Paul: I am a pretty young pipe smoker so I am not sure how it used to be back in the day. But most tobacco shops or newspaper stores do have 'Flandria Florina' which is a semois (but I think not grown in the semois valley) topped with tonquin bean. At the tobacco stall on our towns Thursday morning market, they still have quite a few different Semois tobaccos, including Vincent Manil and some other producers as well as Wervik tobacco, most of them do have a pretty fine shag cut which in the past seemed to be the preference for tobacco consumption. I have not tried these except for the Manil. There are not many pipe smokers on the street, and the few ones I see are more likely to smoke macbaren or something. I think people who still smoke semois are mainly people from before world war 2 and most have long been gone(though I am from the North, it could be that in South Belgium it is still consumed more frequently), if not for the recent revival due to that news article, I think it would have been game over. I do have some tobacco left from my great grandfather, and it smells a lot like a burley so I assume it is Semois (Pretty sure it was a bit of the poor mans tobacco). Short filler cigars are still frequently smoked, but most of the time only by somewhat older people as the youth prefers vaping devices.
I do think that semois is used for cigars, recently members of a Dutch forum organised a trip to visit semois producers and I think some of them bought different kind of cigars, also some kind of cigar that you need to put inside of your pipe called ' Bouchons'.
