Kyle Weiss":aivd8n45 said:
An old, random post I dug up by PB (I think) some time ago made me put Blackpoint on the list. For those not willing to wait 10 years to put some age on a tin, is it really any less a tobacco with only a year or two on it? How about fresh?
Just wondering. Like old books, I sure have a lot of tobacco that, next to the date, I've put notes on like "2 years" or "4 years" :lol: Gonna have tons of tobacco and nothing to smoke soon.
It's not just good fresh, it's GREAT fresh. My experience with tobaccos are as follows:
a.) 99% of the blends I enjoy aged, I enjoy fresh as well. A horrible tobacco will generally not transform into a stellar tobacco ten years down the line. However, take a blend like SG Full Virginia Flake. It is decent fresh, but just a little bit rough around the edges. I find that aging it for merely 2 years, takes the roughness out and it develops into a world class smoke, but it was damn good to begin with.
b.) Buying tobacco off pipestud.com or ebay that have already been aged is a great way to beat the impatience involved with aging by yourself, but my best experiences with tobaccos have come with the ones that I jarred up and aged when they were fresh. I can use Pipeworks&Wilke #10 as a prime example. When I first started smoking a pipe, this was one of the first English blends that I fell in love with. After smoking a good bit of the "fresh stuff", I decided to jar up a pound of it to age. Following Greg Pease's advice on an old alt.pipes FAQ on aging tobacco, I used small, 1/2 pint mason jars so that I could sample small amounts every six months or so and jot down notes. I am approaching the three year mark on the first jars I ever sealed up back in 2009 and let me say that this is the most fun I have ever had with smoking pipe tobacco. It has been such a great learning experience seeing first hand just how wonderful this stuff ages. I don't think any of the 6 month tasting cycles I have done with #10 during the last three years have yielded a result that compared precisely with the previous tasting. This stuff ages magically and once again, Greg mentioned in an old FAQ that orientals age more rapidly in a 12-24 month cycle than any other tobacco. With this "taste it every 6 month" experiment that I have been doing, I have been able to see first hand how true this statement is.
c.) Aging tobaccos have taught me a lot about how pipe tobacco not only "ages" from a biological standpoint, but also how well tobacco meld and integrate together during a year's time, something totally exclusive from the aging. Blackpoint is a great example. The Perique and Latakia used in Blackpoint are both quite present in a fresh tin or even one that is a couple years old. However, at the ten year mark that my current jar is approaching, it is difficult to discern the separate parts of the blend. They have all integrated themselves together into one cohesive unit and this is something that I have come to appreciate almost as much as the actual aging process.
Hope this is useful info to you and others. I have done a lot of experimenting with aging tobaccos during the last 3 years and of course I still buy pre-aged tins off the Internet, but IMO nothing is more worthwhile and just plain fun than doing your own experimentation with aging tobacco. It takes a little patience, but hell they say patience is virtue, right?
-Scott
