Mac Baren & Sutliff - Buying up what's left, looking to the future.

[Pypkė]

I stocked up on HH Old Dark Fired and HH Burley Flake, and lesser amounts of HH Bold Kentucky and Stockton after the news that Mac Baren was acquired by STG. Not a lot - just a few pounds in aggregate. Bought a few pounds of Sutliff blending tobacco too, like their TS-20 Perique.

Yesterday, I visited two local B&M shops, and bought their last two 3.5 oz. tins of HH Bold Kentucky and two 1.75 oz. tins of HH Latakia Flake. I passed on buying up more of the Latakia Flake, and several tins of 2018 HH Balkan Blend that was marked way up. Passed on a stack of Cringle Flake too.

I'm done now. Not going on a search for more HH blends or anything other products that are rapidly being bought up right now. If I smoked only HH blends my supply may last me maybe a little over a year. But I'm smoking mostly other tabacs, so it'll last longer than that.

Currently doing a side-by-side comparison of GLP Telegraph Hill and C&D Exclusive, those being blends that are up in the polls of the 2025 Blend of the Year Thread. Looking forward to trying out some of that Toscano Maestro Puccini blend too, and my first taste of 1792. The whole Tobaccopalypse is in my review mirror. I've moved on.

 

[jvnshr]

I have been smoking pipes since 2015 and from time to time I have been hearing about that Tobaccopalypse thing. No worries, there will be lots of blends to try.

 

[gentlemanjerry]

I too have put aside a few pounds of Max Baren Club Blend...a long time favorite of mine. Hard to believe they would do away with it. My Sutliff go to's are the Match blends Revelation & Walnut...I can't find any to cellar so I'll make do with what I have. Hopefully other blenders can pick up on some of these great tobaccos...

 

[Lesterfield]

I too have put aside a few pounds of Max Baren Club Blend...a long time favorite of mine. Hard to believe they would do away with it. My Sutliff go to's are the Match blends Revelation & Walnut...I can't find any to cellar so I'll make do with what I have. Hopefully other blenders can pick up on some of these great tobaccos...

You may want to look into Hearth & Home's Chestnut blend over at P&C. It looks to be very similar, if not identical, to Walnut match.

 

[krizzose]

I too have put aside a few pounds of Max Baren Club Blend...a long time favorite of mine. Hard to believe they would do away with it. My Sutliff go to's are the Match blends Revelation & Walnut...I can't find any to cellar so I'll make do with what I have. Hopefully other blenders can pick up on some of these great tobaccos...

I think the Mac Baren roll cakes are [EDIT: will be when the Mac Baren factory stops production] gone forever. I would bet that the machinery needed to make them will be among that scrapped by STG so that competitors don’t get it. I also seriously doubt that STG will start producing the Mac Baren proprietary cavendish or the maple sugar cased tobaccos that are in so many Mac Baren blends. They’ve already announced that Mac Baren Navy Flake will be one of the SKUs that they will keep, but without those special ingredients it will not be the same.

I also love Club Blend, and luckily for me I started cellaring it as far back as 2011.

 

[Servant King]

Watching both the Sutliff and Mac Baren pages on SP the past couple weeks reminded me of watching one of those nature shows on the African Savannah. You know, when the vultures and hyenas show up at a wildebeest carcass after the lions have had their fill, and they pick the skeleton clean. At least they restocked 507-C, fleeting though this may be; the MB page (filtered to show 16 oz. bags only) is utterly bare, save for a couple 7 Seas stragglers and the Vanilla Cream loose cut; hell, even the Cube sold out, whatever the crap that is! I'm just hoping there will be one final inventory purge before March, since @krizzose is probably correct that the entirety of the roll cake contingency is effectively 86ed, along with the entirety of the HH line. Even the stuff that remains will likely change components and subsequently become a shadow of what they once were.

 

[Terry Lennox]

Watching both the Sutliff and Mac Baren pages on SP the past couple weeks reminded me of watching one of those nature shows on the African Savannah. You know, when the vultures and hyenas show up at a wildebeest carcass after the lions have had their fill, and they pick the skeleton clean. At least they restocked 507-C, fleeting though this may be; the MB page (filtered to show 16 oz. bags only) is utterly bare, save for a couple 7 Seas stragglers and the Vanilla Cream loose cut; hell, even the Cube sold out, whatever the crap that is! I'm just hoping there will be one final inventory purge before March, since @krizzose is probably correct that the entirety of the roll cake contingency is effectively 86ed, along with the entirety of the HH line. Even the stuff that remains will likely change components and subsequently become a shadow of what they once were.

The 2024 tin dates on certain TinBids listings tells you all you need to know.
Why even bother unboxing the stuff. Just re-label it for the new buyer. LOL.

 

[jpberg]

So you’ve got 18-24 months of this silliness ahead. Everyone buying tons of shit they’ve never smoked, but will resell for a profit for maybe 8 months.
After that, there will be a grace period where dumb dumbs who don’t know better will still pay more than it’s worth just to have it on their instalookatme page.
Then new guys will come in and buy some because they believe what they read and want to be a part of things.
It’s really kind of pathetic.
There’s threads out there discussing what folks are going to smoke now that these are gone, that should be the focus, and maybe a couple threads discussing how not many people smoked a lot of these tins anyway, and maybe some support for the blenders who are carrying on making new blends from sources that are still available.

 

[garageboy]

So you’ve got 18-24 months of this silliness ahead. Everyone buying tons of shit they’ve never smoked, but will resell for a profit for maybe 8 months.
After that, there will be a grace period where dumb dumbs who don’t know better will still pay more than it’s worth just to have it on their instalookatme page.
Then new guys will come in and buy some because they believe what they read and want to be a part of things.
It’s really kind of pathetic.
There’s threads out there discussing what folks are going to smoke now that these are gone, that should be the focus, and maybe a couple threads discussing how not many people smoked a lot of these tins anyway, and maybe some support for the blenders who are carrying on making new blends from sources that are still available.

Sounds exactly like what happened after McClelland closed

 

[Pypkė]

Whelp... I lied. Bought more ODF, Dark Twist, and Bold Kentucky.

I discovered that GH Dark Flake Aromatic is for me a good alternative to these MB blends, so if anyone missed out, try the dark flake.

 

[Chasing Embers]

The last thing strictly Mac Baren that I bought were several of the HH Burley Flake one pound boxes when it first released back in 2018. Hard to believe that's already been seven years ago.

 

[HawkeyeLinus]

I saw Mac Baren was back in at SP pretty much when it hit the "shelves" by accident the other day and things now out of stock by today and continuing were there in good supply. I've never tried the Vanilla Flake so what the heck, I ordered a couple of tins. Just didn't have a sense of urgency about any of the rest.

 

[coming to_falling too]

Just didn't have a sense of urgency about any of the rest

Same. I probably have enough MB to last the rest of my life tbh. And that's not a whole heck of a lot. Maybe a couple pounds in total