Greetings from Alaska

[Joe H]

Thanks again for all of the gracious welcomes - what a great site!

RPK - that was a nice tribute to your father, well done! I wonder what my family will toss in my casket when the time comes...

 

[Bourbonandcigars]

Welcome

 

[rakovsky]

I’ll try to post a picture of my pipe collection. They’re mostly from my dad. He’s passed away for some time now but his pipes are a cherished keepsake to me. In fact, everything in the photo is from my dad’s stuff except the whiskey flask, two pipes and three lighters.

I’ll happily write later about growing up in a pipe-smoker’s house, filled with what are now known as codger tobacco smells and drug store pipes

WV Old F. who responded to you about the Edgeworth in your OP photo's upper right is right- Edgeworth really is a special classic blend.
I didn' t have the same experience of a piper relative who was smoking popular codger blends from decades ago, and by the time I got into piping, Edgeworth was already long discontinued, so I'm glad to hear your stories that you mentioned from bygone days.
Where in Alaska are you?

 

[Joe H]

WV Old F. who responded to you about the Edgeworth in your OP photo's upper right is right- Edgeworth really is a special classic blend.
I didn' t have the same experience of a piper relative who was smoking popular codger blends from decades ago, and by the time I got into piping, Edgeworth was already long discontinued, so I'm glad to hear your stories that you mentioned from bygone days.
Where in Alaska are you?

Anchorage. And Sutliff makes a pretty darn good Edgeworth match that is sold in bulk. I doubt my dad could have told the difference between the original and the match.

 

[rakovsky]

Anchorage. And Sutliff makes a pretty darn good Edgeworth match that is sold in bulk. I doubt my dad could have told the difference between the original and the match.

Joe,
Can I please ask:
When is your Edgeworth from in your photo, is it from like the 1960's and by Larus Brothers?

I have Sutliff's RR Match, and it sounds like you have had both? But I never had the original, it's just something I read about in classic reviews and stories. I'm sorry about your Dad's passing.

In the case of my Sutliff's RR Match, it came with a strong cocoa smell like cocoa puffs or hot chocolate powder. I kept it in its mailbag unjarred, and after a couple months the cocoa tin note has vanished. How does that compare with your Edgeworth?

The Nature in Achorage is pretty cool, with big untamed fauna that are fun to watch in naturalist videos.
Wishing you the best.

 

[/Adam\]

 

[Thorin Pipenshield]

 

[Joe H]

@rakovsky : The boxed pouch in the photo is probably from the early 1970s. I read someplace that the trade name, “House of Edgeworth” which appears on this box, was phased out in 1974, but I’m no historian. My dad stopped smoking in 1976 or 1977 so it definitely predates that.

Thanks for the condolences, dad passed away 15 years ago so the grief is long passed but I do miss him and enjoy using his old piping gear.

I keep a selection of around eight or so old “codger blend” matches in 2 to 4 ounce bags on hand. I store the bags in the same air-tight container as my cherry aromatics and the zip-lock bags all smell of cherry, which makes it hard to get too nuanced about the smell of the tobacco before the pipe gets loaded. It was three degrees below zero when I walked the dog this morning so I’m not likely to light up a pipe today or until it warms up a bit (I only smoke outside), otherwise I’d fire up a bowl of the Edgeworth match and describe it. Your description sounds about right though. I tend to get that chocolaty taste more toward the latter half of the bowls.

I’ve considered doing a 50 year comparison between the old box and the modern match. I’d have to rehydrate the old version and it will obviously be significantly changed from what it was intended to be, so it would just be a pointless exercise in messing around with tobacco, but that’s never stopped me from messing around with tobacco.

 

[Joxer]

Greetings from Alaska! I’ve been taking advantage of the wealth of information on this web site for quite a while so I decided to sign up for an account to say thank you and maybe contribute a bit to the amazing information here.

I have been smoking a pipe casually (always outside, a couple of times a week to once a month depending on the weather, my schedule, etc.) for 30 years. I smoked cigars before the pipe but gave up those once my kids were born; they love the pipe smell and hate the cigars.

I’ll try to post a picture of my pipe collection. They’re mostly from my dad. He’s passed away for some time now but his pipes are a cherished keepsake to me. In fact, everything in the photo is from my dad’s stuff except the whiskey flask, two pipes and three lighters.

I’ll happily write later about growing up in a pipe-smoker’s house, filled with what are now known as codger tobacco smells and drug store pipes, but for now, greetings and thanks for having such a great on-line resource for pipe smokers.

Sincerely,

Joe H

Hello and welcome from Perth Australia!!

 

[rakovsky]

@rakovsky : The boxed pouch in the photo is probably from the early 1970s. I read someplace that the trade name, “House of Edgeworth” which appears on this box, was phased out in 1974, but I’m no historian. My dad stopped smoking in 1976 or 1977 so it definitely predates that.

If it's saying House of Edgeworth, it's from before Lane took it over. I don't recall exactly when that transition to Lane's brand happened.

Thanks for the condolences, dad passed away 15 years ago so the grief is long passed but I do miss him and enjoy using his old piping gear.

Yeah, having Dads back is better than having piping gear. I think about my grandfather and dream about him sometimes. In the dreams it feels like I'm staying in his house. My Mom has those kinds of dreams about her parents too.

I keep a selection of around eight or so old “codger blend” matches in 2 to 4 ounce bags on hand. I store the bags in the same air-tight container as my cherry aromatics and the zip-lock bags all smell of cherry, which makes it hard to get too nuanced about the smell of the tobacco before the pipe gets loaded.

I keep my chocolate-smelling tobaccos in the same glass jam jar. One piper told me that the best thing to do is to get little mason jars, one for each blend. Hardware stores around me sell big boxes of ~12 ctup-sized mason jars for ~$10-20 each. It's just more mason jars than I want, so I never got them and just divided my blends up among jam and tomato sauce jars based on common flavors (Englishes, Cherry, Chocolate, VAs, etc.)
Alot of them are in Mylar bags, so the flavor is kind of sealed in OK.

If you smoke your codger blends and it gets a cherry note, then it's not bad for two reasons- cherry is a good flavor, and you can just mentally subtract the cherry smell from the non-cherry codgers' smell.

Personally I recommend you put the chocolate ones like PA/Edgeworth into the same jam/tomato sauce jar because those jars are cheap and Edgeworth is such a special antique classic blend at this point in history, so it's better to preserve the flavor.

But it's up to you. Piping as a hobby should be about enjoying yourself rather than getting OCD about making everything perfect. You could even say that you like a cherry-chocolate smell overlap.

It was three degrees below zero when I walked the dog this morning so I’m not likely to light up a pipe today or until it warms up a bit (I only smoke outside), otherwise I’d fire up a bowl of the Edgeworth match and describe it. Your description sounds about right though. I tend to get that chocolaty taste more toward the latter half of the bowls.

I know what you mean about avoiding smoking outside when it's so cold. Can you smoke while you walk the dog? Are there cigar lounges in Anchorage?

Original Edgeworth by Larus Brothers like you have is a classic famous blend that Grabow used to pre-smoke their pipes with and the US or US diplomats gave to J. Stalin or the USSR in WW2 during the Lend Lease era. Since you are in Alaska, I'll put this here because it's an example of what I mean:

I think that the statue is cooler looking with the snow on it.

Lend-Lease Monument

This super-sized statue is the only public memorial to the deal that ended America's neutrality during World War II.

www.atlasobscura.com

People into piping history love the original Edgeworth brand:

Since I never had it, I just have descriptions of it. Reviewers tend to think Lane's Edgeworth RR is closer to the original Larus Edgeworth, but some like Jim Inks think that Sutliff's "RR MATCH" is closer.
Lane's Edgeworth RR used to say Edgeworth, but then probably due to copyright issues they dropped the Edgeworth part of the name. Then in the 2010's Lane discontinued theirs altogether. A piper on the Speak EZ forum sent me a sample of 1990's Lane's RR and it came pretty dry in a solid mylar pouch, with a light sweet prune smell. I figured it needed hydrating, so I flicked a couple boiled filtered water drops in the bag, and it got overly moist, like the skins on prunes in a grocery store cardboard prune box. The smell made me imagine pipe smokers at poker tables, probably because Grabow has a spade symbol on its pipes.

I didn't really pick up a chocolate smell on my sample of Lane's RR. But when @JimInks here reviewed Lane's RR, he found it to be so goopy with chocolate topping that he considered it to be significantly different.

In contrast, when I got a bag of Sutliff's RR MATCH from 4Noggins, it came in a seethrough bag and smelled very much like cocoa puffs. One piper titled their review for the blend "Sutliff's RR MATCH = Box of Cocoa Puffs."

I'm not necessarily saying that negatively. I like cocoa puffs fine. It's better with milk and I've found the two chocolate blends I've smoked like S.G. Chocolate Flake to be better with milk.

But rather what I'm curious about this is whether the tin note when you open a pouch of Edgeworth also has a strong cocoa puffs smell?

I thought PA has a chocolate smell, but it was maybe half as strong as the Sutliff RR tin note.

I’ve considered doing a 50 year comparison between the old box and the modern match. I’d have to rehydrate the old version and it will obviously be significantly changed from what it was intended to be, so it would just be a pointless exercise in messing around with tobacco,

I really don't consider doing the test to be pointless due to age.
Tobacco is like wine, MREs, or crackers in that when it's made and packed it's normally intended to last, and this applies to tobacco sent to the USSR in WW2. US foodstuffs and supplies to the USSR were meant to last in adverse conditions like cold and lack of refrigeration- boots, canned spam, Ford Trucks. Just thinking about this makes me want to play one of those WW2 videogames like Men of War AS2 where you get to use US Lend Lease equipment.

Unless it's moldy, the tobacco hasn't gone bad in my view. On top of that, a lot of pipers count a lot of cellared/properly stored tobacco to be better for their tastes. Cherokee Black is an example that comes to mind.

I would recommend smoking it dry and rehydrated on different occasions. Some pipers even prefer their tobacco to be very dry. Personally I smoked Wellauer's English blend and Germain's #7 when they were crispy dry like they came to me, and they were OK that way. I rehydrated them and found them to be better after rehydration. The danger with rehydration I think is that you could get mold to show up like what happened to me with some Indonesian stuff, so I think it might be better to rehydrate very old tobacco only one part at a time. At least, that's my own plan for rehydrating old tobacco if I have enough of it in the future.

 

[JimInks]

@rakovsky , I didn't say that the chocolate in Lane Limited RR was goopy. I did point out that it was stronger than the original, and didn't have flavor balance of the original as a result. Lane used the original formula, but not the same source for toppings, which is why it was a little different. After some griping, they made an adjustment on later productions, and it was more like it should have been. Even then, I still preferred the Sutliff Match, which I thought was a bit closer in its overall effect.

 

[rakovsky]

@rakovsky , I didn't say that the chocolate in Lane Limited RR was goopy. I did point out that it was stronger than the original, and didn't have flavor balance of the original as a result. Lane used the original formula, but not the same source for toppings, which is why it was a little different. After some griping, they made an adjustment on later productions, and it was more like it should have been. Even then, I still preferred the Sutliff Match, which I thought was a bit closer in its overall effect.

It's cool to hear from you, because you do such a careful and informed job of making reviews. I probably wouldn't even be able to tell how molasses was showing up in a blend. I must be misremembering what you wrote about Lane's topping, because I remember people saying that some blends have too much topping, to the point where it gets goopy. But now it looks like your point is that Lane's topping was strong, not necessarily too thick or big in volume. Thanks for clearing that up.

It's nice knowing that Sutliff's RR is so close to the original. My 1990's Lane's RR didn't seem to have chocolate flavor to me. This could be from me not being sensitive enough to it, or else the cocoa fading away before I got it, like how Sutliff's RR MATCH cocoa faded away after I had it in its bag unjarred for several months.

It was kind of weird that my samples seemed quite different from your description: You described Lane's RR has being much stronger in chocolate than Sutliff's RR MATCH, but with me it was the opposite when I first got Sutliff's RR MATCH- it was like a strong box of cocoa puff's smell, whereas Lane's 1990's RR was just a soft sweet prune smell. But then when it sat out, the Sutliff's RR MATCH cocoa smell vanished. In comparison, I don't know what the original Edgeworth RR would be like in terms of that topping smell. Based on what you said and my own experience, I could imagine that Larus' Edgeworth RR would have a light cocoa note that would vanish if left unjarred. But you didn't describe Sutliff's RR MATCH as being like cocoa puffs, so I'm still unsure about this.

Wishing you the best.

 

[JimInks]

It's cool to hear from you, because you do such a careful and informed job of making reviews. I probably wouldn't even be able to tell how molasses was showing up in a blend. I must be misremembering what you wrote about Lane's topping, because I remember people saying that some blends have too much topping, to the point where it gets goopy. But now it looks like your point is that Lane's topping was strong, not necessarily too thick or big in volume. Thanks for clearing that up.

It's nice knowing that Sutliff's RR is so close to the original. My 1990's Lane's RR didn't seem to have chocolate flavor to me. This could be from me not being sensitive enough to it, or else the cocoa fading away before I got it, like how Sutliff's RR MATCH cocoa faded away after I had it in its bag unjarred for several months.

It was kind of weird that my samples seemed quite different from your description: You described Lane's RR has being much stronger in chocolate than Sutliff's RR MATCH, but with me it was the opposite when I first got Sutliff's RR MATCH- it was like a strong box of cocoa puff's smell, whereas Lane's 1990's RR was just a soft sweet prune smell. But then when it sat out, the Sutliff's RR MATCH cocoa smell vanished. In comparison, I don't know what the original Edgeworth RR would be like in terms of that topping smell. Based on what you said and my own experience, I could imagine that Larus' Edgeworth RR would have a light cocoa note that would vanish if left unjarred. But you didn't describe Sutliff's RR MATCH as being like cocoa puffs, so I'm still unsure about this.

Wishing you the best.

I never found the Sutliff Match to be like Coca Puffs, so I wouldn't have described it that way. It's there, but not as strong as you think which leads me to believe that our respective taste buds see it differently. Differing body chemistries experience things differently. The molasses topping is very obvious in that blend to me.

The 1990s Edgeworth, not the Lane Limited, was what you were smoking in that particular time period. Edgeworth was discontinued in 2010. Lane Limited RR came along a few years later. The first batch was cocoa heavy, and a fair amount of us complained about it. I talked to Lane myself at the time, and they agreed with me, which is why they made an adjustment. Check out my review of that blend, and you'll see that I described the change at the time.

I have smoked every version of Edgeworth from the 1940s until the last 2010 batch. All of them had cocoa and molasses, and a discreet fruit note.

 

[Sgetz]

Welcome from Durham in the UK