ftrplt":5df67mzv said:
Sir Greg of Pease...I had hopes you might jump in on this!! Thank you!! And..I await your further comments. My gut feeling (and that's all it is, just an educated guess) is that it is practically impossible to "carbon copy" an old blend. I grew up "priming" tobacco in North Carolina (40 damn acres of it!!). Crops changed from year to year; one year's leaves were never exactly like another's. The BS 759 I last smoked several years ago was not the same as what I smoked in the 60's; still pretty dern good, but not the same!!
ipe: FTRPLT
You bring up a couple of very interesting points. That tobacco changes from year to year is something we cannot ignore. Through careful selection and blending, it's possible to deliver a fairly consistent product, but some amount of change is inevitable.
But, what irks me is when a blend is changed dramatically without regard for the tradition of the blend. The Sobranie blends are an excellent example. When Gallaher's began manufacturing them, they were fairly true to the originals, but, over time, they were changed. A lot. In the white label blend, the Latakia content was systematically reduced from about 50% to 35% - no doubt a cost-cutting measure. I recall buying a tin in the late 1980s, and wondering what the heck had happened to the stuff. I had not bought any in a few years, and this new blend was very different. Yes, it was still good, but it was NOT the same, and the differences were far more than could be explained by agriculture.
Most who smoked it regularly did not notice the differences, because the changes were made gradually over time, allowing customers to become acclimated to the "new" formula. My several year lapse resulted in my noticing this as an abrupt change. This precipitated a "research" project of finding as many "vintages" of the stuff as I could (and, at the time, aged tobaccos were not trading like platinum, and could be found fairly easily), and investigated them. Years later, I was able to read internal memos (at one time, publicly available) that documented the focus groups, the ingredient changes, and so on. This was clearly not just some idle phantasm of a possibly faulty memory. They'd really mucked things up...
Latakia is expensive, so they wanted to leave a few more quid on the bottom line. Personally, I'd have rather paid a little more in order to have what I wanted; even expensive tobacco is a cheap luxury when you think of cost per hour of pleasure, and in the 1980s, it was even more so!
All that to say that the 759 you smoked in the 1960s was really quite different from that which you smoked a few short years ago.
Cheers,
Greg