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mso489

Lifer
Feb 21, 2013
41,210
60,610
Hey from central North Carolina. My wife and I have a friend in Santa Fe who works in the various museum gift shops there. Welcome aboard.
 

MRW

Part of the Furniture Now
Jan 6, 2022
602
1,144
61
Fort Worth Texas
Hello everybody,

I've been a pipe smoker on and off for over 20 years. Most of my pipes are going to be basket pipes, but I do have a few nicer briars and a couple of meerschaums. I also love smoking the cobs. My preferences are for the more naturally flavored tobaccos, i.e. VaPers, English, Kentucky Dark Fired, etc... For me personally, aeromatics are more likely to give me bad tongue bite, though not all are bad.

Also, last year, I tried growing some of my own tobacco. Curing it in my dry climate is proving to be challenging. I have settled on fermenting it being the best method for my climate. Last year, I put the tobacco into a milk crate, covered it to keep most of the air off of it and put a lot of weight on it. It's not good tobacco, but there is potential there. Every once in a while when smoking it, I get hints of marshmallow. IMO, it's simply a matter of the tobacco not having been cured enough. Next year, I'm going to grow a bunch and put it in a stone crock, covered and compressed, and I'm going to mix it up every few months and then repack it.
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!
 

garand555

Lurker
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.
 
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jpmcwjr

Moderator
Staff member
May 12, 2015
26,221
30,175
Carmel Valley, CA
A slight niggle- if priced by volume, wouldn't light packing of a barrel produce more cash? Perhaps they were priced by weight?
 

garand555

Lurker
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.
 
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