Pirates of the Pipe Tobacco

(Note to my blog staff: “For the next post on The Pipe Bit, I want a picture of my humble self decked out as a pirate. I can bring the peg leg and eye patch from home, but I need a cutlass and a parrot. The parrot can be the stuffed kind, if necessary.

What I’m gonna do is tie in blend cuts like rope and coin with pirates. Get it? Like Jack Sparrow and shit like that? No? Well it’s because, you know, pirates use like, rope, and they have treasure with gold coins--Ooh! I’ll need some gold coins too, real gold, for the picture. I’m sure you can take these from the store’s register. And I also want like an audio file of me growling “Aaarrgh, matey,” and a video clip of me waving the cutlass! So that’s all pretty cool, right?”

Chris--sorry, not in the budget.  Sorry--Your Blog Staff)
--


Oh, the bitter injustices we bloggers suffer. Anyway, in a continuing attempt at clarity:

Most pipe tobacco blends come neatly packaged and all ready to smoke, just open the pouch or tin and fill your briar. Some blends, though, require a touch of effort before you can smoke them.

A very old-school type of blend is rope cut. This does indeed look, and feel, like a thick, corded rope. The tobacco is twisted and bound into this shape; and since fine cuts of tobacco would not hold the shape, rope cut blends consist of uncut tobacco leaves--a true rarity in pipe tobacco blends. Sometimes called navy Gawith makes rope cut blends, like their Black XX.

Two other styles of pipe tobacco blends require not cutting, but “rubbing out” (a pause for jokes)…Okay, this term means the smoker takes the tobacco and “rubs” it “out,” between the hands, making a villain’s “heh-heh-heh” gesture, breaking the blend into smaller pieces. Once a blend is rubbed out, the pipe can be filled. Most commonly, this type of pipe mixture is called flake. A flake blend--not the blend component, see the “Basics” post below--is pressed into a “cake,” a small, thin tablet of tobacco. This is then rubbed out. Coin cut, also called birdseye, blend styles are pressed too, but cut into discs. Both flake and coin styles extract the oils in tobacco leaves by pressing; but once rubbed out, can dry quickly. Peter Stokkebye makes a coin cut blend, called Curly Cut, and Sam Gawith offers the legendary Full Virginia Flake. Also, Cornell and Diehl makes a brick-style flake called Pirate Kake (sigh).

These cuts provide a change of pace for the pipe smoker, and are a reminder of the long history and evolution of pipe tobacco blends--for pirates, and everyone else.

Twitter:  @thepipebit