Floral incense with smoke.
I don’t care for the flavor or aroma, but I kinda wish I did because it’s so creamy and cool-smoking.
I don’t care for the flavor or aroma, but I kinda wish I did because it’s so creamy and cool-smoking.
What Does Latakia Taste Like
- Thread starter Richmond B. Funkenhouser
- Start date
Give it a little more time. What you want is to taste the oils which are vaporizing off of the tobacco rather than the smoke. The slower and cooler you smoke, the more of those flavors you are going to get.I am doubtful about some of the tastes that reviewers sometimes report. It's a fact that our sensation of taste has a range of temperature at which it is most sensitive. Outside of the range taste sensation falls off. Pipe smoke in the mouth comes in very warm and you're not getting much of anything besides registering "yep...I'm detecting tobacco..." and not, "a chocolaty sweetness with caramel and a lemony overtone..."
I sip water when I am sipping my pipe to cool the palate. It's in the aftertaste where I might experience a sensation of tasting something besides tobacco. It's nice when it happens. Sometimes all I taste is tobacco. "Yes, this blend has a certain tobacco-ie tobacconess with overtones of tobacco laced with tobacco."
So "smokiness?" Well... duh,.. you inhaled a mouthful of smoke. What did you expect?
Other times I can taste other tastes, hopefully pleasant ones. The best is the aftertaste after putting the pipe away that tastes like how the blend smells. That can be quite pleasant.
About 99.8% of the bowls of tobacco I smoke are Latakia blends, usually MM965 but I rotate in Gaslight, Charing Cross, Odyssey, Abingdon, Captain Earl's etc. There's a lot more flavor to latakia than just smokiness. I get a definite creamy chocolate/espresso flavor that I also get from stouts and porters.
@damacene Thanks for the pointer. I'm still working on slowing it down, and am noticing more as I get better at it. Nice to know there is more to Latakia than just smokiness.
Latakia tastes like Latakia in the way that orange tastes like orange and an apple like an apple. A primary flavor.
Latakia shares a lot of flavors you find in a good peated scotch to me, which is one reason I like it so much.
The only tobacco that is smoked exclusively in pipes is latakia. Virginias and burley spell cigarettes to me. They even put perique in cigs these days. 
It tastes like incense in its best effect, and leather and creosote most of the rest of the time.
forgot that I also get a hint of aspirin with latakia.
The tastes vary a bit for me according to what other tobaccos are in the mix; but the dominant trait on my palate is leather. I know that's more a scent correlation, yet it is best my vocabulary affords me...
For me, often floral, sweet, piney, herbal, and creamy. I only get a traditional campfire smell from whiffs of smoke exhaled from my mouth.
Sometimes I hear people saying that Latakia is like incense. The only times I had straight Latakia were Sutliff's pure Latakia and by picking all the black pieces out of two English house blends and smoking the black specks separately from the blends. Neither time was the smell or taste what I would describe as incense, but rather an aged wood overripe tobacco or barnstall hay smell. Different varieties of Latakia are different though. I've had Latakia blends like Balkan Sasieni that reminded me of Old Leather.
Dunhill blends don't seem to smell so much as overripe tobacco though, and I could kind of see someone perceiving them as like incense. Nightcap had a surprisingly fresh smell together with a classic Latakia side of aged tobacco. I recall it having some kind of clovelike or cinnamonlike smell too.
