Carolina Leaf in Pipes, What About It?

[Chasing Embers]

So, the blending Carolina LINK is most likely a Virginia?

That's how I take it. That's the one I use for blending, but it is right nice on its own.

 

[chilllucky]

Cosmic, you ain't kidding about the different nomenclatures for the same things between all the stages of tobacco production. Between the seed buying and the copy writing for the tin labels, a lot of information is translated between dialects. Many times over.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Chilllucky, try asking 2nd and 3rd generation tobacco farmers that have grown and flue cured Virginias their whole life about Reds... you might as well be asking them about outerspace. It wasn't till I asked one guy who works for cigarette tobacco manufacturers about it that I got led in the right direction. I'm not sure if the obfuscation is intentional, or if most are so specialized with what they do that they don't understand the terminology of the tobacco companies.

 

[swilford]

Chilllucky, try asking 2nd and 3rd generation tobacco farmers that have grown and flue cured Virginias their whole life about Reds... you might as well be asking them about outerspace. It wasn't till I asked one guy who works for cigarette tobacco manufacturers about it that I got led in the right direction. I'm not sure if the obfuscation is intentional, or if most are so specialized with what they do that they don't understand the terminology of the tobacco companies.

It's crazy from an industry perspective. It's like the farmers and the leaf folks and the pipe tobacco manufacturers all speak different languages. I find myself asking Jeremy Reeves what 'X' means to leaf people because so often I make bad assumptions coming from the tobacco world.
It's not intentional obfuscation; it's just folks coming at the same thing with very different emphases and priorities.
If you really want to dig in on this stuff, read 'Making Tobacco Bright' by Barbara Hahn. Among other things, she argues that there really isn't a true varietal difference between bright virginia and burleys at the seed level, it's all in cultivation and curing. That jacked with my head for awhile...

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Thanks, I will check that out. It would make sense, in that Virginias (or brightleafs) were basically just a strain that was grown in poor sandy coastal soils that someone accidentally set their barn on fire. Voila, we have Virginias!!

 

[chilllucky]

Swilford: It's on my bedside table right now! Cosmic: I can send you my copy when I'm done with it if you like.
Although I am not new to pipe smoking, I am only in this last year making anything approaching a serious study of tobacco. For the first couple of decades of smoking, I knew only the names of the large families of blends. Aromatic or English or 'one with perique in it'. That was good enough for me to find blends I liked.
This year, I had started a sort of chart with the columns "Virginia | Burley | Oriental" across the top and "Air cured - Flue cured - Fire cured - Fermented" as the rows. Filling it in with all of the varietals I was discovering by listening to the Pipes magazine Radio Show and talking to tobacconists and club members and reading the copy on tins.
Then I started shopping for tobacco seeds, and pretty much abandoned the chart. For the reasons we're talking about in this thread. Then I started reading that book, and got even more confused. I may just select a couple of 'virginias' and a couple of 'burleys' at random and just see what next summer's weather and my soil conditions create on their own. :roll: