The "Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is" List

[karam]

This is not a review per se as I am not going to talk about the 70 tobaccos I got either in my drawers or well gone up in smoke the last 3-4 years. There are many lists like it but this one is mine (forgive me, I had to!).

I decided to tidy up my tobacco list and add a column asking the question "would you buy this tobacco again?". I did three passes, trying to be strict about it, until I couldn't eliminate any more. This does not reflect on quality of the blends, just whether I'd readily fork out some hard-earned cash to obtain them again/cellar them.

Some which didn't make the cut I liked, but they never shined for me (like Roppel's Roundels and Scottish Cake, the only VaPers in the "no" group).
There are other blends which I liked, but there are others like them I know I'd always prefer, case in point is HH Old Dark Fired (made the cut) vs HH Bold Kentucky and Lakeland Dark (both failed). I prefer Lakeland Dark to Bold Kentucky, but overall prefer ODF over both as it's smoother and sweeter. To be honest I'd throw Dark Bird's Eye out too as it's GOOD, but too monochromatic for me, though I find it combines very nicely with another "maybe", MacB's Dark Twist Roll Cake, the MacB smoothens the English hooligan, but also gains much needed strength from it.

Excel is nice as it allows you to interrogate the data. This tells me that despite saying I like nicotine/Kentucky bombs, I gravitate, and most of my buying is VaPers, also tells me that there wasn't a Lakeland I tried and didn't like. Also tells me that I'm difficult towards Latakia, though if you ask me "what have you smoked most of?" I'd say I've smoked 10 years' worth of Dunhill Nightcap before branching out.

Interesting exercise, wanted to share!

 

[lukasstrifeson]

I have a similar Excel for my cellar. You should definitely add a column for stock reference.

I'm a visual guy so the charts really tickle me, love seeing it presented in such a fashion.

 

[bullet08]

Honest truth is, I'll smoke almost anything. Whatever is in my cellar will be smoked unless I die first.

 

[karam]

I have a similar Excel for my cellar. You should definitely add a column for stock reference.

I'm a visual guy so the charts really tickle me, love seeing it presented in such a fashion.

Oh I do, it's just hidden

 

[judcole]

It's interesting how the term "cellar" has changed. When I picked up my pipe again, 20 years ago, after 10 years or so of mostly smoking cigars, I found and joined the old Yahoo Pipesmokers2 group. When we spoke about a "cellar", we meant tobaccos that we were deliberately keeping for the long haul, for aging. We didn't really have a term for tobaccos that we had on hand but hadn't gotten into rotation, yet.
I still think of my "cellar" as long term storage.

 

[karam]

I don't think this has changed, having more than I can smoke in say 6 months means I don't run as big a risk of running out if/when the ordering from abroad door closes, and also achieves aging organically. I have switched to "cellaring" some blends I found to like, and they are in sealed containers, not to be disturbed, while others - sometimes the same blend - are in jars I dip in regularly.

 

[Casual]

I still think of my "cellar" as long term storage.

Since the term cellar was coined, some western governments have quadrupled the price of tobacco with taxes and others have banned almost all importation, and the trend of regulation is tighter rather than looser.

I created a cellar to be able to have anything in ten years, not to age. I suppose there could be another word, maybe “prep”?

 

[Country Bladesmith]

Never bothered with a spreadsheet, but I know there are quite a lot of blends in the stash that were good, but not enough to my liking to bother re-ordering. I think I’m going to start paring my orders down to just those blends that I wouldn’t want to go without. Time to streamline, I think.

 

[hoosierpipeguy]

I have a spread sheet but i didn't create columns for data that would allow me much analysis. I didn't really care. I know I very strongly prefer Virginia Flake. I know I don't care for English blends much. My cellar reflects that, don't need a bar chart to figure out ou To be fair, it helps that I probably have at least 25% more tobacco than I'll ever need, that tolerance level doesn't require careful analysis or precision.

 

[cshubhra]

Fantastic ? I have a spreadsheet similar to yours. There are a few others who have also showed their spreadsheets here

 

[jaytex1969]

I've "spread sheets" on the desk to catch what I drop. Does that count?

 

[odobenus]

Excellent data! Thanks for posting. I love seeing this kind of thing.
My own system is much more arcane. Beyond using tobaccocellar.com to keep track of amounts and aging, I have an absurdly incomprehensible pair of word documents with my notes on every blend I've ever bought -- one doc for blends in rotation, the other for rejected tobacco. To date, there are 59 in the rejected doc, and only 19 in current use (and a few of those should probably be struck from the list). Whenever I read here that someone has found enjoyment out of all, or nearly all, of the blends they've tried, I admire the hell out of that person. Why am I such a picky m__________r? I do not know.

 

[Merton]

Yikes...glad that works for you but it wouldn't be any fun for me. Anyway, while I generally keep genres together I really like finding a tin of something which I forgot I had now and then. I purge every couple of years so that it does not get completely ridiculous.

 

[sablebrush52]

That's a pretty neat tool. I'm just too freakin' lazy. I figure that the largest holdings in my closets cellar are blends that I tried, liked, bought again, liked again, and then stocked up. So mine would be predominantly "yes".

These days, the few purchases I make are for blends that have run low which I want to replenish. I'm not doing much further exploration. And now that the autobahn is closed to the US I'm even less inclined, since I was really getting into German blends.

What's a little weird is how many blends I bought are no longer made. I was surprised that Modern Virginia has gone the way of the dodo. But then so many things have gone the way of the dodo. And at some point, so will I.

 

[JKoD]

Impressive seeing people take such great care in tracking their goods. I don’t think I’ll get to this point as it would take some of the pleasure in being surprised someday when I find a stash and go - awesome, forgot I had that. Life has all kinds of exciting moments, sometimes our lack of memory can help create more!

 

[condorlover1]

@JKoD is that a Morrel in your avatar?

 

[saltedplug]

This is not a review per se as I am not going to talk about the 70 tobaccos I got either in my drawers or well gone up in smoke the last 3-4 years. There are many lists like it but this one is mine (forgive me, I had to!).

I decided to tidy up my tobacco list and add a column asking the question "would you buy this tobacco again?". I did three passes, trying to be strict about it, until I couldn't eliminate any more. This does not reflect on quality of the blends, just whether I'd readily fork out some hard-earned cash to obtain them again/cellar them.

Some which didn't make the cut I liked, but they never shined for me (like Roppel's Roundels and Scottish Cake, the only VaPers in the "no" group).
There are other blends which I liked, but there are others like them I know I'd always prefer, case in point is HH Old Dark Fired (made the cut) vs HH Bold Kentucky and Lakeland Dark (both failed). I prefer Lakeland Dark to Bold Kentucky, but overall prefer ODF over both as it's smoother and sweeter. To be honest I'd throw Dark Bird's Eye out too as it's GOOD, but too monochromatic for me, though I find it combines very nicely with another "maybe", MacB's Dark Twist Roll Cake, the MacB smoothens the English hooligan, but also gains much needed strength from it.

Excel is nice as it allows you to interrogate the data. This tells me that despite saying I like nicotine/Kentucky bombs, I gravitate, and most of my buying is VaPers, also tells me that there wasn't a Lakeland I tried and didn't like. Also tells me that I'm difficult towards Latakia, though if you ask me "what have you smoked most of?" I'd say I've smoked 10 years' worth of Dunhill Nightcap before branching out.

Interesting exercise, wanted to share!

View attachment 80082View attachment 80083

"There are other blends which I liked, but there are others like them I know I'd always prefer, case in point is HH Old Dark Fired (made the cut) vs HH Bold Kentucky and Lakeland Dark (both failed)."

I think this is rather brilliant. You are forgoing evaluating each blend on its own merits, which is the usual approach and which of necessity demands a rating scale, which is a PIA (pain in the ass) and then demands a massive contrast and compare.

No, you just group similar tobaccos and ask the question which would you smoke first. A simple, expedient that gets you to the answer with much less work and thus more quickly.

 

[anotherbob]

if I can't remember that I have it or what I think of it well then it's a nice surprise. So no notes or spreadsheets. And most blends you can id by sight and smell anyways.

 

[anotherbob]

@JKoD is that a Morrel in your avatar?

hopefully. Cause if it's not then it's probably something a doctor needs to send a sample of to a lab. I.e. an unsightly growth.

 

[karam]

I have a spread sheet but i didn't create columns for data that would allow me much analysis. I didn't really care. I know I very strongly prefer Virginia Flake. I know I don't care for English blends much. My cellar reflects that, don't need a bar chart to figure out ou To be fair, it helps that I probably have at least 25% more tobacco than I'll ever need, that tolerance level doesn't require careful analysis or precision.

Ah it's fine, I set out on Sunday to update my sheet, a few years out of date, and when I did I decided to add some more columns and see if I can make any sense of it, from a detached point of view, as a fun exercise. I mean I do this kind of thing at work all the time so it comes naturally.

What I liked a lot in your cellaring post is what you said "Don't be afraid to branch out within your favourite genre", this is good as it allows one to be flexible. As you see from the charts, it's reasonably likely that there won't be a VaPer I won't like (and there hasn't been one that I didn't finish and enjoy the tin), while over in Latakia and DFK land I'm a bit stricter.