend imaginable. It doesn’t smell terrible, and for that I thank it, and while there’s a Latakia in there it’s more of a sweet, grassy scent with a light campfire smoke lingering around. The ribbon cut is in the delicate side, but it is easy to load and light. I’ll talk about moisture level later.
Your first few puffs do exactly what most English blends do: they let you know you have Latakia in the mix, and it tends to be less strong as the bowl is smoked. Pelican doesn’t disappoint here either, as it tastes like the most basic and straightforward English blend you could ask for. There’s just enough Latakia, and what I’m guessing are the Turkish and Virginia tobaccos rounding out the mix. The grassy notes I mentioned smelling in the tin mix in an odd way while smoking, and I never could get the hang of what the blender was going for using such fresh leaf. Maybe this is a change since Butera (or anyone else) originally held the product? By the time you get just past the first quarter of the bowl, there’s a tart and astringent attitude that is fairly pleasant.
The halfway mark is where a few things improve while other questionable oddities pop up. The great thing is the forgiveness: the smoke is cool and regulated in just about any pipe and using any packing method. The not-so-great-thing is what might lurk below. It’s pretty tough for me to get proper bite from a tobacco, and this one gave me a few nibbles in a particular way. For me, this type of bite usually indicates an infamous culprit that I have yet to find a solution except to avoid it: propylene glycol. Pelicans, the migratory bird that is, normally doesn’t stick around my neck of the sagebrush too long. They’re water birds. They need moisture. Pelican the Arango offering apparently also needed moisture, and I did a small experiment to see if “PG” was possibly in there. Unlike a real pelican, Arango Pelican doesn’t dry out. I left the lid off overnight, which would make breakfast cereal crunch to most of my pipe tobacco. Nevada winds and single-digit relative humidity didn’t faze it. I found this to be odd since it’s uncommon to have an English or non-aromatic to have PG as a part of its makeup–not one that I know or enjoy, anyway, and I could be 100% mistaken. Either way, why the tobacco stayed suspiciously and perfectly moist for me or why I was getting a kind of bite from a tobacco remained a mystery. I hadn’t experienced “PG-tongue” in years since I gave up following common advice for newbies, being told to start smoking aromatics.
Three quarters to the end of any given bowl of Pelican was probably its best show: the tobaccos meld a bit more carefully, the grassy-newness subsides while the Latakia becomes a nasal whiff rather than a tongue-coating interruption. This same tart and astringent character is where I found a little redemption in a tobacco struggling to win me over. The sad part were the finales. All were a tad ashy in flavor, no matter what I smoked and which pipe I chose.
Odd duck, and the bizarre Pelican. Overall the tobacco is weirdly not bad. It’s by far not the worst thing I’ve stuffed into my pipes, it’s simply not very exciting either. The qualities that make it appealing, like having a cut that performs, and a gentle, interesting flavor get pushed aside by the fact there’s better, gentler and suspiciously more quality tobacco out there. The two ounce tin can retail in brick-and-mortar shops for close to the $20 mark as well, so it’s tough to call Pelican a good value, either. The good news is if I haven’t at this point reported anything that dissuades you, this tobacco is mild on nicotine, smokes effortlessly and isn’t too strong, and it pairs up decently with morning, daytime and evening beverages. If having a non-aromatic tobacco that doesn’t dry out easily is a bonus, you’re in luck.
Pelican might not have been my newest nicotine nest-mate, but it was fun to get to try something you don’t see around every day. Like the migratory flocks which share its name, Pelican drifts off eastward to live somewhere and with someone more appropriate. I wish it (and the birds) safe travels.
Written by Kevin Godbee
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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. 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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! 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A remarkable bird is the pelican,
It can hold more in his beak than his belly can,
He can hold more in his beak,
Than he can eat in a week,
But I can’t figure out how the hell he can.
Russ
Russ, you made me chuckle. Stop that. I prefer my grouchy cantankery.