Seattle Pipe Club Virginia Jazz Tobacco Review
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E. Roberts - Apr 5, 2023
- 4 min read
It’s spring, finally, and the city itself is in bloom. Love is in the air, sidewalks are abuzz with folks eager to shed heavy winter coats and scarves, and there’s a racy adventurous feel to it all—a fitting time to rotate to a new blend, one suited to afternoon strolls in brisk spring chills or sipping coffee on cool nights with mysterious excitement in them. As mentioned in the last installment of this column, we’ll be getting to know the most recent offering from Sutliff’s Seattle Pipe Club Signature Series: Virginia Jazz, wherein Joe Lankford’s legacy blends continue to swing on.
The chosen aural, and oral, accompaniments for testing, as directed by the tin’s ad copy, are a wide selection of era-appropriate tracks from the likes of Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Louie Armstrong, Billie Holiday and more, along with some piping hot coffee perfect for taking the edge from a nippy spring morning—Cafe du Monde and scalded condensed milk seemed to be most appropriate. From the tin:
The 1920s Jazz Age changed America. The new music moved people. New Orleans, The Great Gatsby, prohibition, radio and a national urge to cut loose. Music and cultures mashed together. Our Virginia Perique starts with 10 year old mature red Virginias blended with a good amount of Cajun tobacco Acadian Perique. Add some tasty stoved Virginia, pressed and crumble cake cut. Virginia Jazz is an exceptional smoke and music to VaPer lovers. As Louisiana locals say, Pass a good time, cher!
The tin note upon opening is emphatically Virginian: a waft of vinegar and raisin, turned earth, parchment, and sweet wood. Inside the tin are three wafers of crumble cake tobacco roughly the size and shape of English tea biscuits, all a uniform mahogany brown. Extra points to this blend for the presentation, as the cakes are easy to cleave a smoking portion from and are of a consistent cut and humidity to break apart easily for a quick air-dry during preparation. Loading up a few grams for sampling is likewise easy as can be, just gravity fill and go. Allowing some airing time for the biscuits to breathe, the overtones of the aroma bend at first toward sawdust then an earthy mustiness which gives way to cocoa, alluding to the stoved component as well as the fermented Acadian Perique. This condiment is quite restrained within the blend, and lacks the full fruitiness of its sibling from St. James parish.
Once lit, the unassuming aromas begin to organize in much the same way a big band tunes, warms up, and falls into step with each other. The cadence of the smoke is indeed parallel to jazz of this era: a steady shuffle rhythm, a walking bassline of flavor with occasional solo flourishes of sweetness and sour; though one should take care not to puff at too frenetic a tempo—more “Blue Feeling” than “Take the A Train”, to put it in Ellingtonian terms. It begins with a standard Virginia refrain of woodsy, raisiny smoke that’s more than a little sweet around the edges, evidenced on the tip of the tongue. There is an inclination toward sharpness to this—although there’s plenty of aged leaf in it, it’s still relatively young in the tin—for after all, youth is a form of chemical madness, to paraphrase Fitzgerald. It will be interesting to circle back after a couple of years in the cellar on this one, as other crumble cakes I’ve stored have fared rather well; notably, early batches of H&H’s Anniversary Kake jarred for a decade plus. An occasional tingle in the nose once the ember is built up sufficiently announces the Acadian Perique, anxious to contribute its voice to the composition nearing mid-bowl, where it opens up a little with intimations of sweet and sour raisin and date notes. The voice is there, though not center stage, merely adding a bit of counterpoint to the otherwise steady core of the mature and stoved Virginias plodding along rhythmically to that leather and wood campfire tune. It’s modest enough that some may not even notice its inclusion, though its mildly sour tang definitely serves to color in the overall flavor of the composition. For the most part the arrangement stays steady through to the heel, evincing more of the sourdough bread and hay tones with just a hint of baker’s cocoa toward the end of the bowl.
Interestingly, most bowls ended with a remainder of dottle no matter which pipe I used. Gravitating this time toward the Canadian and Lumberman section of my toolbox, all the chambers of the pipes were nearly the same size—a bog-standard ¾” by 2”—while the shaft lengths varied between 5 ¾” to a rather egregious 7 ½”, like the Becker Canadian pictured. The tobacco never suffered from too much moisture in the heel, it simply crossed the point of diminishing returns to try to keep an ember nurtured below the last quarter of the chamber. I can only chalk it up to my technique or the weather, and it was consistent, though not an issue that would detract points in my book. A few crumbs aside, three bowls an evening coincided exquisitely with the runtime of the 1920s jazz compilations employed in the making of this article.
Overall the smoke, though uncomplicated, is quite a joy and hard to not be upbeat about—it’s a real toe-tapper with a crackerjack presentation in the crumble cakes. The sidestream smoke and room note is mild and dissipates rather quickly, not clinging to clothes or upholstery appreciably. If only we could still smoke in late-night jazz clubs, this would be the blend to bring; but alas, that age has passed.
Written by E. Roberts
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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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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. 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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. 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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.
