Am I Late to the Party?

[kcghost]

You can get some old time tobaccos on pipestud.com but they aren't cheap. They're too many quality tobaccos out there to resort to that unless there are some you particularly want to try. There are lots of vendors to order from: smokingpipes.com, pipesandcigars.com, cupojoes.com, 4noggins.com, watchcitycigars.com, thepipenook.com, etc., and a large number of others.

 

[peregrinus]

I feel like I may have missed some sort of Golden Age.

You haven’t missed anything life changing, in fact, you’re just in time.
Lucky you- these are the good old days.

 

[anotherbob]

I don't know if I would qualify as a pipe scene veteran as I've only been smoking pipes for about 48-49 years. But I'll share my thoughts about this.

Many blends and blenders have come and gone. Sometimes the blend returns, made by a different company and sometimes that blend is gone for good. Supplies for different blenders wax and wane, then wax and wane again. Part of the situation is that the Chinese pipe smoking community has expanded in recent years and are now getting a significant portion of production. This results in somewhat smaller amounts of blends making it to the US. This will adjust in time.

People are always pining over what they've lost or have difficulty finding. They bestow legend and greatness on hard to find blends. This is what I refer to as THE PSYCHOPATHY OF SCARCITY.

Most of it is bullshit.

There are plenty of great blends available for purchase. You get to start with a blank canvas and paint your own picture.

If your curiosity needs to be satisfied and your pocketbook is bottomless you can find most of these fabled blends. In my experience it's rarely worth the cost.

Welcome to the hunt! Have fun!

yes what you can't have often seems better then it really was. Heck who hasn't thought about the great times they've had with an ex while forgetting the whole reason they're an ex? Who doesn't know someone that was miserable in high school but now calls it the best time of their life? Yeah that which can't be had becomes legend after a while.

 

[mordy18]

I picked up the pipe somewhere around january 2019. I had the exact same experience as you did on Mclleland except it was even more frustrating be because it disappeared literally a few months before I put in my first tobacco order.

It seemed that every top blend review I read included some Frog Morton blend, Cellar in particular. And then, shortly after I put in my first Dunhill order it went away (came back as Peterson but my two favorites - durbar and bb1938 - didnt). Frustrating.

I paid scalper prices for a tin of Frog Morton Cellar and really really like it. And I got the same advice from the veteran pipers that you just did in this thread - lots and lots of good and great blends. And you know what, they were right.

My two cents: Forget about what’s gone and start building your own stash. If you want some general sense of what Frog Morton Cellar was try Boswells Northwoods and Esoterica Pembroke (not that easy to find but it is available from time to time online and seemingly not being one of the most desirable Esoterica blend can be had for a reasonable price on the secondary market).

Definitely watch the tobacco offered for sale on this site. There are a few scalpers but seems the vast majority of people price even hard to find tobaccos much much more fairly here than on ebay. Also pipestud has great offerings at fair prices but they go quickly. Get on his mailing list.

But just start with 5 or 6 widely available blends of different varieties. Read the relevant threads and reviews on tobaccoreviews for ideas. My suggestion is to focus on those few selected blends and get to know them before ordering more. And definitely get a good easy smoking “codger blend”. I recommend Sir Walter Raleigh aromatic but you can also find lots or threads on that.

 

[anotherbob]

Blends come and go, and brands come a go, and that has been happening for centuries. You've pointed out a couple of the departures or scarcities of recent time. This is still the golden age of pipe tobacco in terms of the numbers of brands and blends relatively available to today's pipe smoker, so bask in that while it lasts, and don't go into mourning. There is currently more variety and more genres than you will ever be able to sample. However, the big picture is that a regulatory boom is about to lower that will eliminate many blends, probably some brands, and perhaps a lot of the distributions and availability of blends. This has pipe smokers hoarding into the foreseeable future. Keep track of that.

I still say the blends that disappear with the new regs where probably already about to get the ax. To my mind unless we're left with a handful of blends the ones cut where already on the way out and died from a thousand cuts not one (seriously the price for those is high but not prohibitively high it would only put a blend in the red if it was already tettering there). Companys care about image and if they can pass the buck they will.

 

[Briar Baron]

I do regret that many of the "famous" blends are gone but as others have said there are plently of realy good blends left.
I will say though that even if some blends were maybe not supported well here on this forum, (the McCelland blends were given as an example) they were widely appreciated as can be seen by reviews on Tobaccoreviews.com. where reviews going back more than 10 years already had picked many of thier blends as outstanding.

So IMHO not a lot of the hype was generated after they announced they were closing but were strongly supported over a long time. Check out the reviews of Christmas Cheer (my favourites).

 

[chopper]

Yep, you missed it. They've arrested all of the tobacco cartels, and I believe that they are going door to door smashing pipes now.
It was all fun while it lasted.

So you've been to Nanny State Australia recently then?

 

[bullet08]

Don't get anything currently popular. They are all crap. Don't buy any briar pipes, specially good looking Peterson. They are crap too. And last but not the least, no matter what don't buy Ashton Artisan's Blend! It's a real crap!

 

[brut666]

I was a huge McClelland fan, but it wasn't outrageously popular on here. Non-aromatic smokers make up the smallest percentage of pipe smokers, making us an obscure minority that makes up this forum. When McClellands would come up on here, more people posted making fun of the blends than singing their praises.
But, when they announced their closure, a few days later people were all of a sudden their biggest fans.

Anytime a tobacco company closes, or a blend goes away, the same damned people who made fun of it are all all of a sudden boohooing in the streets. Which, then makes newcomers all think that the blend or company was much loved across the prism.

Take the advice of those above, find what you like first. Then worry about the bullshit later.

? Love this dude ??

 

[brut666]

Don't get anything currently popular. They are all crap. Don't buy any briar pipes, specially good looking Peterson. They are crap too. And last but not the least, no matter what don't buy Ashton Artisan's Blend! It's a real crap!

Perfect advice ?

 

[chopper]

I picked up pipe smoking as a quarantine hobby back in the Spring, and I love it. Diving in and exploring/researching the pipe blend world, I feel like I may have missed some sort of Golden Age. For example, my local shop has a house blend that is an all time favorite of mine, and the owner there says he based that blend on Frog Morton Cellar. I look for that...gone. I read online how McClelland had been around for years cranking out an array of beloved and praiseworthy blends until they closed their doors just a while back. With the holidays coming up, all my searches for holiday blends show people raving about McClelland Christmas blends, with comparatively sparse and lackluster mentions of any other. Also, I keep finding mention of Penzance - gone. Elsewhere, I read of Lakelands. Sounds intriguing, and I want to try it. I can’t find the stuff ANYWHERE! An entire genre missing? Can any pipe scene veterans here give me some perspective on this?

Try being a pipe smoker in Nanny State Australia.
Here our politicians grabbed the ball from the self appointed arbiters of social conscience, the shreiking anti-smoking minority, and ran with it, hard, and have not let up since.

Plain packaging with disgusting pics sent most pipe tobacco importers/distributers running. [One such pic is a before and after pic of poor 'Gary' who really looks like crap in the after pic. Even when it was revealed that Gary had died from AIDS, not from smoking, his pics still remain on tobacco products]
Choice of blends here is pathetically limited.

Then they introduced an auto tax hike every six months to the point where 50 grams of tobacco is now over $120. [I shit you not]
To make matters even worse, last year TPTB made it illegal to import tobacco into Oz [It's not illegal for kind souls to send us poor souls tobacco - a gentle hint to members who refuse to sell their excess to antipodeans]

So now I'm reduced to running the gauntlet before Christmas every year to take advantage of the mail rush. No point in ordering tinned tobacco because those clever x-ray machines at Customs seem to nab them nearly every time, so my choices are limited to bulk blends [For which I'm grateful when a pound makes it to my door]

No doubt I'll have tobacco confiscated again, only a matter of time. I try not to entertain images of jackbooks kicking in my front door at 6am due to my heinous 'crimes'.

So I hope you don't think I'm insensitive or being a dick for chuckling at your 'dilemma' and for muttering 'Oh, the poor dear' to myself when reading your lamentations.
All I can say is be grateful for what tobacco you can acquire at reasonable cost. It could be much worse.

 

[brut666]

Try being a pipe smoker in Nanny State Australia.
Here our politicians grabbed the ball from the self appointed arbiters of social conscience, the shreiking anti-smoking minority, and ran with it, hard, and have not let up since.

Plain packaging with disgusting pics sent most pipe tobacco importers/distributers running. [One such pic is a before and after pic of poor 'Gary' who really looks like crap in the after pic. Even when it was revealed that Gary had died from AIDS, not from smoking, his pics still remain on tobacco products]
Choice of blends here is pathetically limited.

Then they introduced an auto tax hike every six months to the point where 50 grams of tobacco is now over $120. [I shit you not]
To make matters even worse, last year TPTB made it illegal to import tobacco into Oz [It's not illegal for kind souls to send us poor souls tobacco - a gentle hint to members who refuse to sell their excess to antipodeans]

So now I'm reduced to running the gauntlet before Christmas every year to take advantage of the mail rush. No point in ordering tinned tobacco because those clever x-ray machines at Customs seem to nab them nearly every time, so my choices are limited to bulk blends [For which I'm grateful when a pound makes it to my door]

No doubt I'll have tobacco confiscated again, only a matter of time. I try not to entertain images of jackbooks kicking in my front door at 6am due to my heinous 'crimes'.

So I hope you don't think I'm insensitive or being a dick for chuckling at your 'dilemma' and for muttering 'Oh, the poor dear' to myself when reading your lamentations.
All I can say is be grateful for what tobacco you can acquire at reasonable cost. It could be much worse.

Still on the plus side, at least you don't have to have the stress and hardship some of us have to endure when choosing different tobaccos to try, hoping we find one or two we like, then having to spend hard earned money building a stock pile of them to show other people on a internet forum. ???

 

[brut666]

On a serious note thou, are you able to buy pipes or is that just as hard as tobacco?

 

[samuelgawith01]

Sam Gawith and Gawith & Hoggarth are in stock at a number of online retailers about every month or two, I think. As a matter of fact, I just checked and Tobacco Pipes has several Sam Gawith blends, including Squadron Leader, Kendal Cream, and St. James Flake in stock now.
I, too, mourned the loss of Frog Morton's Cellar. Then I found Seattle Pipe Club's Plum Pudding Bourbon Barrel, which pulls FMC's pants down to its ankles then stuffs it headfirst into a garbage can. You should try it.

Thanks for the heads up on the St James Flake.The 50gr tins were all gone, so I ordered the 250 gr.

 

[milehighpiper]

I am not a seasoned veteran I have only been smoking pipes for about 3 years. I started the search for the unobtainable blends and quickly found myself falling in love with some Dunhill blends. Now I have a small stash of it but smoke it carefully so I do not run out of it. The point is, these guys are correct and I did not realize that until I went down the path of trying to find these old blends. Yes, some McClelland stuff is awesome and I am going to miss the ones I tried but I will not miss the ones I did not try. My favorite all day every day smoke is John Bull’s English Pipe Tobacco. It is a $5 pouch and available online. I also LOVE Dunhill’s Aperitif but that is not available and I am not paying $50 per tin just to cellar it. Instead I have found other blends to satisfy my smoking needs. These guys here are awesome and will help you figure it all out!

 

[chopper]

All said above! You can find any of the above if you look hard enough and are willing to pay dearly. Not worth it, imo.

You can put your location in your Profile—(please!—because people will forget!) That will save questions in the future as to where you live when you later mention local stores, weather, tobacco prices, availability, regulations, location of photos, wildfires, air quality, etc., etc..
Under your avatar, (top right, left most of three symbols) you choose "Account Details", which brings up "My Account". "My Location" is halfway down. Whatever you're comfortable with- town, city, county, state. Just country if you must.

You're right. A kind soul from the U.S. [An internet friend on a politically inclined forum] sent me a very generous gift package a couple of years back that included some real gems like a couple of ounces of Christmas Cheer.

Very nice stuff indeed. The vinegar note is a touch distracting but nonetheless, as nice as it is, no way would I pay exorbitant money to acquire more.

Were I able, I'd be ordering Va blends from Wessex and Hu Tobacco, just two blenders that are high on my wish list.
There's so many good blends available it's a waste of energy yearning for stuff that's gone the way of the Dodo bird.

 

[chopper]

On a serious note thou, are you able to buy pipes or is that just as hard as tobacco?

Without pipes no one would buy pipe tobacco for the govt. to tax outrageously.

The anti-smoking laws has nothing to do with concern for our health; it's just one big lucrative tax grab.
I've had dozens of orders of pipes go through Customs. Not one has been inspected by Customs. [I learnt the hard way not to add a pipe to an order of tobacco after one was intercepted by Customs. The bastards not only destroyed my baccy but also the two MM cobs and a Dr Grabow that was with it]

I've got heaps of pipes. Due to postage costs, I bought most of them from Germany [U.S. postage is $25usd - postage from Germany $10usd]

 

[ophiuchus]

Concentrate on blends you can get now. There are plenty. When you find something you like, buy up a bunch of it before you go trumpeting how great it is on a public Internet forum. There is the small but existent possibility you’ll start a snowball of hype and find yourself competing with other hoarders for your favorites.

 

[WildTurkeySurprise]

^^^^This.



What have you smoked that you have liked? People here can make some very good suggestions tailored to your tastes if they know the answer to this.

P.S.: Arango Balkan Supreme is a perfectly acceptable substitution for Penzance. Yes Penzance is great but barely worth the regular retail price vs Balkan Supreme and not even worth considering at scalper prices. So that's one hard to get blend sorted for ya.

P.P.S.: There never was any "Golden Age". Sure some fine blends are gone but there are many, many fine blends available. Actually, considering the sheer variety of blends on the market today, one could conceivably consider this to be a rather "Golden Age".

I have noticed I tend to favor Latakia blends, for one. I really like plum pudding. I like nightcap, but I realized smoking it in the evening it gives me crazy dreams (I confess sometimes now I’ll smoke it before bed for that very reason lol). Changing styles, I didn’t like Elizabethan mixture at first, but I have since grown fond of it. Mixture 965 I feel is ok, but unremarkable. My Morning Pipe to too light for me. I have some different tins on the way. I plan to make my rounds with companies and their blends, for sure. For a time it just seemed like anytime I heard or read about something interesting, BAM! out of stock, or discontinued. Thank you for your insight.

 

[WildTurkeySurprise]

And definitely get a good easy smoking “codger blend”. I recommend Sir Walter Raleigh aromatic but you can also find lots or threads on that.

Thank you much! Coincidentally, my dad told me my great grandfather kept a can of Sir Walter Raleigh on his mantel and smoked it daily. It’s in my latest p&c order. I’m pumped to try it.