Samuel Gawith, EU and BREXIT

[oldgeezersmoker]

We're a fringe market.

Precisely. A rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

 

[fireground_piper]

Which could be a benefit for getting lower quantity, higher graded product....if the consumers also weren't cheap SoBs. It's fringe and penny pinching customers where we want a pound of tobacco for the price a premium cigar smoker might pay for a single cigar.

 

[Worknman]

As Jeremy Reeves recently pointed out, on a pie chart the pipe smoking segment is invisible. Less than 1%. And a lot of what we think of as premium tobacco (African and Indian dark air and fire cured) is actually the cheapest leaf on the planet used mostly to beef up the nicotine in strong cigarettes and snuff. If they (cig and oral tobacco manufacturers) didn't use the leaf in their products, it wouldn't exist for pipe tobacco manufacturers because the farmers wouldn't grow it. We're a fringe market.

I get that but does that mean that pipe tobacco is just whats left over of the rejected cigarrete crops? If that were true it would mean cigarettes have higher quality tobacco than pipe tobacco.

 

[sablebrush52]

Precisely. A rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

Wow! Pipe smoking is really expanding its numbers!

 

[sablebrush52]

Pipe tobacco manufacturers are already basically relegated to batches rejected by cigarette and oral tobacco brands

I'm not sure that's entirely the case. At least, that's not what my conversations with blenders have indicated. Big Tobacco dominates, but it's not necessarily the leavings that get sold to be made into pipe tobacco. And some blenders have had their own deals with growers and importers.

 

[oldgeezersmoker]

I'm not sure that's entirely the case. At least, that's not what my conversations with blenders have indicated. Big Tobacco dominates, but it's not necessarily the leavings that get sold to be made into pipe tobacco. And some blenders have had their own deals with growers and importers.

True. Less so now, but still true.
Back in the early 1990’s, the first PCCA blends that McClelland did for the late Bob Hamlin featured very high sugar content Virginia. Bob told me that one of the cigarette leaf dealers had acquired the leaf somehow, even though it was outside of what they normally would have bought. They were going to “down blend” it so it could be made into cigarette strip, but before going to that expense, Mike made them an offer, and used it for those limited edition PCCA blends for several years.

Such things still are possible.