Rouseco Buoy Gold
- Thread starter Briar Lee
- Start date
SmokingPipes.com Updates
Watch for Updates Twice a Week
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
Site Sponsors
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
Difference in terminology. Here in the UK we have RYO (hand rolling for cigarettes) and pipe tobacco. They are taxed differently and the government states what constitutes a hand rolling tobacco versus a pipe tobacco i.e. how thin/thick the tobacco can be cut.
The "thinnest" pipe tobacco available in the UK is termed shag tobacco (Kendal Gold, Mixed, Dark etc) and is finer. Many years ago before the government clamped down on things, you could buy even finer cut pipe tobacco and some used it for hand rolling. This tended to be what was sold to the prisons as cheaper as taxed less. Also if heavily scented tended to disguise the smell of 'other stuff'.
For the American market mixtures are produced as finer cut shag tobaccos, where as in the UK and rest of the world it is the usual ribbon cut. Ribbon cut in America is sold as Vintage cut. i.e. American vintage cut is our usual UK pipe tobacco.
Last edited:
@gawithhoggarth , besides the thinnest of the cut, what other differences would one expect between RYO and pipe tobacco?
Price! Taxes!
Certainly in the UK, you cannot have flavoured RYO. Only plain.
Packaging - only plain packaging in the UK.
Pipe tobacco will be more moist. RYO tends to be fairly dry.
Type of leaf used, depending on the pipe tobacco.
The processing the leaf goes through - again depending on the exact blend and type of pipe tobacco being produced.
Ultimately, apart from both being made from tobacco leaf, they are two different things, made for different purposes.
Certainly in the UK, you cannot have flavoured RYO. Only plain.
Packaging - only plain packaging in the UK.
Pipe tobacco will be more moist. RYO tends to be fairly dry.
Type of leaf used, depending on the pipe tobacco.
The processing the leaf goes through - again depending on the exact blend and type of pipe tobacco being produced.
Ultimately, apart from both being made from tobacco leaf, they are two different things, made for different purposes.
Thank you for the reply. Would you agree then with the statement that RYO will not provide you with the same depth and complexity in pipes when compared to the pipe tobaccos you produce for pipes. One should not expect to swap RYO sold at the petro store and expect the same tobacco experience one would be provided with a tin of Kendall? Or am I mistaken?
Since 2009, in America, the government taxes cigarrete tobacco about eight times more than pipe tobacco per pound. $2.83 for pipe tobacco and $24.78 for cigarette tobacco.
They still sell straight up cigarette tobacco in those cheap smoke shops. Not nearly as much, I’d reckon, but it’s still sold, and some of the makers such as Republic sell both cigarrete tobacco and cheap pipe tobacco.
If you roll your own smokes an pound of tobacco can make as many as 600 cigarettes.
Here are the last USDA price guidance for tobacco
Premium pipe tobaccos from Lane and Sutliff are nearly all flavored, and moistened with PG.
The menthol cheap pipe tobaccos have to somehow get a menthol taste, and the Red blends are so tasty and good they about have to be flavored, but a lot of the cheap pipe tobacco is marketed as all natural tobacco, and water, especially the Yellow blends.
The cheap pipe tobacco makers have to get every blend approved by the FDA as pipe tobacco. Otherwise they pay eight times the tax.
And every scrap of actual leaf tobacco must be aged or it’s no good, no good for anything. The makers age it as long as they want.
The makers can use the bottoms, middle, or tops of the leaves. They blend any USDA type with another type they want. But the recipe has to be filed and approved by the FDA.
There’s a shortcut for a “substantial equivalent” to pre 2007 blends. All those “match blends” use that, I suppose and maybe the cheaper stuff.
The FDA still allows any kind of wholesome flavorings, whether cased or topped. Otherwise there’d be no cherry, peach, rum, blackberry, bourbon, or other fruity flavored aromatic pipe tobaccos.
The biggest difference I can see is for true premium tobaccos we have Sutliff, Lane, and the boutique blenders.
At the lower end you can’t count all the makers, and all the blends.
Every one sells FDA approved pipe tobacco, course ribbon cut, taxed at $2.83 a pound. All of it looks like course ribbon cut pipe tobacco such as Kendal #7, or Lane Very Cherry, etc.
I think it’s the best thing for pipe smokers since they put Prince Albert in a can.
Who can argue against nearly endless choices at the corner smoke shop? Many come in $1.25 one ounce packs and all come in five or six ounce packs to try out. Competition is so brutal the five ounce packs are sometimes less than five dollars, such as the Gambler Turkish I’m smoking this morning.
And every package I’ve opened so far comes with a big rush of wonderful tobacco scent. The “tin note” on all the cheap stuff is wonderful.
The customers actually handle the stuff and look at it, you know?
Why I think we ought to support the small makers is this:
Altria pays about two dollars a pound for leaf. They take two pounds, four dollars, and make one thousand cigarettes. The tax on those five cartons is $50.
Five cartons of Marlboros sell for about $300.
Or take two pounds of $10 pipe tobacco, and $10 worth of tubes, and roll five cartons of excellent, tasty, high quality smokes for $30.
Big tobacco wants Uncle Sam to tax away the competion at the bottom end.
Last edited:
That is a great question. But @Briar Lee, it did not answer the question to which you replied, ...
Your thread posited that RYO can be and is as good as Blue Capstan or G&H Kendall #7 specifically. It also posited that the RYO brand you introduced at the beginning of the thread presents Virginia tobacco as well as or better than the so called premium blends and that pipe smokers could reliably achieve the same satisfaction with the Gold brand that they could with the premium blends.
That's a bold statement. Your response provided just now did nothing to back up that statement.
Which is why it might be worthwhile having an industry representative weigh in on the issue and the question that I asked above.
My own experience is that Prince Albert is no substitute for tobacco flavor delivered by brands such as G&H's Brown Flake Aromatic or Brown Bogie. I have in fact added both those tobaccos to blends such as Prince Albert and marveled at how just a little bit of the latter drastically improves the former... Prince Albert almost being a good example of a tobacco that could be representative of RYO.
RYO has a different cut, but that is not where the differences end. My father smokes the very "bagged" tobaccos you speak of and when I am at his house, that is what I smoke as well. They are fine enough. But they are not in any way as deep and complex as the premium pipe tobaccos most people smoke here and in no way provide as much of an experience.
You can spin a story or share a yarn that has nothing to do with the question as well as share facts and figures that redirect the jury, but the question remains unanswered. Saying the tobacco is cheaper or looks like premium brands does NOT make it premium.
Last edited:
@telescopes : A piece of information that might win you a bar bet one day is that Prince Albert was sold for 'Pipes and Cigarettes' and used to state on the side of the tins that it was 'Crimp Cut' to aid in rolling up a fat one! My good friend Andre Le Long and yours truly tried rolling one up as experience and found the resulting smoke to be ghastly! If you pack it well enough you can smoke any tobacco in a pipe including RYO. I once met a Chinese dude who used to smoke Old Holborn a very popular British OTC RYO tobacco in a Falcon pipe. I always find @Briar Lee posts amusing, interesting and well thought out in a folky kind of way and I suspect his presentation in court is probably much the same. The trick is to get a jury to trust you as from that point onward empathy for your client is a natural progression!
I really don’t understand what you’re getting your knickers in a twist about. It’s tobacco, not a dialysis machine.
Flavor is subjective
Hyperbole is to be expected
Humor is always appreciated
Opinions…and all that
If you can’t see it, I’ll make it clearer: You chain is being yanked by an expert. The more you yelp, the harder he pulls. He comes out looking like an affable Mr. Haney, you come out looking like Mr. Douglass.
How can a tobacco blend be complex?
Let’s say you and me start up the Osage Tobacco Company on the Rez and we hire some egg headed scientists to reverse engineer Capstan.
Let’s call it Captain Blue, and we also offer Captain Yellow and we put pirates and ships on the package with a little guy that might resemble Tolkien.
Capstan is a factory made commercial product that uses aged USDA graded leaf that costs about $2 a pound.
It’s possible. We might not get it exactly but we can get close.
Now, do we make it flake, or course ribbon cut?
If we go the $12 a pound sale point, our customers do not give a damn about complexity.
This morning my hobo grade smoke is Gambler Turkish in a Marxman “Big Boy” that earned a Super Briar stamp somehow.
It came in a five ounce package priced at five dollars even with tax.
I can detect zero flavorings. There’s some nutty burleys, hay like Virginias, butter smooth Turkish.
But Geezus in the Morning, it’s delicious.
We’d do better to match Gambler Turkish than Capstan.
The prime directive for any cheap vice, is the stuff has to really, really taste good.
Otherwise, there’d be no Papst Blue Ribbon beer.
Ha ha. Unfortunately, the internet poorly poorly communicates intent or the affability of a discussion. I enjoy Mr Haney's comments and responses very much. More so, I enjoy watching him dance around any point he is trying hard NOT to make, partially because my own father is an actual hillbilly who lives just a few miles or so from the Yokums, the very people Al Capp modeled his comic strip on. So I know a story teller when I meet them. But more importantly, because when I am on my rocking chair on my front porch over looking beautiful Table Rock Lake, I get a little bored. Watching Mr. Haney trying to sell me a pair of lawn clippers while calling it a tractor breaks up the monotony of my morning before my newspaper arrives. And yes, I am actually Dr. Douglas in real life - oddly enough - I feel like I am pulling Mr. Haney's strings and not the other way around. It's like putting a quarter in the juke box - you know it's going to play the song. He never fails and I get a good laugh to brighten my day.
I am anything but frustrated.
How can a tobacco blend be complex?
Let’s say you and me start up the Osage Tobacco Company on the Rez and we hire some egg headed scientists to reverse engineer Capstan.
Let’s call it Captain Blue, and we also offer Captain Yellow and we put pirates and ships on the package with a little guy that might resemble Tolkien.
Capstan is a factory made commercial product that uses aged USDA graded leaf that costs about $2 a pound.
It’s possible. We might not get it exactly but we can get close.
Now, do we make it flake, or course ribbon cut?
If we go the $12 a pound sale point, our customers do not give a damn about complexity.
This morning my hobo grade smoke is Gambler Turkish in a Marxman “Big Boy” that earned a Super Briar stamp somehow.
It came in a five ounce package priced at five dollars even with tax.
I can detect zero flavorings. There’s some nutty burleys, hay like Virginias, butter smooth Turkish.
But Geezus in the Morning, it’s delicious.
We’d do better to match Gambler Turkish than Capstan.
The prime directive for any cheap vice, is the stuff has to really, really taste good.
Otherwise, there’d be no Papst Blue Ribbon beer.
Well, maybe there is some very affectionate mutual chain yanking going on, Mr. Douglas.
Again I think there is a difference in terminology here. I would absolutely agree with your statement if we were talking about roll your own/hand rolling cigarette tobacco. RYO/hand rolling tobacco is a different product to pipe tobacco, made for a different purpose. But the original post was about a cheap pipe tobacco.
This is therefore (according to UK terminology) not a RYO. It is just a cheap pipe tobacco of the shag cut. Now maybe people do buy this to roll as well. People do all sorts with all sorts of things, not of their intended use.
There are so many pipe blends and each will differ in complexity as to its leaf components and processing.
Presuming this is all legal and above board, then it's no different from someone enjoying a $3 bottle of wine versus a $30 bottle of wine. Some will prefer the 'complexities' and flavours of a more expensive wine, others are just as happy with the cheap, easy to drink wine.
Last edited:
You are the Dog to his Foghorn Leghorn, so to speak
Those bags are labeled pipe tobacco in cigarette stores to avoid being taxed as cigarette tobacco in the US. It is in fact RYO tobacco though.
Well I guess this is for the government inspectors to decide. That's a legal issue.
It really doesn’t come across that way. From here it looks like he’s leading you around by the short hairs.
Finally I think I am beginning to understand, forgive me, I'm a slow learner. Correct me if I'm wrong. The tobacco Briar has posted, is not pipe tobacco at all, it is instead RYO, masquerading as pipe tobacco in order to avoid the hefty VAT the government puts on RYO. However, according to Briar, this stuff DOES actually make for good pipe smoking, and he has even gone so far as to suggest it beats the premium virginias a lot of us are fond of smoking.
If that is the case, I don't buy it for a minute. Not a nanosecond. What is being posted here is the McDonalds of the pipe tobacco world. Any person is free to gorge themselves on that all day if that is their wish. They are alsofree to convince themselves they are enjoying haute cuisine. And in the case of an addictive substance like nicotine, I can understand the appeal of high quantities at knock down prices, if that product, despite its obvious inferiority, can scratch that itch so to speak. If you smoke 20 bowls a day, I get it. But there is just no way the stuff that is being freight-trained, is as good as the aforementioned Capstan. No chance.
If that is the case, I don't buy it for a minute. Not a nanosecond. What is being posted here is the McDonalds of the pipe tobacco world. Any person is free to gorge themselves on that all day if that is their wish. They are alsofree to convince themselves they are enjoying haute cuisine. And in the case of an addictive substance like nicotine, I can understand the appeal of high quantities at knock down prices, if that product, despite its obvious inferiority, can scratch that itch so to speak. If you smoke 20 bowls a day, I get it. But there is just no way the stuff that is being freight-trained, is as good as the aforementioned Capstan. No chance.
