Jim's STG Versions of Mac Baren Blends Reviews.
- Thread starter JimInks
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Certainly makes me feel good for the stash I have of Mac Baren Virginia flake. Sad for the future of the catalog that STG kept, though. One hopes this is just a hiccup on their way to better things, you never know.
I don’t suppose if anyone knows if HU Dockworker is making it state side?
Would love to know that timeline. Super super great stuff.
Swimming blindly so apologies if I’m not up to speed. All these blends are already released by STG and tins have arrived in the US? Does that mean they were made by the previously operating Sutliff plant before? I was thinking the transition, in the over the pond shops, would take another year to smooth out. This is what my uneducated fingers tell me:
Thank you for the thorough comparisons Jim! It's a bit puzzling that STG decided to use a new crop of young Virginias for all the Mac Baren blends they decided to keep, since I would presume with the acquisition of Mac Baren they should have also acquired Mac Baren's enormous warehouses of well aged Virginias to work with. STG certainly is no stranger to making odd decisions though.
It’s also possible that STG stopped replenishing MacBaren’s stocks and used up a lot of it in preparation for shutting it down.
Nothing about the reduced quality surprises me. It’s all about maximizing profit and efficiency, not quantity.
With less competition there’s less incentive to improve quality.
Has a blend ever improved once STG accquired it?
Thank you very much for these great reviews Jim. 
I think that I have a couple tins of MB Capstan Blue unopened. Now I'll be careful to keep them that way for a long, long time. They'll be my sons' last chance of tasting the classic.
Don’t wait too long. MacBaren’s toppings fade out in a handful of years.
Word on the street is that Granger improved once it moved to STG. I've only had the new (current) Granger, and it's a very satisfying smoke. If it was even better before STG took it over, it must've been quite lovely back in the day. But I'm happy with the STG version that's available now.
I'd say they did okay with the Lane blends they kept from my experience as well. I wonder how much of this is STG and how much is just the alarming drop in quality of everything post 'the great 2020 lapse of duty and reason'...
It seems to me like the quality and integrity of pretty much anything changed or established since during or after the beer bug is just absolute trash and nobody could possibly care less about it...
"Discontinued" is sometimes a retailer's code for "we're not going to stock this anymore."
I think that "care less" is largely true. People acclimate to everything that doesn't represent an immediate threat to their existence. And sometimes they even acclimate to that. You gets what you gets, so either make friends with it or go away.
STG can make a quality product when they have to, like with the "Dunhill" blends, for which they were licensed by BAT, or Revor plug, which they make for GH & Co.
Otherwise, based on past experience, all bets are off.
They paid a lot of money for Lane almost three times what they spent on acquiring MacBaren/Sutliff and they kept that facility intact for years, so they know how those blends are sourced, and have had years of making them after closing down Lane's factory. Those are big selling blends, right in line with STG's definition of worthwhile.
When they took over the manufacturing on Peter Heinrich's Curly Block, they completely changed the blend, adding in a Cavendish bullseye that wasn't in the original and swapping out the Virginias. It wasn't bad, just not nearly as good as the original.
I think of them as the McDonald's of blending houses, huge, efficient, profitable, and reliably mediocre.
Reminds me of the signs restaurants hang when they're going to close down. It's always "closed for remodeling".
There's a gyros shop near us that has been "closed for remodeling" since before we moved here... 9 years ago.
The real McCoy; 2015 MacBaren Mixture Scottish Blend in a 250 gr. tin.
Beautiful to behold too.
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