So I was going to wait a little longer before cracking into one of these, but considering that today is International Pipe Smoking Day, I figured that there's no better time to test some of this out.
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This package is over 100 years old and, all things considered, in nearly pristine condition. Truthfully, part of me feels like I'm desecrating something by opening this up. But I am of the opinion that tobacco was meant to be smoked.
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Opening up the outside paper, I can get a better view of the foil inside.
View attachment 290004I'm fairly certain that this is tin foil. It's a little thicker and more rigid than aluminum foil. At this stage, I still can't smell anything when I hold my nose to the foil package.
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Opening up the foil, I can see that the tobacco itself is wrapped in a layer of paper. I'm by no means an expert, so I can't identify what kind of blend this is based on sight alone. The coloring isn't uniform; it's definitely a blend of some kind. It looks similar to the English blends I am familiar with--Nightcap, Engine 99, and the like.
To my surprise, I can smell a tobaccoey sweetness. It's faint and mingled with the mellow mustiness of age, but it's there.
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I poured half the package into a jar. Here, you can see the coloring a little better. This stuff is beyond dry. It's crispy. I want to try rehydrating this to see if it makes a difference in the taste/smoking, but that'll be a project for another day.
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I figured that any taste I'll be able to get out of this tobacco will be very faint, so I'm smoking it out of a new clay pipe. That way, I can be sure that any flavors I pick up are from this tobacco and not the remnants of some other blend I'd smoked previously or flavors from the pipe itself.
As far as the taste goes: Before smoking this, I was expecting, at best, the taste of papery hot air, and at worst, the bitterness of burning mold. But wow, was I pleasantly surprised. To preface, I have neither the experience, palate, nor vocabulary to be a very good tobacco reviewer, but I can tell you that this tastes like an English blend to me. It's muted, sure, but it's still an English--and a pretty good one at that. Everything I've read about aged tobaccos suggests that Latakia's flavor fades with time, but I swear I can still taste that smoky goodness. Or is that just the complex flavor of a hundred-year-old Virginia? I don't really know. I can't pick up any casing on this--if it ever had one, it faded long ago, probably during the latter years of the Roosevelt administration.
My pipe was 3/4 full, but this was a very quick smoke, likely due to how dry this stuff was. Hopefully my rehydration experiment pays off!
To be continued...
