Tobacconists in South Africa

Posted on June 8, 2008
Filed Under Help Wanted | 4 Comments

Charles would like to know if there are any good tobacconists, particularly ones who do their own blending, in South Africa. If anyone can help him out, please do so.

It seems that we have hit upon a good additional use for the blog. Keep sending in your questions and I’ll keep posting them up for discussion.

Transitioning to Uncased Blends

Posted on June 2, 2008
Filed Under Help Wanted | 13 Comments

It seems our “Help Wanted” section is becoming quite popular. Roswell writes in to ask about moving from aromatics to non-cased blends. What advice do you have for him?

Been smoking aromatic blends for approx 3 years, with increasing frequency (one or two times per day for 4-5 days per week over the past 6-8 months). Mostly C&D’s Autumn Evening and McClelland’s Townsman Cavendish Blue. I want to expand my horizons into non-cased blends and have just tried Dunhill’s Early Morning Pipe. OK, but interested in what others you’d recommend as potential transitioning blends for me…

In my opinion, burley based blends make excellent transition smokes. Try something like Barbary Coast. While being technically a cased blend (Brandy), it will open your eyes to a wider range of tobacco flavors before you go jumping headlong into the rest.

Dunhill Light Flake

Posted on May 27, 2008
Filed Under Help Wanted | 15 Comments

Hmm, it seems to be a day for missing old blends. Nigel writes:

I find to my dismay that this tobacco (formerly known as DUNHILL LIGHT FLAKE) has been discontinued. Can you recommend/suggest a similar tobacco that I can try?

What can you recommend to him?

Hickory No More

Posted on May 27, 2008
Filed Under Help Wanted | 2 Comments

Art writes in to ask:

JR Cigar told me that Hickory pipe tobacco is no longer proouced. Do you know whether this is accurate? I enjoy smoking it and would like to purchase it though other channels if it is still available.

Anyone know where a stash of Hickory might be for Art?

Smoking the Dregs of the Tin

Posted on May 15, 2008
Filed Under Help Wanted | 9 Comments

Jake writes in to ask:

Can anyone answer specifically why the fine tobacco at the bottom of a container does not taste as good as the original, normal size stuff?

The finer stuff left over after a few ounces of my favorite shag tastes grassy and just not very good. I am sure most smokers know what I am talking about.

Is this due to a different kind of burning because the tobacco is fine and has more surface area and less density, or is it due to the parts of the leaf that tend to pulverize and end up at the bottom of the pouch?

What do you say fellows?

Avoiding Burning Out A Blowfish

Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Help Wanted | 12 Comments

Jonathan writes in to ask:

I was hoping for some advice. I have a very high grade pipe from a very well known carver. It is a blowfish shape and one of the walls was cut very very thin. The carver has offered to replace the pipe at no additional cost to me but I am hoping to avoid this since I am in love with this pipe already. My question to you is what would you advise I smoke that will burn well to avoid many relights and also has a tendancy to smoke cool? I am not a huge VaPer guy but am open to almost anything besides a straight Vir.

What help can we offer him?

Brief Update

Posted on April 26, 2008
Filed Under Site News | 2 Comments

John Lennon said “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”, and he was oh so very right. Life has happened here folks, and all my plans have come to a screeching halt for a little bit.

As some of you know, I am living in south Georgia at the moment in order to help out my extended family with some projects. Two weeks ago, one of those projects became my number one priority, and since then I have been working ten hour days to rewire a 100+ year old house.

In addition to the rewiring work, it is time for our garden to go in, and with around a dozen people eating off of it, it is quite sizable, so all of the time I am not wiring is going into that project.

Fear not however. Tobacco Reviews is still up and running, and though I am slow and late with the requests, they are getting done. As soon as I have some breathing room again I will get back to the process of moving the site to the new code base, a process which was about 85% done when I had to stop.

Thanks for reading here, keeping the site going, and offering your encouragement over the years. You make it all worthwhile.

Pipe & Tobacco Trades, Swaps and Auctions

Posted on April 4, 2008
Filed Under Help Wanted | 13 Comments

I have been a bit out of the loop for a while and I was wondering, what are the venues people use these days to trade or sell estate pipes and aged tins? Is it mostly through dealers and eBay, or is there somewhere I don’t know about?

How do you swap, buy and sell your estates and aged tins?

Comments Are Now Threaded

Posted on April 4, 2008
Filed Under Site News | Leave a Comment

Just a quick note to let everyone know that every comment on every article now has a “reply to this comment” link. If you click that link, the comment you leave will be nicely nested under the comment you are replying to. That should help us keep our discussions straight!

More On Tagging Blends

Posted on April 3, 2008
Filed Under Technical | 10 Comments

My previous post on better searching and discovery of blends has generated a good discussion on the possibility of tagging. I thought it deserved its own thread here, so I am moving the discussion of tagging over to this post so we can keep it on its own.

Now, to respond to the comments so far. As a bit of background, this is an aspect of Information Science that I have a keen interest in, so I think a small primer is in order:

What we are talking about here is metadata: data about our data. There are two possibilities for organizing or generating metadata; Controlled Taxonomies (or Vocabularies) and what are now called “folksonomies”, previously known as free-tagging.

Controlled Taxonomies are, without a doubt, the most accurate and useful types of classification schemes for metadata. A different way to look at them is that Controlled Taxonomies are Prescriptive Vocabularies and folksonomies are Emergent Vocabularies. Each have their place in indexing information, and the discussion at hand is which is more relevant to our needs here at Tobacco Reviews.

I love well-designed metadata and Controlled Taxonomies. I labored in love over the ones that are already here on the site, and the even-better ones on the new version of the site, but I do not believe that they are always appropriate. If I thought that it was even remotely possible to create such a vocabulary for “Blend Styles”, I would be the first to jump in and start work on it. I do not, however, think it possible.

There are too many permutations of styles of Blends extent right now for one person (me) to get a handle on them without stopping all other work completely for a couple of years. There is a serious lack of information and definition about Blends that would have to be overcome before any serious attempt to classify them could be made (what constitutes a “casing” or “topping” or “flavoring”, do we have reliable information on constituent tobaccos in a blend, etc…).

Without this sort of information, or at least good approximations, we cannot create a Controlled Taxonomy. We could pretend to by sanctioning a certain set of terms to be used for tagging Blends, but that wouldn’t really help at all - it would just lend us an air of authority without anything backing it up. If that is to be the case, I would prefer a simple free-tagging system, perhaps with some sort of “garbage collection” system that automatically dropped old unused terms after a while, so that the useful (gaged by actual use) would rise to the top and the rest would sink out of sight.

However, if there is the will amongst users to work on developing a serious Taxonomy of tobacco blends for the site; one that we can show to the world and defend the reasoning behind, I am all for it! I will provide as much help and support as I can for such a project and will be an enthusiastic participant. I will also, when such a project produced results, apply them to Tobacco Reviews and rigorously enforce its usage for all new Blends added to the site.

How we would go about creating such a thing is a matter for much discussion. First, let’s see if anyone is interested in the project and then maybe figure out how to do it. Any takers?

p.s. — I use “we” above not in the royal sense to refer to myself, but to mean us, all the people using Tobacco Reviews and deciding its future direction.

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