Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying out a few more tobacco blends. My daily go-to blend has become Towers of Antioch, a relatively Latakia-forward (37.5%) English blend that becomes quite wonderful after a few days in a press. Wonderful enough that I no longer lament the passing of Sutliff’s Sobranie match mixture… this is easily as good, and I can make all I want at a lot lower cost. I’m trying one now with 1/16th less Latakia and 1/16th more Oriental in it, named Damascus Sun. Too soon to tell if this one will be a winner; I only pressed it for a couple of days, and it will need to age for a week or two at least before it matures enough to really evaluate. So far it’s not bad, a little milder than ToA.
I also planted some veggies and tobacco varieties in starter seed trays, and those are sprouting. The corn and cucumbers are leading the charge, with green onions and cherry tomatoes trying to catch up. The spinach is lagging, with only one cell out of six having sprouted so far. I have faith that some more will come up, even if I need to poke a few more seeds in. Of the half dozen varieties of tobacco I planted, five are starting to come up, so I’ll be thinning those out in a week or two. I’m looking forward to getting the veggie planters and new landscaping done so we can transplant once the weather improves some.
I’m trying some new varieties of “pipe weed” this year, including a Burley, some Perique, and a Maryland that’s usually used for cigars, but is also used on some pipe blends.
One of my go-to pipe tobacco blends is called Escudo Navy Deluxe. It’s a blend of Virginia and Perique, a specially fermented tobacco that originates in St. James Parish in Louisiana. Perique can be quite… pungent. If you ever sniff a jar of pipe tobacco and think, “horse barn” – not in a bad way, but you’ll know it if you encounter it – that’s Perique.
Escudo has a great reputation, and for good reason. Not only is it quite delicious if you like VA/Per blends, the little coin slices are cool. Escudo is made by tightly rolling or twisting the different tobaccos together into a rope with the darker variety in the middle. It’s then aged and sliced thinly before being packaged. The little coins are easy to rub out to loose tobacco, or some people just fold or roll and stuff them into their pipe.
As Escudo is a little pricey, I figure if I’m blending my own tobacco I may as well try to make something either close, or at least something I like as well. So, I was a little excited to find a blend on the FTT forum that is billed as an “Escudo match” or substitute. I mixed up some a few days ago, spritzed it very lightly with bourbon – because why not? – and pressed it for three days in my noodle press. I took it out early this afternoon and sliced off a bit to sample. I rubbed out the slice and got a near perfect collection of chunks and ribbons, which I let dry for a while.
As I smoke it now, I’m pretty happy with it. I did make a modification to the recipe; in place of the Res Virginia tobacco called out in the recipe I used my own mixed VA leaf from the 2023 crop. It’s a mix of bright, red, and darker leaves, and they aren’t really properly flue cured. They were kilned and aged for a year, but probably have lower sugar content than “real” flue cured red leaf. I’m sure the flavor is a little different.
One thing that surprises me is that I haven’t needed to relight this stuff yet. it’s burning perfectly, and the flavor is really good. As good as Escudo? Probably not. Good enough that I’ll mix and press another larger plug? Oh, yeah. And I remind myself that it will only get better with age. A year or two in a jar will make this stuff sublime.
In the process of growing and blending my own pipe tobacco, I’ve grown and tried some Turkish or Oriental tobacco called Samsun. Not being familiar with the various different strains of Turkish, I picked that one to grow based on the description on the seed vendor’s web site.
It’s OK, but not really perfect for what I’m trying to blend. Based on feedback and further reading, I ordered a small quantity of Izmir, another Turkish variety. Of course the old blends referred to Yenidje, but that doesn’t seem to be available from anywhere – except as seed. Basma or Izmir is supposed to be close. Anyway, the Izmir arrived today and I decided, as I do, to try a small amount straight to se how it tastes. So, I pulled an bit out of the bag and chopped it into ribbons for the pipe and lit it.
Back in the late 1970s I was in high school, and (gasp) actually smoked. I never did develop an appreciation for the Marlboros or Winstons that were the usual choice; I really liked Camels. During a visit to David’s Briar Shoppe at Westroads Mall, I discovered fancy imported cigarettes, and fell in love with the taste of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes. Sobranie Black Russians were even better, but quite a bit more expensive – nearly two and a half dollars a pack!! The Balkan Sobranies came in a really cool flip-open flat metal tin, which didn’t hurt their appeal. But I developed a real appreciation for fine tobacco. I sure wish I’d kept some of those Sobranie tins.
I lit that pipe full of Izmir Turkish today and my mind immediately flashed back to those days. The taste of Balkan Sobranies was right there, almost perfectly captured. I was walking through the Westroads parking lot, black leather jacket on, my girlfriend (now wife) on my arm…
I like the Izmir a lot more than Samsun. I also bought a small sample of their Samsun just to compare it to mine. The aroma is identical; I’m going to guess the taste is also. I just wanted to make sure that commercially produced Samsun wasn’t significantly different from my own.
I’ll be buying some Yenidje seed and planting that this year. I could smoke the Izmir on its own, but I think it will vastly improve my English blends with Virginia and Latakia. I’m sure the Yenidje will be as good or better.
I decided to experiment with some of my Virginia tobacco on Monday. I took some fairly coarsely shredded VA leaf, mixed it with some similarly shredded Perique, and just for fun, tossed in a piece of Light Fire Cured from the little sample that WLT sent with my order. I included that mainly because it was handy, and I wanted to see if I could taste it in the mix.
The VA was pretty dry, despite my having misted it with water a few times. Still very low case. Since I intended to press it, I misted it with a couple squirts of Woodford Reserve bourbon. I mixed it all up well and loaded it into the noodle press. I screwed the press down in stages over about an hour until I had it down petty tight.
Having heard good things about using heat during the pressing process, and not having tried it until now, I stuck the press in the oven and warmed it up to somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 degrees or so. I think I had it in there for an hour or so, then pulled it out and let it cool for a few hours.
The resulting plug is solid, tough, nearly black, and displays no tendency to expand or separate. It’s got a typical VA/Per aroma. After removing it from the press I let it sit in a little plastic container with a snap-on lid for probably 6 or 8 hours until I had an opportunity to try a little bit of it.
I sliced off a little chunk, then cut it up into smaller chunks. It doesn’t fall apart at all. I rubbed out the chunks enough that I thought I’d be able to get it lit, and loaded up a corncob. While I smoked that little bit, I sliced the rest of the plug into very thin slices. It slices very nicely; it’s moist and dense so you can really get it shaved thin. I cube-cut some of it and left the rest as slices.
This stuff is seriously pretty good. It’s smooth, no bite, no overpowering Perique. The nicotine level is what I would consider a notch past mild, meaning that by the time I’m down to the second half of the bowl I can feel it – but it’s not too much. The flavor is very nice, not overpowering at all but quite robust.
I’m naming this one “Dark Lady”.
Today (Tuesday) i finished up the last bit of the bowl from last night, and it was still smooth and flavorful. I didn’t detect any rough edges (so to speak) or any taste that I didn’t like, until I decided to see how it did when smoked fast. That resulted in a couple of puffs that were less enjoyable — still not bad, but you have to expect that Virginias are not going to take well to smoking them too hot. Once I slowed back down to a normal pace, the taste returned to normal. So far, so good.
I liked it enough, in fact, that after that bowl was finished I loaded it up again. I rubbed out one of the small flakes, then loaded up the rest of the bowl with my cube-cut chunks just to see how those worked. I think those are probably just too big to burn well; I’ll slice any further batches into flake. The cubes taste fine, but require more re-lighting than I’m happy with. It’s distracting and not terribly enjoyable to spend a lot of time re-lighting your pipe. OK, so lesson learned, it’s a flake, not a good candidate for a coarse cube cut. That’s fine; cube cut tends to easily send burning embers everywhere as lot easier than a regular shred packed bowl anyway, and I don’t own a smoking jacket – yet.
This bend may just be a winner, I think. I’m going to take some up to Ted’s and see if the owner wants to try a bit; he’s a VA/Per lover. Oh, and I have not so far detected the fire cured leaf. I know it’s there, but there’s so little of it I think it just isn’t really detectable. I need to try a bit of that on its own to see what it’s like.
Started boiling 5 gallons of maple sap from our back yard trees to make syrup;
Blended and pressed my own tobacco mixture from whole leaf, mostly leaf that I grew myself (it’s a VA/Per bend);
Used boiling water to bend a piece of wood into a curve to finish restoring an old piece of furniture.
I have no idea why my darling wife pointed out the 10# pork belly at Costco and asked if I wanted to start making my own bacon too. She should know by now that if I wanted to make my own bacon, I’d raise a pig…
After three days under pressure, I took the 36 g plug of English blend out of the noodle press. It looks pretty good and smells even better – at least it does to me; Darling Wife thinks it stinks. There is a pretty pungent aroma of campfire bordering on “ashes of last night’s campfire”, and I can understand how that might offend some people. I love it.
After letting it rest in a jar for a day or so I broke up the plug and rubbed it out, then tried a bowl. The pressing made a pretty substantial difference. The blend is now fairly smooth, with the rough/harsh edges polished off. It’s not a perfect match for my favorite Sutliff blend, but I didn’t honestly expect that. It is, however, nice enough that I’ll probably finish the entire plug while I decide what changes to try. I think it will improve even more was it ages, but probably won’t last long enough to show its true potential.
What I’m missing is some of the complexity of the BSOMM/White Knight blend. When smoking that I’ll get hints of anise and a few other notes that are so far not present in my own attempt. It’s not a huge deal – even this little test blend is easily as good as some of the commercial English or Balkan blends I’ve tried. I’ll try a new batch with Izmir and see how that stacks up.
Having gone through all of the leaf I bought from WLT, I decided maybe I should do the same with my own. I have a large tub of flue-cured leaf, and a bag of very, very dry Samsun. Actually I took about half of that, spritzed it with water, and put it in a gallon Ziplock bag. Then I spritzed it a couple more times over a couple of days to bring the leaf into case. It’s pretty ratty, but still OK and it’s been sitting for a year and a half since it was harvested.
The VA leaf is kind of a mystery box. I had a dozen or so “Bright Virginia” plants, and four others that were some combination of “Tennessee Red Leaf” and “Ontario Bold”. Thise were the names on the web site where I bought them (seedman.com), but at least one of them is unknown to anyone with some speculation about what it actually is. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep track of what seedling ended up where. I say unfortunately, because those four plants were magnificently productive. To make matters worse, I didn’t keep the leaves separated when I harvested. Virginia is Virginia, right? Ah, we live and learn.
Anyway, as I go through the tub there are some leaves that are a light tan, some that area deep reddish mahogany brown, and some that are in between. I pilled one of each and shredded them, and tried them both. They’re definitely different. What I’ll call the “bright leaf” is mild, no bite, a little woody. The red leaf is more grassy, a little bolder flavor (maybe this is Ontario Bold?), and has some definite spice in the nose. They’re very different.
Later on I pulled some of the Samsun out of the bag and shredded it as well, and just tried some of it. It’s got a flavor that I liken to a dusty camel trail, very little spice in the nose. I got an occasional hint of burning fall leaves. It’s got a slightly astringent property to it as well. Quite a bit different than the Virginias, of course. I was thinking I could probably smoke it on its own regularly, but I don’t know. I mean, I could — it isn’t bad, but I do think it would be better blended.
I’m going to oder a sample of Izmir and compare it side by side with the Samsun. I’d like something with a hint more floral or anise to it in the English mix, and the guys on the FTT forum tell me that’s a Basma/Izmir/Yenidje characteristic. I can buy seeds for any of those, and Basma and Izmir are readily available as whole leaf.
Wednesday morning I pulled the plug of VA/Per mix from the press, rubbed it out, fluffed it u, gave it a couple spritzes of bourbon, and put it back into the press for a few more hours. Yesterday evening I dried some out and gave it a try.
It’s still a pretty strong mix. Not necessarily the nicotine content, though that is higher than the English mix. The tobacco taste is quite forward. The Perique component is now about where I’d want it, I think. Smoking it in a corncob, I got an occasional little hint of cigar flavor, or something a little sweeter. It seemed to improve quite a bit about halfway through the bowl. This one is pretty interesting. I can’t see it becoming a favorite every day smoke, but for those times when I want something very straightforward and fairly strong, this would fit the bill. I doubt I’ll make more of it, but I’ll definitely continue down the VA/Per path to see if I can make something really good. At least now I know that probably 25% Perique is about as high as I’d want to go. I think I’ll take some of it up to Ted’s Tobacco and see if Jay, the owner, wants to give his opinion on it. He’s got a lot of experience and is a VA/Per fan with a very high nicotine tolerance ( the guy smokes a lot of cigars and pipe tobacco). I’m just interested to know what he thinks. Honestly, I just wish I hadn’t put anything in with the Cavendish leaf when I steamed it. I think it would be better if it had nothing, instead of the molasses and vanilla and whatever else I used. Live and learn, right?
On the flip side, I also finished off the bowl of English blend I’d started. The more I smoke that, the better I like it. I’ll probably make some tweaks here and there, but at this point I’m really not sure what they will be. I’ve got about 30 to 35 grams left, which is quite a bit for an experimental exercise — enough for a dozen to maybe as much as a dozen and a half pipes full. By then I hope to have figured out what adjustments I want to make. For sure the next batch will be made with a more floral Oriental, like Izmir or Basma in place of the Samsun.
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.
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…
