I'd love to have sex with Marilyn Monroe but I'd be happy with a reasonably close substitute. And of course, alive.
Original Three Nuns by Bells
- Thread starter Sgetz
- Start date
SmokingPipes.com Updates
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
Site Sponsors
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
Never had the original 3N but Former's Straight Grain Flake is worth a try if you can find it. Va Perique and no Kentucky. But also no topping though. Cheers.
I've never had the privilege of smoking the original. But I can say Former's Straight Gain and Doblone d'Oro are very good blends all on their own. I think people would be better off letting legends be legends and enjoy what they can reasonably get their hands on today. I'm old enough to realize the good old days weren't always that good.
I’ll have to crack my unopened tin of Hal O' The Wynd now to try and compare. Thank you for the education!
You're welcome. My suggestion won't give you a match, but I am curious as to what you discover if you add perique to HOTW.
I’ll have to start adding some pure blending tobacco to my tobacco orders so I have some ingredients to play around with (or I could try adding a pinch of C&D’s The Beast ?).
I was quite enjoying the Three Nuns green the one with added perique.I bought a few tins and then it was abruptly stopped after only a short run.So I don’t know what that was about.
I hope Ernie keeps experimenting. His blends comprise about 3/4 of what I currently smoke. In fact, I have not touched a traditional tinned flake in months.
You're a good & decent man, sir!?
Unfortunately in my case, I found that easier said than done.?
Bless the wives & sweethearts....
...& pray to god they never meet! 
You're right, it is a sad commentary. Unfortunately for us the consumers we have to take what we can get in 2022.
Today the production of pipe tobacco is all about the money, as it was hundred years ago. Main difference being a hundred years ago all the big blenders in Britain & Ireland were in their heyday, with a huge customer base. They also had the pick of the best tobacco from the best run plantations in the world. That's all gone now, along with their old fashioned & labour intensive way of flavouring the now much missed blends of old, like Three Nuns.
I asked the now retired head blender of Samuel Gawith why they can't reproduce the quality & flavour of my favourite St. Bruno & other old blends. He said for starters, they can't get the consistent quality of leaf like they did years ago, the old way of flavouring blends has also gone out the window, with producers like Mac Barens favouring a 'chemical copy' of the original flavour, which they simply case or top the tobacco with.
Seeing as today we pipesmokers are so few & the difficulties tobacco blenders & producers face today are so many, I think we're all very lucky to still be able to get what's currently available. Whilst all the old blends have either gone or changed beyond recognition, there's still a great variety of tobacco to choose from. I'd personally choose St. James's Plug as today's best Va/Per & recommend people try that one before getting too upset over Three Nuns. Only trouble with it is that it needs 2-3 years or so of age before it really shines, like the flake.
God only knows what will be available for the next generation of pipesmokers. If people are dissapointed today, things will be tragic for them I shouldn't wonder.
I argue that much of what's being sold nowadays as tobacco is just cellulose chips (derived from the tobacco plant due to legal necessity) that are sprayed with all manner of flavors and aromas---essentially smokable automobile air fresheners. Farmers don't make tobacco any longer. Chemical engineers and marketing focus groups do.
I rehydrated some Cope's Escudo a few months ago. It's absolutely brilliant. McClelland Virginia also "comes back" beautifully when rehydrating after it's dry.
I leave an ounce of a contemporary tobacco on my countertop for a single day and its charm evaporates and does not return.
The proof is in the pudding! Says it all, really.
Even sealed tins with age of some of the most popular contemporary blends reveal the effect 'chemical doctoring' has on the tobacco.
Compare a tin of Capstan Flake from 2013 say, with a tin of FVF from the same year. The Capstan will look no different to a fresh tin, no darkening of the leaf & not a sugar crystal in sight!
The FVF on the other hand will be nearly black & all sparkly with crystals.
I suppose the production meetings decide wether to do things the old fashioned way or cut any risk of loss & lace the leaf with all sorts of chemicals, preservatives etc.
There's nothing new here. Blends have come and gone, been sold or leased to other makers, been altered one way or another, for centuries.
You were just as likely to get wood chips, or mulberry leaves, or some other form of crap, tossed into your 16th and 17th century tobacco shipment from the New World, as not, which is why Parliament took action to stop it. I found that legislation during a Google Docs search. Go thou and do likewise.
1930's Warhorse bar had belladonna in it along with other additives. No wonder it had a reputation for being the working man's smoke of choice. The list of other, probably dangerous, ingredients, like talc, added to blends is extensive.
Gallaher was skimping on the Syrian in the later versions of Balkan Sobranie in order to make a few more bucks.
Murray's simplified the number of steps in the processing of some of the Dunhill blends once they took over manufacturing of them. People back then were bitching about finding stems in the tobacco.
What's different is that the supply of US leaf has shrunk to a tiny fraction of what it was, different crops are being grown in their place, and more cost effective practices, like machine harvesting rather than hand picking, are taking over. As a result, quality has taken a hit. Looking into the future and hazarding a guess, climate change is going to play merry hell with crops.
There's still quality tobacco being grown in other countries, at least for the moment.
Generally, I think of Denmark as the place where British blends go to die, and nothing I've smoked so far has suggested otherwise. That said, occasionally some reasonably good stuff still comes out of Mac Baren. Is it Sobranie Ltd, or McConnell quality? No but it's still pretty good. Doblone D'Oro wasn't Three Nuns, but it was a pretty good approximation in 2014 and 2015, no cheap tobaccos, that's baloney, toppings, sure, but Three Nuns had flavorings as well. The underlying blend of tobaccos was different. I smoked a lot of it in the '70's.
Flavorings and topping were always in use. St Bruno? I have a copy of the formula from the 1960's. Of course, it's in company code, but if you have Imperial's code book you can probably figure it out. That product was topped as well. Processing was very different as tobaccos were allowed to ripen and ferment before being released, not shoved out the airlock in infancy, like is done today.
Cope's Escudo was a justly famed blend, though it had been made by Gallaher since the early 20th century, and initially it kept on being great when A & C Petersen took it over. A lot of people actually prefer the A & C Petersen. Today it's shit, doesn't age into anything. It's Dorian Gray in a tin.
And who's to say that the stuff we smoked 40 50 years ago wasn't an earlier generation's idea of crap. High end mid 20th century is the tobacco I imprinted on and while it's no longer in existence, my taste "memories" of the best of them are vivid and helped me with navigating later blends.
But for all that, here's the thing. While I notice the changes in blends that I've smoked for decades, while I've tasted the changes that I interpret as drops in quality compared with what I once smoked and can still enjoy to some extent because I cellared, it doesn't matter. To a newer generation of smokers, this is what their tobaccos are and taste like and if they're happy with it then there's no issue.
You were just as likely to get wood chips, or mulberry leaves, or some other form of crap, tossed into your 16th and 17th century tobacco shipment from the New World, as not, which is why Parliament took action to stop it. I found that legislation during a Google Docs search. Go thou and do likewise.
1930's Warhorse bar had belladonna in it along with other additives. No wonder it had a reputation for being the working man's smoke of choice. The list of other, probably dangerous, ingredients, like talc, added to blends is extensive.
Gallaher was skimping on the Syrian in the later versions of Balkan Sobranie in order to make a few more bucks.
Murray's simplified the number of steps in the processing of some of the Dunhill blends once they took over manufacturing of them. People back then were bitching about finding stems in the tobacco.
What's different is that the supply of US leaf has shrunk to a tiny fraction of what it was, different crops are being grown in their place, and more cost effective practices, like machine harvesting rather than hand picking, are taking over. As a result, quality has taken a hit. Looking into the future and hazarding a guess, climate change is going to play merry hell with crops.
There's still quality tobacco being grown in other countries, at least for the moment.
Generally, I think of Denmark as the place where British blends go to die, and nothing I've smoked so far has suggested otherwise. That said, occasionally some reasonably good stuff still comes out of Mac Baren. Is it Sobranie Ltd, or McConnell quality? No but it's still pretty good. Doblone D'Oro wasn't Three Nuns, but it was a pretty good approximation in 2014 and 2015, no cheap tobaccos, that's baloney, toppings, sure, but Three Nuns had flavorings as well. The underlying blend of tobaccos was different. I smoked a lot of it in the '70's.
Flavorings and topping were always in use. St Bruno? I have a copy of the formula from the 1960's. Of course, it's in company code, but if you have Imperial's code book you can probably figure it out. That product was topped as well. Processing was very different as tobaccos were allowed to ripen and ferment before being released, not shoved out the airlock in infancy, like is done today.
Cope's Escudo was a justly famed blend, though it had been made by Gallaher since the early 20th century, and initially it kept on being great when A & C Petersen took it over. A lot of people actually prefer the A & C Petersen. Today it's shit, doesn't age into anything. It's Dorian Gray in a tin.
And who's to say that the stuff we smoked 40 50 years ago wasn't an earlier generation's idea of crap. High end mid 20th century is the tobacco I imprinted on and while it's no longer in existence, my taste "memories" of the best of them are vivid and helped me with navigating later blends.
But for all that, here's the thing. While I notice the changes in blends that I've smoked for decades, while I've tasted the changes that I interpret as drops in quality compared with what I once smoked and can still enjoy to some extent because I cellared, it doesn't matter. To a newer generation of smokers, this is what their tobaccos are and taste like and if they're happy with it then there's no issue.
I enjoy the recent tobacco far to much to worry about blends from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, most of it just going to be what you remember, growing up we had an amazing Chinese restaurant, amazing shrimp with lobster sauce and the best egg rolls, 45 years later I still compare every Chinese restaurant to them, even though I haven't eaten there in literally 45 years (it closed long ago), was it really that good or did i just remember it being that good, I'm guessing the latter and that it was good but not the end all be all.
I've had some tobaccos with 5 or 10 or 15 years on it and compared them to blends that were right out of the tin and where there were some differences you seriously had to look for them to the point that you could just be talking yourself into them.
A 1998 cuban cigar is going to taste 100x different than a fresh cigar, I'm just not finding enough difference in fresh and aged pipe tobaccos to worry about it, I just like to enjoy my pipe, that's all that really matters.
I've had some tobaccos with 5 or 10 or 15 years on it and compared them to blends that were right out of the tin and where there were some differences you seriously had to look for them to the point that you could just be talking yourself into them.
A 1998 cuban cigar is going to taste 100x different than a fresh cigar, I'm just not finding enough difference in fresh and aged pipe tobaccos to worry about it, I just like to enjoy my pipe, that's all that really matters.
I enjoy what recent tobacco I can, namely the types that aren't deteriorating in quality year after year.
One of the benefits of being newer to the game, ignorance as they say is bliss, don’t miss what you’ve never had and many more sayings to console us losers. ?
i really like the “new” Wessex Dark Flake, would i like the old blend better, probably but I’ve never had it so im in a good place with the new blend and changed.
I'm not sure you will get Doblone D'oro in the U.K.......haven't looked for ages but it wasn't available a few years back......I think I have a bit in a jar somewhere ....if you want to try it let me know and i will post it if you're in the U.K.
After you kept recommending the Sav as a close smoke to the Three Nuns you are saying they fucked it up? I bought 35 3.5 oz tins back in 2018 when they had it on sale for 15.36 for a 3.5 oz tin which I thought was a good deal. Are you telling me the stuff you really liked was changed back then or did it happen recently? I have been aging all my Sav till it hits the 5-7 year mark. If it did change any idea when it happened?