As can sometimes happen, this past Monday I completed a third quite disappointing bowl from a newer pipe, filled with a more complex and challenging Virginia-and-spice blend that I’ve been trying out, though a blend with which I’ve otherwise had some excellent experiences. I’ve come to a point in my smoking hobby where I’m seeking out new and interesting tastes, but such searches are occasionally fraught with hard lessons in technique: in matching a tobacco to a pipe, in pipe maintenance, in the complexities of the simple act of smoking itself. Such lessons make the neophyte smoker work, in short, but confer commensurate benefits, given time.
Still, sometimes a break is appropriate: a caesura for purposes of reflection, for processing those lessons. After taking a day off from pipes to let my palate and my ego recover, I loaded up my standby Wiley pipe with Gatlinburlier Chimney Smoke, a toasted Burley Cavendish blend that I suspect is cased (flavored) with something akin to dark maple syrup. I have a pouch of it next to me as I write, and it’s redolent with strong vanilla and dark chocolate notes, with subtler hints of marzipan, black cherry and other berries.
For all this, Chimney Smoke is not a terribly sophisticated blend: a basic “aromatic,” i.e., flavored tobacco, that most tobacconists carry in some form; black Cavendish is a common, popular favorite. The Gatlinburlier advertises that Chimney Smoke is “a spice-fire Black Cavendish tobacco. Dryer than most toasted Cavendish,” and that dryness (and possibly whatever was spicing the fire) may explain part of its draw for me: I’ve tried several similar blends (The Briary’s Black Gold, for example), but the Gatlinburlier’s blend tastes better, has a friendlier room note, and smokes cooler.
In any event, I loaded up with Chimney Smoke, lit, and it was like the Wiley had been reunited with an old friend: easy, delicious smoke, blood-warm briar in my fingers, a contented sigh from Amy nearby. The tobacco burned gently and politely, stayed lit well, puffed easily, tasted delightful. Chimney Smoke was the tobacco I purchased along with my first pipe, recommended by Amy as the blend her own father had smoked, back in the years he partook. So its smoke has a scent laden with memories and associations already, and a room note that makes people sit up, take notice and smile. It pairs excellently with both Appleton rum and Jack Daniels.
An evening with Chimney Smoke was exactly what I needed, especially given that this week’s been fuller than usual with life’s slings and arrows: comforting, familiar and luxurious. Like most cased aromatic blends, the bowl started with an explosion of room-note aroma, mellowed to more complicated and subtle flavors by the middle of the bowl, and made its exit with the woodsy, unassuming Burley base tobacco taking the bows.
The education of a palate, like the internalizing of the finer points of a skill like smoking, can be rocky territory to explore; when traversing such rocky terrain it can be quite useful to stop, reflect and simply rest amid the enriching well-known. Such familiar and “conquered” territory suffers not at all in the comparison to newer, more complex and challenging fare: on the contrary, there is no pleasure quite like that of coming home again.
-Rich
