Samuel Gawith St. James Flake

[sablebrush52]

One opinion says buy in force what you like, and put it away to age. When you come back, you find you have 5? lbs. to smoke. Multiply that by the number of blends and you come up with quite a bit of tobacco.

Another says you aren't pipe living well unless you try a good number of the new blends on the market. If they are better than what you've already cellared, cellar them, too, in the same large quantity.

Of course, you'll never smoke all that tobacco. You will have earned a seat in the Hell of Incessant Hoarders. (You should have bought only what you will smoke.)

You see how this works to the advantage of the blenders. Cellar/hoard; buy the new stuff and cellar and hoard it.

We wink wink at the megatons of tobacco in our cellars in the same way as we nod in complacently to our growing gut from too any large dinners.

I was of the cellar large quantities of all tobaccos persuasion, as well as cellaring the same amount of new blends.

But at this date it seems to me that running lean would have been the better practice. We tell ourselves that we need to cellar deep because of the FDA. Makes sense; and we need to buy now all the tobacco we will ever need until we drop dead. OK.

But how long until then? And will your health withstand more of those years of tobacco incursion?
What about changing tastes. Are you still going to love a blend the way you do now so the 20 lbs. you bought of it going to get your attention?

Could be that less is more.

I'm in mostly agreement with you. I was never a "30lbs of every blend" kind of guy, and I have met people who do that. On the other hand, I'm not a "buy it as I go" type either. I used to be the latter, only keeping a pound or two on hand and replenishing it. Also, I rarely had more than 3 blends total at any one time.

I've certainly changed over the last 10 years, and now have a cellar and I'm glad that I did thsi. My cellar is pretty modest compared to the Brobdingnagian proportions of many of the cellars described here. I'm at that age where I could go on for 30+ more years or less than 30 minutes. I have what I estimate is a 10+ year supply and have curtailed further purchases to just replacing something that has run out that I would like to continue to smoke With a few exceptions, I don't stock more than a pound or two of anything and I don't have more than 8 lbs of any one thing.

I suspect that many of the large cellar gathers really want to have a complete cellar to choose from when they finally fall off the twig. It's not so much that they have a 20 year supply overall, it's that the have a 20 year full cellar supply. So having an extra 100 to 200 lbs of a variety of blends is the discounted margin of leftovers needed to have a completely stocked cellar when the mortuary staff show up.

So why do this? Is it sensible? I dunno, but I remember what a very prominent figure in the piping community suggested to me a few years ago during a discussion about the cellaring obsession. What he said was that " to stop buying more was to admit to our mortality". Interesting thought.

There are other considerations for putting away more than you can smoke in a month or three. I still have a number of now extinct blends that I can still enjoy. One fact of piping is that blends have a way of going out of production without any warning whatsoever. So if I want to smoke a bowl of McClelland 40th, I've got it.

Also, blends change. The Astley's I bought 7-8 years ago is a different blend than what is being put in the tins today. HU Director's Cut seems to have more dark fired in it today than it had in 2016. I liked it better in 2016.

Aging is another benefit, though a decidedly mixed one. Tobaccos change with age. Whether that change presents an improvement is up to the individual smoker to decide. I like how some blends, like St James Flake or Luxury Bullseye Flake change. And I don't like how other blends change, like 2015.

Also, tins fail over time. So the whole business of cellaring is a matter of percentages.

We have no way of seeing what's coming, no promise of life past this instant. All this cellaring, like many of the decisions we make, is done on faith.

 

[saltedplug]

sable said:

"We have no way of seeing what's coming, no promise of life past this instant. All this cellaring, like many of the decisions we make, is done on faith."

Cellaring seeks to enjoy in the future what we enjoy now, and this is prudent, except that we can't know the future until it arrives. We model the future based upon our understanding of the present. But this is only successful based upon the accuracy of the model, the accuracy of which we can't know until the future overlaps the present and becomes it. It's easy to make mistakes making the model.

The Buddhist theory of Dependent Origination posits chains of causality wherein A is only present if B; if not B not A. To predict the future so that when it becomes present is a guessing game that involves a multitude of causal events whose final outcome can change given the absence of just factor in the chain; that we cannot begin to know from our small perch of understanding in the present.

What we can know is that if alive we will need food, clothing and shelter, and that we will crave connection with friends and our beloved. We can predict our need for tobacco given our pipe smoking penchant present.

So cellaring, I think, is sensible.

sable also said:

"I suspect that many of the large cellar gathers really want to have a complete cellar to choose from when they finally fall off the twig."

So these are my thoughts, but if you're one of the above, don't mind me.

 

[Mr_houston]

Thanks for sharing. A great read. I decided to crack one of my Laurel Flake tins from ‘06. Will try some tonight. Quite moist but looks beautiful.

I am anxious to try SJF and found an old Laurel Flake from 2005. I opened it tonight and was so impressed with the black flakes. Mine looks like yours.

 

[donjgiles]

I am anxious to try SJF and found an old Laurel Flake from 2005. I opened it tonight and was so impressed with the black flakes. Mine looks like yours.

View attachment 75926

YES...

Good stuff!

 

[spugni]

Great review. Love that stuff.

 

[molst]

Totally agree. SJF has become my super quality reference after dinner smoke.