First blending attempt

With a decent assortment of tobacco leaves on hand, I decided to try blending a bit of pipe tobacco. Even though I’d pressed a little block of VA with a few leaves of Samsun in the mix, I’m going to consider this as my first “real” blending attempt.

There are quite a number of recipes available in Bob Goff’s books. He also posted kind of a “Latakia matrix” in the FTT forum, with a number of different blend recipes varying in their percentage of Latakia. I decided to start where he suggested, with one called “Towers of Antioch”. The proportions are the same as “Balkan White”, but the Oriental I have is Samsun, not Xanthi, which has a different flavor profile.

I started out by cutting up enough of each component leaf in 1 gram per part, ending up with about 16 grams of tobacco. I tried some in the pipe and it was OK; not great. A little rough around the edges, not a smooth blend. I could see the potential there, but overall it just “felt like” it needed some time to mature before I could really make a decision about adjusting the ratio of components, or adding something like a touch of Perique or Cavendish or something. I decided to press some and age it a little.

I started that exercise by mixing up another 16 g of the blend and combined it with what I had. I had ordered a noodle press from Amazon, based on recommendations from others who have tried this. The noodle press arrived yesterday, so the timing was perfect. I cut a circle of parchment paper to block the extrusion end of the noodle press, and another for the press follower. I loaded the batch in the press and, over the next several hours, gradually added pressure until it was pretty tight.

This morning I took the resulting puck out of the press, broke it apart into a loose blend, and misted it with some water and then re-loaded the press. I don’t want to repeat the mistake I made last winter with the VA flake, which was pressing it in too dry a condition. I think that would have turned out a lot better had I made sure the lease was in high case before pressing.

As I write this, the blend is back in the press under moderate pressure. I’ll crank the press handle a few times today to get it back under as much pressure as it’s safe to maintain with he noodle press (and its few plastic parts), then let it sit for another 2-3 days before removing it.

What really struck me about this exercise is that, while this bend is not what I’d say is my favorite, it’s close enough to one of the commercially produced English/Balkan blends that I like that I can see the potential for getting it there. I think with some adjustment, maybe switching from Samsun to Yenidje or Xanthi, I may be able to produce a blend that I enjoy as much as or more than my go-to White Knight/Sobranie Match, or one of the others (Father Dempsey, My Mixture 965, Balkan Sobranie) that I have enjoyed so much.

Next up: I have to wonder how difficult it would be to blend up a VA/Per that I like as much as Escudo…

The new tobacco is here!

Cue the Steve Martin video…

I ended up ordering a few different types of tobacco leaf from WLT, and it all arrived today. I’m looking forward to mixing up a small batches of different blends and trying them out, until I find the combinations I like. I find that I enjoy different types of tobacco depending on the day and my mood. Some days nothing but a nice Latakia-infused English or Balkan blend will do. Other days I really like a straight Virginia flake, or a Virginia/Perique (or VA/Per, as it’s often called). My own pressed VA that I made has some Turkish Black Sea Samsun in it, and in my opinion needs something else – like Perique or Latakia. So, I’ll be doing a lot of experimenting over the coming weeks and months, I think.

Right now I’m thinking I’ll start by trying a pinch of each of the leaf varieties I have, on their own, one at a time to get a better idea of what they’re like. I have some Lemon VA, Dark Air Cured, Perique, Latakia, and they were nice enough to throw in a small sample of Light Fire Cured.

It’s going to be bitter, deep cold for the next couple of weeks, so I won’t be distracted by any maple sap collection. I’ll update this post as I try each of the leaf varieties on their own.

  • I decided to start with some Dark Air Cured (DAC). The bag note is like a box of cigars or high end cigarettes. The leaf is in medium case, easily handled and stretchy. I shredded a little over 4 grams, or s small piece about half a hand size torn from one leaf, and loaded up about half of that in a briar. Wow. Strong stuff!! I would have bought a smaller quantity of this stuff, because the blends I want to try only have very small quantities of it. I understand why. It lights easily and burns well, but the strength and nicotine content is well above what I’d want to smoke on its own. I only made it a few minutes into that pipe before I had to set it down and take a break. This stuff is most definitely not for the faint of heart. I was left dizzy and a little nauseous for a couple of hours afterward. I fought it with some dark chocolate and a little food, but in hindsight a better approach would have been trying s very small amount after a full meal.
  • Next up: Lemon Virginia from Canada. This gets its name from the color; the leaves are indeed a light lemon yellow, unlike the medium browns tending to reddish-brown of my own home grown VA (which is why I bought it; a lot of blend recipes call for it and I haven’t grown any). The bag note is… light and quite frankly uninspiring. Not bad, just not that delicious “tobacco” smell. I shredded all of one small leaf of this. As expected, the flavor and nicotine are quite a bit milder than the DAC. The taste is fairly mild; I have a hard time describing flavors but I’d call this rather a classic Virginia, a little woody more than grassy. No overpowering nicotine hit from this stuff. I didn’t notice a lot of spice in the nose, but it does make its presence felt in the back of the mouth and tongue. Overall quite smokable, but one-dimensional and in need of other flavors to give it some complexity. I was tempted to mix in about 5-10% dark air cured just to see how it would taste, but decided to wait. I still have Perique and Latakia to sample.
  • Next up: St. James Perique. The bag note of this stuff is unmistakable. Earthy, with a hint of what others and I have called “barnyard”. Think horse barn, not cattle feed lot. There’s more to it; maybe a little hint of pepper or something there as well. Darling Wife said she smelled candied fruits. Some have said the Perique from Whole Leaf Tobacco arrives “soggy”; I’d just say it’s just high to very high case, pretty moist. Probably a good thing, given the amount of handling that would required to flatten the leaves out. The leaves seem to be fairly small compared to other varieties, more like an Oriental size. They’re pretty well wadded up from their time in the fermentation process. I unfurled one leaf completely and shredded it, putting the contents into a snack size Ziplock bag like I did with the others. It needs a bit of drying time before it’s ready to light. Having learned a valuable lesson with he DAC, I very cautiously tried a small amount in the bottom of the bowl of the briar pipe I’m using for sampling. It’s got a definite Perique taste to it; not overpowering, and the nicotine wasn’t immediately overpowering (but as I said,I’m being very cautious). More telling was that, just before I tried it on its own, I sprinkled a few little strands on top of some half-smoked Lemon VA and re-lit that. The resulting smoke was, unlike the VA on its own, quite interesting — I got a hint of almost a soapy taste, in a good way, like all sorts or Sen-Sen. Not strong, just a hint.
  • Last up: Latakia. As expected, this had a strong, pungent smell of smoldering campfire as soon as the bag was opened. Actually, a little before — I think it actually permeated the rather thick poly heat sealed bag, to be honest. On reflection, the aroma isn’t exactly “smoldering campfire”; it’s closer to “smoldering ashes of last night’s campfire”. The tobacco isn’t large leaves bundled or laid together as with he VA or DAC; at least the stuff at the end of the bag I opened is broken and crumbled pieces of leaf. I pulled out some pieces and chopped them into small strands and chunks to load up a little snack Ziplock for tasting and test blending. This tobacco, opposite of the Perique, is fairly dry – I’d say a bit below medium case. I dropped a bit into the pipe and lit it. Honestly, this is one I think I could probably smoke straight. It’s not overpoweringly strong, there doesn’t seem to be too much nicotine, and it’s a quite nice smoke with kind of a floral undertone to it. I’m eager to see how well it plays with some VA and maybe a bit of Perique, just for a little more depth and complexity.

I’ve been accustomed to smoking Sutliff’s Balkan Sobranie Original Mix Match, later renamed “Balkan S Match”. Unfortunately, Sutliff was swallowed up by Scandinavian Tobacco Group (STG), and STG promptly drove a stake through the heart of Sutliff. Their factory was shut down and most of their tobacco blends discontinued without notice, including BSOMM. It looks like I can still buy its nearly identical tinned version, Hearth & Home White Knight, but I’ll hold off and see how much success I have in blending something that I like as much. One potential obstacle is that the Match & White Knight use Yenidje as part of the blend, and I have none. My Oriental is all Samsun, but I can order some Yenidje seeds and grow it myself. WLT also sells Izmir, which I’ve been told has a much more “floral” taste than Samsun. I may have to try some of that, though again the smallest quantity I can buy is a full pound.

If nothing else, this growing and blending of pipe tobacco is teaching me patience. The Virginia I grew in 2023 is just now beginning to show its potential, about a year and a half after harvesting. It will be next winter before I would have some Yenidje available to try out. I think it’s worth the wait.

Maple syrup season is officially here!

Last winter, we really didn’t have weather conducive to collecting sap. Actually, I think we may have, but I missed it. We had an unseasonably warm spell, either followed or preceded (I don’t recall which) by a bitter cold snap that lasted a couple of weeks… and then it was Spring and too late. So, no sap or syrup last year.

This year I was prepared for that. Despite the fact that it was only January, I was watching the weather forecast like a hawk. Ideally, for collecting maple sap you want temperatures below freezing at night and well above freezing during the day. I think this expands the tree during the day, sucking water from the roots, and contracts it at night, forcing water back into the roots. When I saw a week of temperatures forecast that looked good for sap running, I got out there and tapped the two silver maples along with one of the two smaller red maple trees in our side yard. Over the could have days immediately following, I was rewarded with a couple gallons of sap, which I boiled down into a not-quite-syrup concentrate that filled a couple of pint canning jars. That reduced the volume of the sap and kept it from spoiling. Those jars have been sitting in the fridge. Then we had a run of bitter cold weather for a week or so, followed by warm days that stayed above freezing at night. There was maybe a quart or so of sap sitting in the bags, not enough to bother collecting as it froze solid.

The last couple of days, though, have been good. Yesterday I had my four-year-old grandson help me empty the bags into the stock pot I’ve been using to boil the sap off, resulting in another pint of concentrate. This morning I got up to find a couple more gallons of sap in the collection bags. I have one more tree to tap, and I’ll do that today after filling a five gallon bucket with he collected sap. It looks like this may be a good year for maple syrup.

A bit before lunch time today I decided to go ahead and finish off the concentrate I’d already collected and boiled down. I started with three pint canning jars full of what I figured was probably roughly half of what’s required to be called “maple syrup”, which is 66% sugar concentration. I was close to correct. I put it in a pan on the stove and boiled it until the temperature of the boiling liquid hit 221 F, testing it a couple of times along the way. Finally the hydrometer read 66% – it was done! I poured it into the freshly washed jars and ended up with about 20 ounces or so, a bit less than half of the concentrated solution I started with, and a small fraction of what I’d roughly estimate to be about 4-5 gallons of sap that went into the initial boil.

Yes, I’m tempted to make waffles for lunch…

Smoking my own tobacco

I’ve still got nearly all of my 2023 crop of Virginia and Samsun Oriental tobacco. I’ve tried it at various times and generally found it to be rather harsh and one-dimensional. Even the Cavendish I cooked over a year ago wasn’t very good at all the last time I tried some.

A few days ago, I tried a bit of some that I’d pressed back in December of ’23. I had cased the ear with water and a bit of molasses, stacked the leaves, wrapped the stack in parchment paper, and pressed it between two pieces of particle board in a shop vise for a couple of weeks. I tightened the vise every couple of days during that time to keep the pressure up. When it was done I sliced the resulting block of tobacco, and it was… horrible. I stuck it in a jar and have tried it every few months since then, and it’s slowly improving. The bowl I sampled a few days ago was actually not bad, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I didn’t like. Then it occurred to me… I was expecting a pure Virginia flake tobacco. This wasn’t. I had included some Samsun leaf in the stack, so what I made was almost a cigarette blend. That’s why I wasn’t wild about the taste.

I think I’m going to order two things from Whole Leaf Tobacco that I either cannot produce myself, or simply don’t want to. The one I can’t reproduce is Latakia. Once produced in Syria and now almost exclusively in Cyprus, Latakia is made by hanging Turkish tobacco leaves in a shed and burning aromatic wood and leaves in a pit in the floor of the shed. They’ll use myrtle, pine, mastic, maybe juniper. Who knows? They burn whatever is available locally – none of which is available here, not that I could keep a smoky fire going for months at a time. So I’ll but the Latakia.

The other is Perique. Used as a “condimental” tobacco both for flavor and to Ph-adjust the Virginia, Perique is both the name of a strain of tobacco, and the process that is commonly used to prepare it. This involved compressing the leaf in an oxygen-deprived environment, which allows a specific bacteria to breed and do its work fermenting the leaf. During the months-long process the leaf needs to be periodically removed, tossed, and re-compressed. Even if you do it right, I understand it to be a tedious, stinky process. I may try my hand at it later on, but for now I think I’ll buy mine.

The pressed flake I have will probably be pretty good with the addition of some Latakia and maybe a pinch or two of Perique. I’ve got some Cavendish that’s still sitting in a jar contemplating its sins, and as soon as this cold clears up I’m going to try a little of that and see if it’s learned its lesson yet.

Maple season already

The weather has been crazy again this year. Last year I missed sugar season altogether, as I was thinking we’d get another few weeks of cold weather after it warmed up early. We never did. This year I was more prepared. When we got a couple weeks of bitter cold weather, I figured we might see a break afterward that would allow tapping the trees. That is best done when temperatures are below freezing at night, and in the 30s or 40s during the day.

I tapped the two silver maples in the yard as I did before. I also tapped one of the two red maples we have in the side yard. Sure enough, over the next couple of days we got a couple gallons of sap from the silvers, and maybe a pint and a half or so from the red maple. Then – nothing. It’s not getting much below freezing at night, if at all. I was concerned that the sap I’d collected, sitting in a 5 gallon bucket on the patio, would warm up enough for the sap to spoil. The bucket was only half full, somewhere between 2 and 3 gallons, and I didn’t want that to go to waste.

I pulled our enameled stock pot from the basement, filled it up, and lit the propane under it. The stock pot works really well for this; it’s a couple inches bigger in diameter than the turkey fryer, so there’s more surface area to evaporate eat water. The batch was done boiling off by the time I was ready to shut the burner down for the night. It’s not quite syrup yet, but it’s pretty close. There’s a golden color to it, and it definitely tastes like maple syrup. I don’t really want to get the filters and hydrometer dirty for such a small batch, so I poured it into a couple of canning jars and ended up with a quart of what I’ll call “concentrate”. As we get more sap collected and boiled, I’ll combine this with what follows and finish off larger amounts.

It’s a promising start; I hope the weather cooperates and we end up with a good batch of syrup this year. The last run netted us around half a gallon, most of which we gave away to friends and family, and we ran out a while back. Since then we’ve had to “make do” with that Canadian stuff. 🙂

If the sap starts running well again, I’m thinking about making a run over to one of our rental houses where there’s a HUGE silver maple. I’m sure I can run at least two taps in that tree. I’ve got plastic tubing and will just run those taps into a bucket so I can go over once every couple of days to swap out buckets.

Home grown VA pressed flake

After harvesting my small 2023 crop of tobacco, I spent some time “flue curing” the leaf in a home made kiln. I kept it at roughly 120-125 degrees with humidity levels of at least 70 percent, though I think it was significantly higher for most of the time. I think I had it in there for 4-5 weeks, maybe longer, before giving up trying to keep the kiln sealed up enough.

Once the leaf was out of there, I made a few ounces of Cavendish in a pressure cooker. From the remainder I selected a couple ounces and pressed it for a couple of weeks. It’s mostly VA with a little bit of Black Sea Samsun oriental mixed in. I just removed the midrib, stacked the leaf, wrapped it in parchment paper, and squeezed it in a vise between two chunks of particle board. When that was done, I sliced it into flakes (strips, really) and tried some. It was, well, kind of awful. I put it in a jar to age and see if it would improve with age.

I tried it after 3 months, then 6, and now it’s been about 13 months since it went into the jar. I’m smoking some now in a MM corncob, and I have to say that if you’re a fan of straight Virginia, it’s not bad. There seems to be a fair nicotine content; I had to take a break halfway through. I’ll bet this stuff will be pretty darned good in another year.

So tobacco growing is a long term process that requires a fair amount of patience. I’ve often heard that cigar rollers will often age tobacco leaves for several years before rolling the sticks, then let them age for months before they’re ready to smoke.

I have a pound or two of leaf sitting in a Sterilite tub now, aging at 63 percent RH and room temperature. I’ll likely pull some out in the coming weeks and press two more blocks. One will be straight Virginia tobacco leaf, brought into high case with distilled water. The other will be the same, but brought into high case with a spritz of Islay Scotch whisky just to see if that imparts any of the smoky/peaty flavor at all. I’ll probably try about 50 grams of each.

Update: Here’s a followup.

Bayou Morning

Man, if you’re going to smoke this stuff you’d better really love Perique. 25 percent of it is straight out of Louisiana.

I’ve had this stuff sitting in a sealed jar for well over two years now. The first time I tried it, I did so right after half a bowl of Haunted Bookshop. Both of them have a pretty stout nicotine kick, and I spent the next couple of hours fighting the urge to puke. Not a good scene. Anyway, if you’re used to smoking a lightweight aromatic like Lane 1-Q (aka Captain Black), a perique heavy blend like this will kind of punch you in the face. As a result, I’ve shied away from it until now.

Last night I loaded up a corncob with some and dived in. Cautiously. It’s not bad. It is quite strong, but it’s the Perique spice and not the nicotine. It’s honestly more Perique than I’d prefer at this point, but I’m wondering how it would do mixed 50/50 with my own home grown Virginia, now that it’s got a bit over a year of age on it. I’m planning to press another batch of VA flake before long; I’ll probably try some with some Bayou Morning mixed in to make my own VA/Per and see how that works.

Peterson’s My Mixture 965

I decided to try this one based on some reviews and recommendations I’d seen on line. Actually, that was a small part of it. There’s a (sorry for the Facebook link; it’s apparently the only web presence they have) local tobacconist I visit every once in a while; I try to find something to buy when I go in there. His prices on tobacco are quite a bit higher than what I’d pay ordering on line, but I’ve bought several pipes there. His prices on pipes are pretty reasonable. While the shop’s main business is cigars, the owner is a pipe smoker in addition to smoking cigars. I like giving some support to a local shop; these guys have to try to stay in business. Anyway, the last time I was in there I talked myself out of buying a new Savinelli pipe – gorgeous, but not exactly what I wanted – and settled on a tin of tobacco instead.

It’s an English mixture, with a good portion of Latakia complementing the cavendish and oriental tobacco. I find that it’s not quite as complex as my old standby, Sutliff’s Balkan Sobranie Original Mix Match. I don’t know if it’s different Latakia, different orientals, or what. There’s plenty of nice tasty smoky goodness, but like I said – not as complex.

I will give it this, though: there’s plenty of nicotine, enough to get your attention. I find that a small bowl is plenty, and I often take a break midway through. I probably have a fairly low tolerance, as I don’t smoke every day and haven’t smoked cigarettes or cigars in quite some time. In fact, the last time I tried to smoke a cigar I almost ended up losing several consecutive meals over the next day or two. I’ve run into a few pipe blends that hit me pretty hard, and this is one of them. Orlik Golden Slices is another.

I’ve tried this in several pipes, from a well-used Missouri Meerschaum corncob, to a non-Missouri for-real meerschaum, a couple of different briars, and a calabash. It smokes well in all of them, though of course virtually everything seems a little better out of that calabash.

Will I buy more? I don’t know. Never say never, of course, but at this point I see it as kind of duplicative. I have a solid favorite Balkan/English. If I’m going to stray from that for a little change of pace, I’m more likely to load up some Father Dempsey or possibly Early Morning Pipe, another Peterson labeled product that I bought at Ted’s.

Which reminds me… I should probably load up on some bulk Father Dempsey. I don’t know how the current blend compares to that which was made before the Kramer family closed up shop and sold the blends to Smoking Pipes, but I’m afraid eventually it may get changed substantially or dropped altogether. It seems to be not uncommon when I find something I really like.

Retiring servers as a way of life

I’ve been running a server at home for a lot of years. Over the past 2 or maybe 3 decades, our server has provided Windows network shares and workgroup services, a repository for DVR’ed TV shows and movies, PBX functions with Asterisk, DNS, email, and more. Before all cable Internet providers started blocking incoming port 80 and 443 traffic, it hosted our simple family web site and even webmail at one point. One by one I’ve moved on, migrated, or replaced all of those – except email. Postfix and Dovecot IMAP are really the last things I’ve been using the local server for in the last couple of years. I do still run an ad blocker function in a Raspberry Pi.

The server is on old hardware bought 13 years ago – an Intel Atom D525 motherboard and a similarly old 1TB Seagate hard drive. The Ubuntu OS is long out of support and I have very little confidence in the life left in the hard drive. It’s been weighing on my mind recently. On top of all that, if I get hit by a meteorite or a bus or whatever… it’s going to be a nightmare for someone to figure everything out. It’s high time I retired that box; it owes me nothing.

I looked at a number of options. I could move email to a hosted VM – but it’s really a nightmare maintaining and trying to work around the many companies that block ALL mail for most popular hosting companies, regardless of using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. I looked into a Microsoft business basic account. I considered letting my domain registrar do it, since they’ll provide webmail service. Each of these has advantages and disadvantages, and some are more expensive than others.

In the end, I discovered that you can set up your own custom domain in iCloud and use iCloud email. I don’t see us going back to Android phones, so that’s fine with me. All it takes is a few minutes with iCloud settings and a few TXT and MX records in DNS, so everything is easily reversible should I decide on a new path later on.

Now we’ll see how well Apple filters SPAM and phishing emails. I have spent countless hours over the years trying to eliminate the torrent of this crap that we receive every day, with pretty good results. A combination of Postgrey and some pretty extensive Postfix header and body check filters have eliminated most of the unwanted crap. I’m hoping it doesn’t all reappear again.

Next on the block is moving my small Asterisk system out of my house. It works exceptionally well, but of course if we have an internet outage it’s off line. As I hope to provide VOIP phone service to a couple more family members, I’d like something more reliable.

Making a little progress on the Mustang

Over the past few days, as I’ve gotten the garage cleaned up and organized a little, I’ve also done a few little odds & ends on the Mustang. Nothing major, but I did test the fuel pump and re-install it. I also completely disassembled the distributor, cleaned it up, and ordered parts to finish it. It will need a new lower bushing, points, condenser, primary lead, cap, and rotor. I’m also replacing the drive gear since I’ve replaced the cam.

While I wait for parts to arrive I’ve cleaned everything up, filed off a few casting marks, and so on. The breaker plates seem in really good shape, which is nice since the last Ford distributor I took apart was completely shot. When I’m done it should be as good as new… then I’ll ship it off for re-curve and tuning to match the engine and cam and make it way better than new, if everyone is to be believed.

Tomorrow I’m going to retrieve the exhaust manifolds form storage and get them ready to bolt back on. I’m debating whether to order an intake and carburetor or not. I probably will. Even if the body turns out to be a write-off due to rust, a complete and running, freshly rebuilt engine should be worth more than I have in it at this point. Or the car could be turned into a track toy, but I really doubt I’d take that route. Too much would need to be done to make it in any way competitive in any class.

Hoping to get it to the body shop soon to find out if I’ll be moving forward with the de-rusting or not. Fingers crossed.