This is the infamous, almost legendary Vietnamese weed, supposedly a Rusticana variety packing three times the nicotine punch of US and African tobaccos, and of which not very much information that's useful to a pipe smoker is available on the internet. It's sold in the UK by a very small number of speciality East Asian grocery stores, in 100-gram ziplock packs, attractively priced at about one-third of any regular pipe tobacco.
An initial disappointment on seeing the bag when delivered, is that it is a fine cut shag, like a hand rolling cigarette tobacco. The leaf is a more or less uniform dark brown, the colour of dark, plain chocolate. The bag note that greets the nose on opening is grassy but like old barn hay that's about to moulder.
Bearing in mind the warnings from many sources about just how strong this weed is, I selected a small-bowled Meerschaum for a test smoke. It was too easy to pack it too tightly, the fine cut compacting easily in the bowl - and I did use more pressure than I normally would, fearing that, because of its fine cut, it would burn hot. I needn't have worried about that: even to char, it needed several lights, which not even the soggiest Gawith and Hoggarth blends straight out of the tin require.
The first few puffs - never more than about three, in between relights - offered first a taste of mouldy hay, quickly developing into a discord of acrid notes like a chicken leg that's been burned on the barbecue.
Despite several interventions with the Czech pipe multitool, at no time did the bowl stay lit long enough for me to establish a regular smoking cadence, but even so, there was no detectable tongue bite. That was almost unfortunate, because my taste buds continued able to savour that burned chicken-skin taste without any desensitisation.
The nicotine hit was there all right. I've never crumbled a cigarette butt and an old cigar stub into a pipe to smoke, but when I did manage to taste the tobacco it suggested strongly that the experience would be very similar. It reminded me of a really nasty, cheap Virginia. This weed has clearly neither been cased nor topped with anything at all, and If ever a tobacco deserved to be flavoured with Tonquin bean or Deer Tongue - this would be it.
Two thirds of the way down the bowl, the burnt chicken-skin miasma was joined by a hint of cabbage and the fleeting notion that the old, cheap cigar stub had been mixed with a little rose petal pot-pourri - but the chicken that had been forgotten and left on the grill too long, predominated.
I can confidently say that, of all the tobaccos I have ever smoked, this was the most unsatisfying yet nicotine-high smoke I've ever had, but with Gawith's 1792 Flake coming a close second. If there were no other tobaccos left in the world, and with a choice of only these two, the 1792 would be the tobacco of choice every time.
Why, one might ask, is this unattractive, rough beast sold in the UK at all? Well, I can only imagine that there are some long-term Vietnamese expatriates who long for a taste of The Old Country, much as a Sri Lankan expat treats himself to the occasional bottle of coconut toddy, a vile concoction that looks like old washing-up water, smells like a blocked drain and kicks like a Mocow Mule.
To be fair, Thuoc Lao isn't designed to hold a light or be smoked in a pipe, of course: Vietnamese folk smoke it in a bamboo bong, filling their lungs from a single fill of a tiny bowl, in one mighty blast, burned up in a single light, and take delight in the sight of foreign tourists taking a big, long toke then falling over. But if I were going to assault my lungs withthe smoke, I'd want to cut it first with dried peppermint leaves.
I'm writing this about an hour after the smoke and I'm still stoned from the nicotine, but not in a good way: with no pleasant taste or continuity, the nicotine hit was not at all relaxing. The taste is still with me, even after drinking a pint of Rooibos tea to try and wash it away.
And the room note? Imagine an old heap of grass cuttings which has overheated and started to smoulder.
So... I still have about 98 grams of the stuff left: what am I to do with it? Would it benefit at all from an infusion of rum? I may try. Will I perhaps keep it to enliven some blends I like that are deliciously mellow and complex in taste, but are too weak on the nicotine for my liking? I may try this, too, taking care that there's not enough in the mix for the charred chicken to come through. But I shall also be happy to dispense it in 5-gram sample bags to anyone in UK who cares to PM me their mailing address and wants to be able to say they've tried it.
As Jim Inks, master of euphemism, might say: "Has a few rough edges. Not an all day smoke.".
Perhaps not even a pipe smoke at all.
