Blind Tasting: Red Virginia

[Non-Mentholated Black Man]

I have to apologize. Upon opening/smoking the final two (2) samples, it would seem that this is not a "three (3) identical pair(s)…" experiment or malevolent attempt to denigrate anyone.

5) This was a nice tobacco, subtle and smooth. The enjoyment from this smoke was fleeting, as I was rudely interrupted by some very loud sounds emanating from the scanner that often seems to do that very thing.
For the record:
I became a volunteer firefighter for the same reason that everyone else does; the overly grateful beauties that spend their lives lined up around the block of every fire station in America.
Imagine my chagrin, the day I realized:
What was supposed to be my entrance into the male calendar modelling industry, has now become a thankless second job that pays the minimalist wage known to man.

6) I will attempt to give an actual review of this final sample, as my very concrete deadline is quickly approaching. Mrs. Pickles was very specific about what he expects from "the stooges" (his words) and the PM envelope at the top of this page has gone from dormant to an angry looking red number 4 in the span of about two (2) minutes.
This tobacco was interesting but somewhat bland also. It was interesting because it had more of a fresh hay taste, which is quite different from the sweet/mature alfalfa taste of sample 1) that I found so appealing. It was bland in the sense of being bland. The Red Virginia seems to be less pronounced, if not almost muted.

My numerical ranking, beginning with the sample I found most appealing, is as follows:
1), 2), 5), 3), 4), 6)



I want to thank Mrs. Pickles for the time/effort/expense that he put forth in order to make this Blind Tasting happen. Thank you, Andrew, for being a gentleman and great guy.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for you.

 

[Mrs. Pickles]

My utmost respect to @Non-Mentholated Black Man for not only completing all the samples as a volunteer fire fighter during hurricane recovery, but also for exposing this thread as the diabolical psyop that it is.

Before the authorities take me away, it seems I've got some explaining to do...

 

[Mrs. Pickles]

Alright folks, hold on to your bowls.

To give these choices some context, I’ll reveal the general idea behind this line up.

Aside from offering straight red Virginias, the secondary goal was to give tasters a wide range leaf age, origin, and cut.

The samples were in sequence from oldest to youngest in terms of tin age. With older tobacco deteriorating faster after popping its tin, I wanted tasters to be able to get to it sooner. Surprisingly, the progression in age didn’t turn out as obvious as I thought it would be. I don’t think anyone mentioned it during the tasting.

In total, there were three American and two European manufacturers, the tin age of the tobaccos spanned about 30 years with a distribution of years between them, and the cuts were, as you saw, from flake, to broken flake, to ribbon, to mixed. I regret not including a tiny cube of KBV Jupiter Slices as a fun size candy bar plug. I also regret not begging some homegrown flue cured leaf from @Ahi Ka and @cosmicfolklore and sneaking it in amongst the samples.

On the positive side, here is what you did smoke:

 

[Mrs. Pickles]

Sample #1
McCranie's Red Flake 1983 Crop, tinned 1994

You can’t start a discussion on red virginias without mentioning the whale, so I figured we might as well get it over with first. This tobacco is here because it’s generally recognized as good and emblematic of the McClelland aesthetic and it seemed to do that job pretty well. Just about everyone identified the manufacturer by tin note alone, including smokers who hadn’t experienced McClelland tobacco before.

A lot has been said about this particular tobacco and McClelland in general, so I’ll avoid repeating it here except for one note that I think puts this tobacco in context with the rest of the tasting.

McCranie’s ‘83 is, to my knowledge, among the first pipe tobacco to be marketed and sold as single crop red virginia. Yes, there was Christmas Cheer 1992 and 1994, and maybe you can count Two Flakes from the 1930s. Even still, it seems like McC’s really leaned into the exclusive crop idea with this one with its 1983 North Carolina leaves having way more bale age on them than those of the first (crop year 1989) and the second (crop year 1991) Christmas Cheer.

Maybe the early 90s premium cigar boom zeitgeist was creeping into pipe tobacco here, but if you ask me, this is an impressive stroke of marketing genius from a little American pipe tobacco company that was making a private label product for a family business.

This tin of tobacco makes the claim that straight red virginia–an unblended crop of it even--is worthy of our appreciation. And yeah, I think they were successful. Here we are three decades later living in a paradigm where we strangers are comparing passionate notes on a flight of straight red virginias.

So, yep, this tin is a legend from far before I was of smoking age. Has it held up? Have forty years enhanced it or driven it weird? A valid question for this tobacco and my own body.

With regard to the tobacco, there was some mixed opinion among our tasters, too far faded for some, too dressed up for others, but a bullseye for a good number of us. In the aggregation of ranked choice, this one was the most preferred (or least hated). I guess the legend still lives.

For my part, I’m sad there’s one less tin of this in the world, but I’m glad we got to share it.

 

[Mrs. Pickles]

Sample #2
Tavern Tobacco Company’s Boar’s Head, made by Samuel Gawith, tinned 2003

Our wild card and chameleon. The tin note suggests McClelland, but the real story behind this is convoluted. Getting to the bottom of it isn’t made any easier by the fact that if you try to enter this tin’s name into a search engine, you’ll mostly get back pictures of ham.



The most reliable scoop I can find is from some knowledgeable members in this old thread. According to them, this tobacco was made by one of Gawith houses for the Knoxville Cigar Company. The tin looks like some of the old C&D tins from around this time. Maybe it was shipped in bulk and packed by Knoxville Cigar?

I apologize for this breaking away from our straight red virginia parameter, but this is as close as I could get to a Gawith-made blend that fits our scope. Also, I really wanted to try it myself and thought it would be fun to include.

The contents are listed as “matured Virginias” but of what grade? Surely some red, but what else? As you pointed out, the lemon grades darken quite a bit with age, so there’s probably some of that in here, and maybe they even started dark and heavily stoved.

Not knowing what to expect when I popped the tin, it accidentally turned out to be a red herring–a McClelland smell-alike. Very fun to try this with you all and utterly weird to discover that Gawith cracked the McC sauce back in the early aughts, shipped it off for an American private label, and then quietly went back to making Ennerdale et al.
A successful clone as it is/was, I am sorry that it utterly fails as an obtainable alternative to McClelland. There was a tin of it on Pipestud last weekend, however.

 

[Mrs. Pickles]

Sample #3
Fribourg & Treyer Blackjack Red Virginia, tinned 2008

Described on its packaging as “a ready-rubbed pure red Virginia plug.” I included this in the mix because it fills some holes in the rest of the list: teenage tin, European manufacturer, likely African origins of the tobacco, ready-rubbed fine ribbon cut.

Jbfrady sharply detected the Kopp toppings (Koppings?) that overlap with their other F&T products. His rogue approach to sample order also let him taste this early on while those toppings were still fresh.

Maybe this blend needs freshness because it seems age was unkind to Blackjack, taking an already mild version of red virginia and softening even more--perhaps a bit too much for most of our tasters. Or maybe it just felt a little too muted, burned a little too quick, and got lost in the hangover from the two pungent flakes before it.

In the combined opinion, Blackjack ranked in 6 place out of 6.

 

[Mrs. Pickles]

Sample #4
Cornell & Diehl Carolina Red Flake 2018

I felt like our tasting had to include this for the same reasons that McCranie’s red flake is here. It’s a landmark tobacco from a company that carries the torch of limited releases with an emphasis on specific, single crops, and believes in the flavor potential of relatively naked red virginia.

C&D might owe a debt to McClelland for the marketing of Carolina Red Flake, but the tobacco itself is far from a McClelland clone and in my opinion, that makes it interesting.

If McClelland is red virginia turned up to 11, CRF is red virginia tuned to some irrational and transcendental number with a hefty dose of nicotine.

It’s a different take on the genre, one that struts an indecipherable grade code on its package and flavors that are less sweet, more savory, darker and weirdly herbal. Interestingly Jeremy Reeves characterized this crop as having a standout “caraway seed” flavor. I don’t think anyone else has described this tobacco as such since, but when I was playing along with you guys and smoking this sample, that "caraway seed" whacked me over the head. Savory, herbal, celery-like. Emerging mid-bowl, like Rambo from a swamp.

The good news is that some incarnation of CRF comes around every years or two and you can sometimes find older tins on the secondary market with little premium. Sandblast also gets his wish for when he said this tobacco “welcome perique with open arms.” C & D will validate that opinion with the next release of CRF with Perique.

CRF came in a close fourth place. It does, however, win a gold medal for the sample our panel most frequently compared to raisins.

 

[Mrs. Pickles]

Sample #5
Watch City Simply Red (August, 2023 release)

It’s not 515 RC-1, at least not explicitly, but I think it's safe to say that this tobacco was made in part by Sutliff, our other great American manufacturer. Moreover, it represents another great tobacconist in Watch City.

With regard to Sutliff, it was hard to include only one of their offerings in the mix and it seems kind of unfair that we didn't compare something like Cringle Flake 2019 while the other two American blenders were represented with their tony limited-release stuff. But, as your scores affirmed, Simply Red can stand with the best of them. This was our one bulk offering among all the samples and it was also our bronze medalist following two way more expensive tobaccos.

It’s modeled after the McClelland type, but as @Butter Side Down side down put it, it's McC with the volume its turned down by half, and I believe that’s by design. It hits genre expectations: mellow, fruit-like, some bread and vinegar, enough dynamism and enough subtlety to be a fine blender or straight smoke. Sure, it’s McC inspired, but it too is its own.

 

[Mrs. Pickles]

Sample #6
HU Tobacco My Red Fox (tinned December, 2023)

Our youngest tin of tobacco. It’s here to provide a different experience, one that's (for good or bad) a more modern profile of red virginia. That’s to say, a virginia blend with flavors that are maybe not as "red" as they used to be. It’s not an entirely fair comparison, though–this is the second sample that bends the all red virginia rule as the blender notes explicitly put bright virginia in the mix along with the red.

It was neat to see that it hit the mark for some and landed dead last for others with very little in between. Its strong appeal to hay loving folk nudged it into 5th place, beating out a "pure red virginia" from the same maker from 16 years before. To me, it’s a plain cake doughnut of a virginia blend. Utterly simple, boring to consider, and still uniquely satisfying.

This tobacco is also here because we also needed another European manufacturer in the mix and I mistakenly thought this was made by Dan Tobacco. It wasn’t until after I mailed out the samples that I noticed the date code and the blend’s notes on tobacco reviews indicate it is actually blended by Kopp. For those that liked it, that may actually be good news with Kopp taking over distribution of the HU line and maybe, hopefully, bringing them to the states. Maybe this one will make it over here too? Things could go the other way. All the HU tobaccos made by Dan Tobacco are discontinued after the Kopp takeover and it’s unclear to me if any others in the line are getting chopped as well.

For now, I think you can still get this on Estervals if you’re willing to jump through the hoops.






There you have it, folks.

Thank you to all of our tasters for playing along and thank you to everyone else following the thread for enduring all the words this took up!

 

[Sobrbiker]

Thanks for doing this, and I appreciate the inclusion! As a neophyte pipester I’m happy to have played along, and definitely learned a thing or two, primarily that taking a purely “blind taste test” approach to a tobacco is very different than trying a blend new to me that I’ve made pre-judgements (conscious or not) on based on reviews, marketing, etc.
I’m awed still by folks that have the “palate time and breadth” to clearly elucidate flavors, age, casing/topping, etc.

I’m going to go through the samples again, as time allows. I had only one smoke each in an almost new mini-meer, so I’ve got some left. I thought this pipe would be a good leveler to the field, but I may have not done the tobaccos or myself justice. Last night I smoked a favorite in the same pipe and tasted pretty “off” compared to the same in a well broken-in pipe.

Thanks again for the inclusion and what you put into this Andrew!
I’d also agree with NMBN: wassup with the screen name? Until the mail ran I had a different mental image for sure

 

[Mrs. Pickles]

I’d also agree with NMBN: wassup with the screen name? Until the mail ran I had a different mental image for sure

I am through with being a guinea pig for a man that calls himself Mrs. Pickles. What is that supposed to be in reference to anyway?

Sorry for the confusion, guys.

It's just that @andrew was already taken by @andrew.

 

[Mr_houston]

Wow! That’s a classy bunch of tobacco you sent us. Very generous.

Thanks again for the fun.

 

[Sandblast]

The entire thing was (as I've previously stated) really fun. Adding to the fun of just being able to try these various Red Va's was also the easy conversation with Mrs. Pickles (Andrew). NOTE: My package (as I would guess everybody else's) clearly had Andrew's name on the Return Address sticker. I only add this point just to clarify, so that none of my Red Va Brothers possibly wondered if there was a little bit of long distance (MN to AZ) flirting going on. Nothing "untoward" was under the surface of my interactions with .... "Mrs. Pickles". And that had nothing to do with any wonder as to who/what "Mr. Pickles" was like (???).

 

[Butter Side Down]

I agree with @Sobrbiker, the blind nature definitely removes the chance for any preconceived bias and lets you enjoy or not enjoy based entirely on your own experience. I'm a bit bummed that my hands down favorite was the McCranie's, but on the flip side, without Andrew's generosity I probably never would have gotten the opportunity to try it so I'm not going to spend too much time crying in my beer over it. I'll probably continue to prefer VAs that lean toward the lighter citrus and hay variety, but I did enjoy almost everything we smoked and I definitely feel this experience has given me a much better idea of what red brings to the table when used as a component in a bend. Most especially why a little bit of red can be used to subdue or tame what people sometimes refer to as the cigarette-like quality of brighter leaf.

Thanks again Andrew!

 

[VDL_Piper]

Brilliant stuff @Mrs. Pickles for doing this, lots of effort and enjoyed by all for sure, so thank you . To all the participants I thoroughly enjoyed the analysis from all of you and I found it interesting that quite a few honed in on particular notes that carried across to other samples, I do wonder about choice of pipe and how that has influenced outcome, that saidBravo to you one and all

 

[vosBghos]

I like that you posted them in order looks like I was right on the first one though I doubted myself.
here is what I wrote copied from my phone notes. I also smoked the second sample but could not place it which now having looked I see that I have never encountered it my palate is destroyed but it was definitely not singing more stinging on this one.


Firstly I must say that the amount of miticulous effort that went into the packaging presentation here was impressive




Number 1 is a beautiful broken flake covered in plume of obvious age and care. Upon the charring light it began an even burn and refused to go out so as to need a true light this flake broke up so perfectly and the moisture was perfect and behaved beautifully in the bowl a Bing's , it reminds me of the first time I smoked Mc Crannies red ribbon perhaps it is the flake version although it could be Christmas Cheer or any of the other famous broken red flakes from house McClleland with this Covid palate though and a bit of spice and the absence of distinct viniger it could be F and T cut plug but it is so rich and well behaved I’m leaning Mclelland I’m probably way off

 

[DesertDan]

This was a very enjoyable read.
I appreciate Mrs. Pickles for the endeavor, very excellent work!
I appreciate everyone contributing their reviews it has been fascinating to read the differences of the participants experiences.
I look forward to the next installment.

Well done everyone!

 

[Mrs. Pickles]

I look forward to the next installment.

Same here!

This tasting came together with inspiration and guidance from @Butter Side Down and the Latakia tasting he did last year.

If any smokers feel interested in running their own tasting, please feel free to reach out. I’m happy to share what I learned from doing it this time. It’s a bit of work but a lot of fun being on this side of it.

Thanks again to everyone who tasted, commented, and made this so fun to read. It was a pleasure being a part of this with you all.

 

[Jbrewer2002]

I was going to buy some of the HU Tobacco My Red Fox. But I’m not able to find any. Anyone have any leads?

 

[Sobrbiker]

I was going to buy some of the HU Tobacco My Red Fox. But I’m not able to find any. Anyone have any leads?

Esterval’s isn’t showing it, that’s the only retailer I know of that could scratch that itch these days.
WTB/WTTF ads are allowed here.