The short takeaway is this: I haven’t hit on the perfect blend in the whopping 3 or 4 days I’ve been playing around with this stuff. Shocker, right? I can, however, see the potential for finding recipes that give me what I want, and without the PG and whatever else the commercial manufacturers — which seem to be increasingly narrowing down to Scandinavian Tobacco Group and Laudisi — seem to insist go into every single tin, pouch, or bag of pipe tobacco.
I decided to try something non-English — no Latakia. I’ve become a huge fan of Escudo Navy Deluxe, which is a Virginia/Perique blend. I found a recipe that used 2/3 Cavendish, which is essentially just steamed tobacco leaves, and 1/3 Perique. Another variation uses the same components but 75/25. So, I mixed up some of the Cavendish I made back in late 2023 with a bit of the Perique from my recent order.
The initial bowl was not fantastic, but not terrible either. It’s a little more Perique have that I normally like, but not overpoweringly so. And I’ve never really been fond of my Cavendish. When I made it, I steamed it in jars and I’d put a little water mixed with a small amount of molasses and maybe a few drops of vanilla or something. I don’t really remember what I used, to be honest, but it’s really never lived up to my hopes and expectations. Like my “mostly VA” flake, it’s smokable, but I don’t smoke it much because I really just don’t like it much.
After trying a good half bowl of it, I decided to mix in some of my VA flake and press it for a while. I tossed in a little pressed VA, roughly the same amount as the Perique. Now I figure it’s roughly half Cavendish, and a quarter each of VA and Perique. Thing is, that VA also has some indeterminate small quantity of Samsun in there too… and it’s made out of some random selection of bright VA, Canadian, and some unknown called “Tennessee Red Leaf” by the seed supplier that most people theorize is a flue-cured Virginia. One guy who knows a lot about tobacco says it like like an Orinoco of some sort. Who knows. Point is, I’m hoping it turns out decent but not perfect as I’ll like never be able to exactly reproduce it.
Once it was all blended together, it was into the noodle press for a few days of increasing pressure. I cranked the handle down a bit more every couple of hours yesterday and last night, until it got to the point where it was obviously about as compressed as it’s going to get. I have the little plug of English that I took out of the press yesterday; in fact, I just crumbled it up so I can try smoking a bit later on. The plug has expanded slightly since I took it out of the press, and seems surprisingly dry — I may need to add more moisture in the future. I did give the VA/Per mix a few spritzes of Woodford Reserve bourbon before pressing it.
Anyway, we’ll see how that one works out.