In 1865 the longstanding pipe tobacco company of Kendal, UK, split into two, Gawith and Hoggarth, and Samuel Gawith. These companies developed their own style and specialties over the decades. G&H, as it’s often called, is well known for very strong tobaccos, notably their ropes. Samuel Gawith is better known for well balanced English blends…
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Armageddon and Deep Impact. The Adams Family and The Munsters. Gobots and Transformers. Cheeze Whiz and Easy Cheese. Sutliff English Oriental and Peter Stokkebye English Oriental Supreme. There are dozens of times competing companies have given us seemingly identical products. And we the consuming public must choose one or the other. Or you know, watch…
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With a less than inspiring name like ‘J4’ you can safely assume that Sutliff had little intention of selling this directly to the public when they added it to their catalogue. Instead, J4, like much of Sutliff bulk tobacco, was marketed as a blending tobacco. Or possibly something a Brick and Mortar retailer would repackage…
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If you read a spirits blog you are unlikely to find a review of Jack Daniels. If you read over beer reviews you will find sparse opinions on likes of Budweiser and Coors Light. That is because these are known quantities, experienced by most anyone who has dabbled in whiskey or beer. Captain Black, a…
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Orange Virginia is the forgotten middle child of the Virginia pipe tobacco landscape. I mean that quite literally. For a flue-cured Virginia, that is, dried by indirect heat over a handful of days, there will be a gradation of color from the base to the top, which is due to the variation of chemical compounds…
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In the last decade HP Lovecraft has had a revival. Once relegated to the black fingernail polish set, now even your mom and maybe your baby is passingly familiar with Cthulhu and the concept of the Eldritch horror. And maybe why the person behind the expansive literary exploration of dread is not to be celebrated….
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We are in the midst of a surge of craft spirits. There’s a pretty clear pattern established, with most new distilleries starting with vodka, moving to gin, then maybe throwing some raw ethanol into an oak barrel, praying something drinkable comes out the other side a few years later. Assuming the distiller is successful, this…
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There two things you can’t evade, death, taxes, and worn out adages. Three things then. But at least with tobacco you can try to avoid them. One common ploy in the tobacco business is to take cigarette tobacco, scratch out cigarette, slap pipe on there, and avoid paying the revenue man his share. If you find yourself…
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Tinkering with your pipe tobacco is something that occurs naturally for pipe smokers. You begin with thinking that two of your tobaccos might taste better together than apart. You build or buy a press to turn your ribbon into cake. Maybe you start burping your jars of Virginia when you hear it speeds up the…
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Longtime readers know that this time of year, like many pipe smokers, I’ll dig through my cellar to find the smokiest blend I haven’t yet reviewed, smoke it all winter, and drop a review once the snow starts melting. Ashton Artisan’s blend is a highly regarded heavy Latakia English blend. It gets spoken in the…
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