HU Tobacco Coming to the States

[PipeIT]

@MavErik look back up on my last reply. I contacted Kopp, I explained what they said about shipping, and nothing special was done.

 

[MavErik]

I assumed they meant when I asked, they weren’t placed in any special sealed type of a container, which made it seem like the tobacco didn’t really receive any special type of packaging. I’ll be sure to ask if they can clarify how it was packed.

2-3 weeks in bad ambient conditions being shipped by boat, not in a good container, or an environmentally controlled ship container, hmm not exactly the way I pictured this.

I hope everyone realizes when you ship by boat, it’s in metal containers outdoors on the deck of the boat, roasting in the day, and freezing at night. Unless it’s in environmentally controlled containers, which Kopp told me they didn’t use anything special.

A friend of mine had a shipping container, he got a hold of one to put all sorts of stuff in to store. Have any of you walked inside one of these during the day? I have, and the heat and humidity inside is absolutely insane, during the day in the sun.

Attached are 2 pics of the promoted label for Director's Cut from SP. As this is a brand new to America series, what on these labels tells you that this is packaged in the US? SP didn’t provide any other info such as the back label that would have shown it was packaged here.

Many of you continue to defend Laudisi and others who package European brands here, as good as gold. Yet we know that this tobacco was likely treated like Kopp’s and thrown in a plastic bag as bulk and boxed inside of a container and freighted across the pond where it sat in heat waiting for Customs clearance and then transported to SC. Yet it’s just as good as HU packaged tins that are packaged in-house without all of the heat soak, humidity changes and extra handling. All assuming no additional PG was added…

Look I am not adept enough to tell the difference and probably neither are most of you. I just wanted to be given the opportunity to choose based on honest representations. If you don’t care, awesome. I for one do.

@MavErik look back up on my last reply. I contacted Kopp, I explained what they said about shipping, and nothing special was done.

I think our replies crossed in the ether.

Given that info, our logic is even more relative. Nice work @PipeIT

 

[Terry Lennox]

Interesting discussion. I have never smoked HU tobaccos. But I do smoke a blend made by Kopp that is also tinned here in the US by C&D/Laudisi: Sillem's Councilor flake. Most of my tins are from when it was tinned in Germany. The other day I opened my first tin from a Laudisi tinned batch. It was fine. Tasted exactly as I remember it. However there were 2 differences. The flakes were clumped together rather than in neat stacks. This is due to the fact that Kopp uses a square paper insert that holds the flakes in place. Laudisi does not, so the the flakes were just bunched together. A bit of a mess that I had to pull apart. The other difference is that the flakes were a touch dry and the tin note was not as strong. I believe this is because of the long distance shipping in bulk. So there is something to this. Now would it stop me from buying it? No, I love the blend and as I said the smoke was just as good. But something to note.

 

[sablebrush52]

Attached are 2 pics of the promoted label for Director's Cut from SP. As this is a brand new to America series, what on these labels tells you that this is packaged in the US? SP didn’t provide any other info such as the back label that would have shown it was packaged here.

Many of you continue to defend Laudisi and others who package European brands here, as good as gold. Yet we know that this tobacco was likely treated like Kopp’s and thrown in a plastic bag as bulk and boxed inside of a container and freighted across the pond where it sat in heat waiting for Customs clearance and then transported to SC. Yet it’s just as good as HU packaged tins that are packaged in-house without all of the heat soak, humidity changes and extra handling. All assuming no additional PG was added…

Look I am not adept enough to tell the difference and probably neither are most of you. I just wanted to be given the opportunity to choose based on honest representations. If you don’t care, awesome. I for one do.

There are a LOT of assumptions supporting your argument, such as the conditions under which the imported tobacco was subjected, and assumptions regarding the conditions under which domestic tobacco is stored prior to being tinned.
You assumed that the HU blends would be tinned in Germany, you weren’t told that. So dishonesty doesn’t apply.
Besides that, do you know how tobacco is stored at a blending house for use in blending, or under what conditions tobacco is stored going from the grower to the distributor?

 

[Terry Lennox]

Correction to my post above. I believe the Sillem's Councilor flake is tinned in the US by Sutliffe.

 

[Piping Abe]

These are the probably same guys that cellar LBF and LNF by the pound because they say it gets better with age.

 

[sablebrush52]

These are the probably same guys that cellar LBF and LNF by the pound because they say it gets better with age.

I don’t know about LNF, but PS-LBF improves remarkably with about 4 years of aging. I assume that it’s because the tobacco is still green when it’s released.

 

[Sigmund]

Kopp flakes in my limited experience are usually hard to get apart. They just seem to be squished together in tins. I don’t smoke them whole so its not a big deal for me. Its not because they were transported by ship.

 

[PLANofMAN]

This has been an interesting read. Aside from the discussion on packaging, which I'm about to contribute to. Sorry.

I once worked for Safeway at one of their distribution plants in the dairy department. The difference between the "name brand" milk and "Safeway Select" brand milk, is that the labels and cap colors on the cartons were different. We'd stop the jugs, change the label roll and start the jugs again, change over took about ten seconds. The raw milk from Alpenrose went into the same pasteurization setup as the rest of the milk.

If you live in America, there's an excellent chance your beer/soda/energy drink says "bottled under licence" or "bottled under the authority of ..." on the back of the can or bottle.

Guess what? A Coca-cola bottled in New York is going to taste the same as one bottled in California.

To play devil's advocate, though, I must confess to another story. The head of the Busch family flew into a rage when a freshly opened bottle of Budweiser didn't meet his high expectations. It wasn't until he looked at the bottling date, he realized that a case of Budweiser had gotten misplaced in his house for five months (if I recall correctly), and had gone quite stale.

To return to the topic at hand, I sincerely doubt that the manufacturer is concerned about the tobacco 'changing' during shipment. These are 'blended' tobaccos. They contain tobacco from Asia, America, Africa, etc. Those tobaccos didn't teleport to the manufacturer's warehouse. They came on a ship. Then they sat in the warehouse for a month, or a decade. The old blending houses can have 25+ year old bales of rare tobacco sitting on their pallet racks. A three month sea voyage isn't going to appreciably do much to 500 kilograms of tobacco bulk packed that hasn't already happened the first time it went on a sea voyage to become part of a blend in the first place.

Some of you all are overthinking things that are just plain normal things and ought not be thought about, like where something is packaged.

Especially if the packaging is generally considered an improvement.

 

[woodsroad]

I’m not seeing the problem with shipping. Not knowing the particulars, I’ll suggest that the bulk HU tobacco is shipped in poly bags, in a corrugated box. Best scenario would be a large lot in Mylar inside a triwall. But even if it’s 5 pounds in a poly bag inside a Chinesium cardboard box, the loss of moisture will be minimal.

As for the complaint about environmental conditions inside a Conex box: Isn’t tinned tobacco shipped exactly the same way?

 

[Sigmund]

I find it interesting that people are so disturbed but a packing issue when they have no idea how another brand is managed before it is packed. For all we know other brands are stored in a room full of donkey dung before its pacakged. So far as Im concerned its ok...more HU for me!

 

[filmguerilla]

I find it interesting that people are so disturbed but a packing issue when they have no idea how another brand is managed before it is packed. For all we know other brands are stored in a room full of donkey dung before its pacakged. So far as Im concerned its ok...more HU for me!

Agree 100%! Just grabbed some more of my beloved Zulu, as well as Louisiana Broken, today.

 

[PipeIT]

To return to the topic at hand, I sincerely doubt that the manufacturer is concerned about the tobacco 'changing' during shipment. These are 'blended' tobaccos. They contain tobacco from Asia, America, Africa, etc. Those tobaccos didn't teleport to the manufacturer's warehouse. They came on a ship. Then they sat in the warehouse for a month, or a decade. The old blending houses can have 25+ year old bales of rare tobacco sitting on their pallet racks. A three month sea voyage isn't going to appreciably do much to 500 kilograms of tobacco bulk packed that hasn't already happened the first time it went on a sea voyage to become part of a blend in the first place.

You make a very valid point, to what I left above quoted by you. I don’t know why I got so wrapped up in the voyage to the USA. You are correct, tobacco that a company like Kopp uses, is going to also go by boat a lot of it, or maybe all of it, from around the world, and do some sitting around in warehouses afterwards, some maybe more than others for aging purposes.

When I look back on this, I guess I was looking at it like a high end completed product, at this stage, you then carefully ship it. Taking care of fancier goods, if that makes sense.

Anyhow, I have 4 tins, I’m happy. I just hope I enjoy them…

 

[MavErik]

I want to thank all of you for an enjoyable discussion on this topic. As a first time poster, I jumped off the deep end and all of you were polite and informative. I learned a lot from the discussion. Looking forward to “cussing and discussing” more topics in the future with all of you. Thanks!

 

[pappymac]

I would like to address something said about shipping containers. (This was true back in the early-1990s when I had reason to have a basic knowledge of shipping containers.)

Yes, if you have an individual shipping container sitting on the ground in the hot sun, it is going to get hot inside. How hot depends on factors like daytime temperatures etc.

This will also hold true for any shipping container across the top or the outside position when the container ship is loaded.

Do you have any idea on how many containers a container ship may carry? I have personally seen container ships that could be safely loaded with over 5,000 20-foot shipping containers. Not all of them are on the "outside" of the stack. Not all of them are even stacked on the deck. This can make a difference to the temperature inside the containers in the interior of the stacks.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Ha ha... a buncha guys on a forum, criticizing how tobacco companies do their business, seems to tract for how we do everything on here, ha ha. At one point, tobacco was shipped in a sewage smelling hold on a wooden boat that took six months to get across the pond. One of the reasons tobacco faired well with exporting from the New World was that it help up well during shipping. Now, for some reason tobacco has gotten much more fragile. But, it is fun to criticize... that I do agree with.

 

[pappymac]

Ha ha... a buncha guys on a forum, criticizing how tobacco companies do their business, seems to tract for how we do everything on here, ha ha. At one point, tobacco was shipped in a sewage smelling hold on a wooden boat that took six months to get across the pond. One of the reasons tobacco faired well with exporting from the New World was that it help up well during shipping. Now, for some reason tobacco has gotten much more fragile. But, it is fun to criticize... that I do agree with.

And they used to ship tea in wood boxes from China to England. It didn't hurt the tea business.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

And they used to ship tea in wood boxes from China to England. It didn't hurt the tea business.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China... ha ha. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

 

[pappymac]

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China... ha ha. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Well, no one back then was complaining about the quality of tea leaves shipped in wooden boxes on wooden ships taking six months to make the trip.

I sometimes wonder if humanity is just getting to picky about things these days.

 

[Sigmund]

We have a lot of time on our hands to obsess...