Tobaccos and Reviews I’d Like to See
-
Kevin Godbee - Jun 3, 2015
- 4 min read
Marshall "Butch" Armstrong
I’m sure we have all read tobacco reviews, as well as wine and beer reviews. Pipes Magazine posts some great ones that I know I have benefited from. This is where I learned about Bosphorus Cruise, which I love. Most of the reviews I have read here have been down to earth and make sense when you read them. But haven’t we all read reviews that were pretentious at best. Reviews that told us our wine should taste like bacon and our tobacco like bramble. Bramble? Who knows what bramble tastes like? And how do you get bacon flavored wine? Can they really taste those things?
Now I like to drink stout. And most stout has a coffeeish flavor due to the roasted barley. So when I read a review of a stout and the reviewer mentions coffee flavor, I know what they’re talking about. But when I read “notes of roasted meat and mush-roomy earth,” I start to wonder how many beers this reviewer has had. I also like wine, but most, if not all the wine I have had has had some type of fruit flavor as opposed to “grass” or “honey drizzled banana.” Also the names of tobacco and wine and beer are meant to attract us to the product. Names like “Taste of Autumn,” or “Sexual Chocolate,” give us an impression of what to expect when smoking or drinking. But really, a wine called “Sexual Chocolate” is meant for a certain target consumer. Can you imagine a farmer coming home from a long day in the tractor seat and enjoying a glass of Sexual Chocolate? Or the “Taste of Autumn” pipe tobacco. Autumn is reminiscent of turning leaves and campfires, but maybe that’s not your thing. So that name and taste wouldn’t be attractive to you.
This got me thinking about names and reviews of pipe tobacco I’d like to see. Certain types of consumers are completely left out of the picture when companies go fishing for buyers for their products. And speaking of fishing, I like to fish. So how about a pipe tobacco called “Feelin’ Bassy” with notes of forgotten bait, fresh wax worm and gas fumes. For the hunter we have “Autumn Musk,” with aromas of freshly gutted deer and dried goose droppings with a turkey feather mouth feel. And here’s a wine for the Equestrian called “Lame Nanny,” with notes of old horse blanket and sparrows nest “teasing provocatively on the nose.”
For those who like tongue bite there’s “Mud Dauber” pipe tobacco. “Stings like a wasp!” For the aforementioned farmer we have “Old Barn” pipe tobacco. “Reminiscent of days on the farm with the full bold aroma of hoof scrapings and corn husk.” Anyone who works out knows the sweet smells of old gym socks and used towels, am I right? So the tobacco for you is “Five O’clock Sweat,” with the “locker room finish on each and every puff.” And for our pipe makers out there we have “Morning Wood,” with notes of burned sandpaper and leather dye and a briar shavings mouth feel! For our pipe smokers who really aren’t interested in anything but smoking we have, “Bowl Cake,” with a room note of used ashtray and a sulfur match finish. Moving on, we cannot forget our highway workers and so we have a special tobacco appropriately named “Bituminous Nights.” For those workers who can’t leave the job when they go home, it has notes of, fresh tar, 100 degree 12 hour days, and an old work boot finish. Amazing! For the office workers we have “Leather Desk Chair.” “With a room note of liquid paper and a mouth feel of pencil shavings and worn out leather, you’ll feel like you never left work!”
For our Winter ice fishing enthusiasts we should have “Frozen Foot,” pipe tobacco. With an ice fishing shack room note of propane fumes and a fish scale mouth feel. Yum! For dog groomers there is, “Canine Delight” A room note of old dog hair and a mouth feel of whatever the last customer rolled in. “A delight to the senses!” And last, but certainly not least, there is, “Italian Restaurant.” With notes of bread dough and garlic and an onion finish on the palette.
Now I know I’ve been having some fun here at pipe tobacco reviewers expense, and really, most reviewers are pretty good at telling us what a tobacco will taste like. But when reading reviews I’ve always wondered how unappealing a review would seem if you didn’t like the tastes and smells being described. And maybe you like some smells and tastes not always enjoyed by others. Like motor oil, or freshly cleaned barn. Wouldn’t it be great to have a tobacco smell and taste like some of the other things you enjoy? Especially if you really enjoy your work. Although there are some jobs like mine, with smells that I don’t think anyone wants to think about, let alone taste. So I apologize to the reviewers and I hope you have a sense of humor. And above all, keep doing the fine work you do.
|
Marshall Lee Armstrong enjoys camping, fly fishing, kayaking, painting, drumming and writing. He has published two books of poetry and writes a blog called "The Window". He is 58-years old, and has worked as a Rock Band Drummer, Electroplater, Chemical Process Technician, and Circuitry Manufacturing Supervisor. He is currently a Medical Lab Technician. He started smoking pipes in 1980. |
Written by Kevin Godbee
16 Responses
Smokingpipes.com Updates
2 Fresh Davide Iafisco Pipes |
8 Fresh Rinaldo Pipes |
12 Fresh Dunhill Pipes |
6 Fresh BriarWorks Pipes |
12 Fresh Neerup 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.
You have to wonder how many tobacco reviews are written extolling the different flavors found by virtue of the power of suggestion. I have a good chuckle when I read reviews and they all sound like they were written by the same person or by people who said, “Wait! I didn’t taste the White Chocolate orange marmalade but I better agree to it because I don’t want to sound like a noobie.”
I can’t help but wonder how reviewers come up with the descriptions that they do.
But I guess I’m not as skilled in my tastes as they are.
After all is said and done, the blend either tastes good and enjoyable or it’s not.
To each his own and the search for that special blend continues.
Reviewing is always a neat trick. If you get too fanciful, you lose touch with the subject. If you write too dryly, it’s just not engaging. I think giving a review a strong factual base, telling what you know about the blend, is important. Then, at the opportune place in the review, if you can use the selected unexpected verb or image to depict the taste, smell, texture, or other characteristic of the blend, that can put the review across with a ring of authenticity. It’s always a balancing act. Hopefully many will appreciate the ring of truth, and always there will be those who think you are too boring to live, or are a jerk. But that’s the sport of reviewing.
I did a little research on taste and tasting before writing this piece. In tobacco and wine there are thousands of flavor compounds that people with a refined sense of taste can experience. Robert Parker, the famous wine critic is said to have a more refined sense of taste than anyone ever tested. It mostly has to do with your sense of smell. The “retro-hale” or aroma that travels from your mouth up into your nasal cavity where your olfactory bulb lies is fundamental in forming taste. Also, things you eat and drink before tasting a tobacco can have widely varying effects on the taste you experience and each person’s taste senses and preferences will differ. I just thought it would be fun to come up with some alternative tobaccos. As I said in the article, I hope the reviewers have a sense of humor!
There are some crazy pretentious reviews of anything and everything. Some beer reviews make my cry with how much nonsense is written within it. Seriously, bramble? Totally agree, sir.
But there are more than enough good reviews that this is just noise and a good laugh while you’re combing reviews for your next pipe tobacco, cigar, coffee, beer, liquor or wine.
Funny stuff.
Motor oil and freshly cleaned barn? He has obviously tried Condor!
Almost in the same league are menu writers at some restaurants! At this moment, I can’t think of a funny example; hope someone else can.
Thanks for a humorous and well written article. A tad curmudgeonly, but good fun.
Great article, I’ve always chuckled at some terms reviewers have used to.
I can really relate to this. Being a stout drinker myself, I tried a brew named: “Old Engine Oil”. The label was not a lie. At any rate, I do benefit from the reviews posted here and elsewhere, but all too often I do not get the same results when I smoke the blends. Taste is too subjective, and effected by the humidity, time of day, phases of the moon, etc. I love Dunhill EMP, but only in a corncob pipe. I also enjoy Missouri Meerschaum Country Gentleman, but only in briar. I do not like it in a cob. Go figure! If nothing else I enjoy the unintentional humor taken from the pretentiousness of some reviews. There is nothing like the taste of cedar and leather, and the wafting fragrance of PPG.
Very funny and in some cases “right on”. After reading some reviews I sometimes wonder “What the Hell is this guy trying to say?” The majority are good and helpful but some are sterling examples of that which you poke fun at. Let’s hope those guys read this.
Thank you, thank you. I’ve been trying to find names for some of my own blending experiences, and I think you just found labels for every batch.
I should send some, let you post the review here. (But then, I think you just did!)
Thanks for the great comments, everyone. This was a fun article to write.
Well said! Satire that truly comes home. Definitely a home run full of giggles.
Ah, one of the many never-ending debates! I find my bases covered by enjoying both coated and uncoated bowls for their own merits–problem solved. 🙂
And I posted the right comment to the wrong article. That’s what I get for binge-reading in multiple browser windows….
.
That said, I can certainly relate–often I’ll look back on a dated review and wonder just what the hell I was tasting back then! It can be trying to write and talk about the same, rather narrowly-focused, parameters of what tobacco smoke tastes like over the course of hundreds of published articles. Fortunately for me, I tend to review the good stuff, and it makes it easy to look for the little tastes that set one blend apart from another.
Speaking of, have you tried F&K’s Merde de Cheval tobacco? It’s right up your alley.