I am very disappointed with the price point of St. Bruno.
Add my voice to the chorus of the eff Mac Baren crowd.
I'm unsure if it's them or the American distributors who came up with the ridiculous price,
but it's really goofy and a real pisser that I can get St. Bruno Flake shipped over here from England for cheaper than it's now being sold in the States.
Mac Baren has come a long way since their "McBite" days as many oldtime smokers knew them due to the sugar casings they favored --- the embrace of the British methods by Mac Baren have made some strides to squash that nickname, but they are still prone to producing overly mild and innocuous baccy in the Danish tradition --- it doesn't seem that Mac Baren is capable of making a truly stout tobacco.
And if it's true that the new tins have a "vinegar warning" on the paper insert inside the tin, that's silly too haha
St. Bruno has always traditionally had a balsamic element and I guess the "vinegar warning" is because the tins tend to rust on the inside?
The recipe has most certainly degraded, both the leaf composition and the flavour, there's no way that it couldn't after being passed through so many hands, Mac Baren got it from Orlik who got it from British American Tobacco who got it from Imperial Tobacco who got it from Ogden's of Liverpool --- BAT was in "bean counter" mode anyway when they shut down Murray's and started getting everything made in Denmark so the recipe integrity wasn't really of concern to them anyway, they were looking to cut production costs.
In short it means that Mac Baren has been producing the blends according to the recipes we were handed over from Imperial Tobacco. So if the english pipe smokers since 2006 didn't taste a difference I see no reason why anybody else would.
I beg to differ.
There were plenty of complaints from oldtime pipemen when St. Bruno production was originally shifted to Denmark and made by Orlik,
but old British codgers aren't exactly "online people" so their complaints weren't plastered all over the internet.
If the recipe was used in conjunction with a sense of history and more careful researching into the blend and what constituted its attributes in the glory days of what actually made it a legend, then that'd be great --- but just because you inherited a recipe doesn't mean that you're matching the stuff as it was made in the UK --- take Three Nuns for example, to manufacture it without perique is a prime example of disregarding the historical truths and instead relying on watered-down recipes that had been adjusted by the accounting department to fatten the bottom line for BAT/Imperial, there could have been an attempt to acquire the earlier versions of the recipe, especially since money changed hands it would seem that the archival processing methods and recipe could have been obtained as well.
Just my 2 pennies in the pond.
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