Greetings from New Mexico
- Thread starter garand555
- Start date
Welcome. Love that New Mexico Pinon coffee. A friend here in WV was married to a New Mexico native and carried Pinon coffee in his sporting goods store. What a great cup of Joe.
Well, if you're lucky, I'll figure out a New Mexico tobacco that works well for pipes. Fair warning, I like my Vitamin N, so it might include some rustica.
Hello and welcome to the Forum from Deep in the Heart of Texas. You will find this site to be informative and the members insightful (and at times, most entertaining). Enjoy your stay!
Grow your own? Interesting hobby. With NM being a legal state, I would try your hand at a different crop, lol!
That other crop certainly requires specialized knowledge to produce quality, but it does grow like a weed at the end of the day. I personally find tobacco is harder to produce quality with, in part, because of the climate. If there's any chlorophyll (green) left in the leaves, they dry out far too quickly here for that to break down and for the leaves to finish yellowing/browning. To be quite blunt, any room note ratings will be atrocious. It gets even worse if I'm expecting an early freeze, because I might have to harvest while many leaves are fully green. It's why I'm tending towards the fermentation of the tobacco, and that's inspired by Perique. I make my own fermented veggies and compost is fermentation. Why not tobacco? It solves the drying out too fast problem. Adding a little salt could also change the profile, though that'd probably tend more towards chew than pipe tobacco.
Fun fact: During the earlier colonial days here, shipping was priced by volume, so tobacco growers would absolutely pack as much tobacco into casks as they possibly could fit. Then, on the stuff shipped to Europe, it would have something like 4-12 weeks packed into those casks to age, plus whatever time it was left in the casks after it made it to a European port. When European tourists started coming here, they noted that the tobacco they got in Europe was of higher quality than what American colonists were smoking. It was the shipping method of packing that tobacco into casks that allowed for proper aging/curing/fermenting.
A slight niggle- if priced by volume, wouldn't light packing of a barrel produce more cash? Perhaps they were priced by weight?
Depends on how it's sold once it reaches market. If it's sold by weight, packing those casks as tight as possible makes sense. Even if it was sold by volume, you could unpack the cask and fluff it up before selling it.
