Week 7 and Barbados Plantation
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Kevin Godbee - Nov 4, 2013
- 4 min read
E. Roberts
Football season, also known as "autumn" by the uninitiated, is well and truly underway. For many this is a time of debaucherous tribal gatherings, facepainted weekend warriors, grillmasters holding court at tailgates, and the primal harvest of last year’s struggles reaped on the gridiron every Thursday, Sunday and Monday. Every game matters in this short season, and we rejoice in our teams’ triumphs and mourn their defeats. Unless of course if you’re a Giants fan, in which case you stiffen your upper lip and carry on as if you had not a care in the world, muttering under your smile about this being a rebuilding year.
Football season is also about sharing the spirit with friends. Rooting for your team and consuming mass quantities of fried foods and booze is a ritual we look forward to indulging, and is made even better when we tobacco enthusiasts can enjoy it in our last bastions of smoking comfort—the man cave, a local tobacconist or cigar lounge, or tailgating in the out of doors. I particularly enjoy bringing a nice aromatic pipeful to such gatherings, and week 7 of this season found me accompanied by a fresh tin of Sutliff Private Stock Barbados Plantation.
"SWEET BARBADOS RUM, SMOOTH AND RICH" is how the tobacco is billed, though much like the Arizona Cardinals this season, it was off to a shaky start. The aroma in the tin is certainly lush and luxurious, with the distinct top note of dark rum mingled with the earthy tobaccos: Burley, Virginia and plenty of Black Cavendish. If you’ve ever spent time in the tropics, you’ll also pick up the sharp aroma of fresh-squeezed raw cane juice. It’s a flavor that brought fond memories for me, particularly at this chilly time of year. But it didn’t respond well to my smaller aromatic-dedicated pipes, which was a bit disappointing; often times when I crave a quick smoke I’ll reach for an aromatic, particularly when in mixed company, and during my taste testing regimen I found the flavor coming up short. Fortunately there are ample instruments in my arsenal, and after sampling through a few different chamber and bowl configurations I found that a larger-chambered briar (group 4 or 5 minimum) was necessary to allow the blend to come into its own, which it did admirably in a Savinelli bent billiard. It is a thoroughly cased aromatic, with plenty of Cavendish, and the balsa filter was perfect for regulating the moisture while keeping the smoke cool yet unfettered. Once the right combination was found, the flavor really came through and took charge, much like the Seattle Seahawks on Thursday as they went on to dominate the game.
"SWEET BARBADOS RUM, SMOOTH AND RICH"
Friday and Saturday of week 7 were spent teasing out the particulars of the blend. The flavors are not widely varied, being all in the vein of sugar sweetness—rum, butterscotch, molasses, brown sugar, jaggery—but as repeated bowls went through the pipe, I was able to settle into and better distinguish them. By Saturday morning my cadence and packing had been sufficiently adjusted to bring out the best in this blend, and a lazy afternoon charting out the fantasy league and preparing for the next couple days found me surrounded by a thick haze of sweet smoke in the home office. After a couple days in the tin it had settled down in aroma, and started to offer some more complex chocolaty notes that brought to mind a rich black forest cake.
Football Sunday was a typical rollercoaster ride of cheers, jeers and beers; the Bills pulled through a tough contest over the Dolphins, which led to many cheers of jubilation. Chugging away on this sweet aromatic kept me and my team in the sweet spot, and amplified the festive air as the 23-21 score was finalized. A couple of the cigar-smoking members of the crowd even (rather sheepishly) complimented me on how good it smelled, particularly compared to the aromas issuing from their sticks. Perhaps I had found my good-luck smoke; the Bengals put down the Lions, the 49ers made easy work of the Titans, and the Chiefs squeaked by the Texans—each game putting money back in my pockets and a smile behind my pipe. Confirmation of this blend’s miraculous (if scientifically unproven) winning mojo came when the Jets, beleaguered as they often are with remembering how to play the game, were assisted by the overtime penalty of the season and clinched their win over the Pats with a stat-saving field goal. Hail Mary indeed.
Go Niners!
The true test of Barbados Plantation’s magical beneficence would have to wait until the following evening’s game. Monday night’s matchup between the Giants and Vikings wasn’t looking to be a spectacular display of sports artistes at their peak; rather, it was a crapshoot of which team could play worse. I managed to smoke through half a tin in the three-hour game time, pacing myself with a potent recipe of Jolt Cola, Kraken rum and 2 maraschino cherries—a perfect high-octane accompaniment to the tobacco that framed its sweetness well, not to mention dulling the pain of watching the passing game that was on display. The nicotine quotient was comfortable for repeated bowls, enough to satisfy and tempered well with the addition of alcohol and finger food. Spicier fare tended to cancel out the full flavor of the blend, not unexpectedly, but there was enough tobacco goodness to carry through. As the final quarter ticked away and it seemed the Giants may be able to hold on to some semblance of dignity, I quietly said a prayer that included thanks to my newfound talisman for accomplishing the impossible—Barbados Plantation came through with the win.
SPONSORED LINK: Read More About Barbados Plantation @ Sutliff-Tobacco.com & Find a Retailer
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. 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. 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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! 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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.
Nice review, Bill.
Another great review. ANNNNNND another blend I have to try now. Thanks.
Thanks for a very well written, entertaining, and nicely illustrated review. Although the sports commentary, comprising nearly half of the text, was a little distracting, it was none-the-less a very good read. As for the tobacco, well, I knew from the start that it wouldn’t be for me; but I always enjoy you analyses, and each of your articles is an edifying experience. Thanks.
I’m glad you weren’t *too* distracted by the sports, Cortez–I know you’re not a fan. I’m not a rabid football fan, really, but I do enjoy it as a seasonal time-pass, and I was trying to stretch out the boundaries of the topic a little bit–nothing would be worse than me being bored to death writing the same old tobacco article, except perhaps the readership being MORE bored to death reading the same old tobacco article. I’ll keep stretching out here and there, and hoping that the stuff that doesn’t work is easily forgiven.
Entertaining review. So far my opinion of Barbados Plantation is that it’s a nice aro but although the tin note is remarkable (I smell coconut in it too), when smoked it tastes like every other high-quality vanilla-cased aro I’ve smoked. I’m not getting so much as a hint of rum, not in the taste nor the room note.
Here’s an experiment for you, shutterbug–pour yourself a shot of a good dark rum (I used Appleton 12, for lack of Mount Gay in my liquor cabinet), but don’t drink it. Just waft the aromas and inhale deeply, letting them settle in your sinuses. Then fire up a bowl of Barbados Plantation, and occasionally inhale a bit from the rum (ok, take a sip if you can’t help it). I’d bet you a tin you’ll begin to find the smokey, vanilla notes in the rum as easily as you’ll find the thread of rum in the tobacco smoke. Feel free to PM or post your results.