Homegrown pipe tobacco recipes

[Knucklehead]

Please post your favorite pipe blends made from your homegrown tobacco. Be warned - Copyright laws are ignored in Alabama.

Thank you.

 

[DonH]

I am really happy with the blends I've made. I like them better than store-bought. And, one of the best blends I made was my first:

Well, I went and did it today. Went out and bought a pipe. I've been fascinated with everyone's descriptions of making flake and Cavendish and whatnot, so I started watching pipe videos on YouTube. So I went to the tobacco shop and got a $5 corn cob pipe just to try it. I was looking around at what pipe tobacco they had and decided to buy some so I would know what it supposed to be like. I don't like aromatics, so I was looking at the English blends. They had tins of Davidoff, so I bought one of Davidoff Flake Medallions because I saw a guy smoke some on YouTube and rave about it. It is a blend of Virginia, Perique, and Cavendish, with the Cavendish as a bulls-eye in the middle of the medallion. Sounded interesting.

When I got home, I stuffed the cob with my shredded cigarette mix, just to test it. Wasn't very good. Was wondering if I would even like pipe smoking. So then I tried the Davidoff Flake. Wow, that was nice!

So I started trying to make a blend with the whole leaf I have, but this time using pipe tobacco techniques, not cigarette shred. I pulled out five Flue Cured Virginia leaves, four Burley, one very large Fire Cured leaf, a few small Dark Air Cured 3rd Priming leaves, a Yellow Twist Bud leaf or two, and a bunch of small Oriental ones. I removed the mid ribs and sprayed them with a honey-water solution and put them in a ziploc. I gotta say, it really smells like pipe tobacco in that bag. Tomorrow I will either press them or roll them tightly and slice medallions, depending on whether I can find the right size boards to use with my C clamp. I am thinking of spraying it with Scotch whiskey as a topping when done.

I sprayed a pipe tobacco blend of whole leaves, Virginia FC, Burley, Dark Air Cured, Oriental, and Fire Cured with a 1 to 1 mix of 2 oz honey and 2 oz water until they were very wet. I let them sit in a ziploc for a couple hours, then flattened them one by one and laid them in a pile with the largest Flue Cured on the bottom. Then I rolled it up as tightly as I could like you would roll the binder for a cigar (haven't done that yet). Then I took another Flue Cured leaf and used it like a cigar wrapper and rolled it up. The honey solution made everything stick together nicely. Then I kept rolling it on a cutting board over and over to get it as tight as possible. I let the cigar, which held 3.5 oz of tobacco and looked like a large dinner candle, sit overnight.

The next morning I sliced it into medallions. I put the medallions in a jar with the lid off to dry a bit, then I plan to rub them out, spray them with whiskey and dry to medium case. I tried one medallion's worth in a pipe and it had a bit of a bite. I think I need to make some Black Cavendish to blend and make it smoother. Flavor's good, though.

I think it had much more than a bit of bite. Wasn't very smokable, really. Part of it was because it hadn't dried properly. I read that if the tobacco is too moist it can bite. Once it dried it was better, but still not good enough. I am really amazed at how smooth the expensive store-bought stuff is. And I inhale (not every puff, but four or five times a session) and the store bought stuff is the smoothest smoke I have ever inhaled. You really get the best flavor inhaling. I don't know why most pipe smokers don't inhale.

I bought two more varieties this weekend, Davidoff Royalty, which is a nice English style blend and Mac Baren's Vintage Syrian. I wanted to taste what Latakia and other Orientals are supposed to taste like in pipe tobacco. Very nice.

But what to do with mine? I decided that since mine had untoasted Burley in it I would toast it. I sprayed it with water with Licorice extract and Vanilla extract. The toasting worked, it actually tastes OK now, much smoother. I overdid the Vanilla, though. I will have to cut it maybe with the Cavendish I'm making and more uncased Virginia and see if the vanilla gets toned down. I also ordered some Perique online and plan to pick up some bulk Latakia at my tobacco shop and blend that in two different batches.

I then bought two ounces of Latakia. The Latakia was the perfect thing to balance the vanilla. The piney spiciness covers up the too-sweet vanilla/honey combo perfectly. And the Burley, Dark Air, and Fire Cured gives it a good bass range.

I also made some Cavendish out of Maryland leaves. It came out dark brown, almost but not quite black. I lost patience after about 16 hours. I mixed that in with the blend-- perfect!

So to summarize that blend, it has Virginia Flue Cured, TN 90 Burley, Dark Air Cured, Fire Cured (getting just the right amount of Fire Cured is the trick, one or two big leaves at the most should do it), maybe some YTB, Cavendish, Oriental/Turkish, and Latakia. I like to put in some Perique, too. Now that I have a makeshift press, I prefer to press into plugs, but rolling them into big, tight cigars to create medallions is nice, too.

My other favorite blend was a slightly aromatic English or Baltic Blend. Start with equal parts Virginia (I used Flue Cured but if I had Virginia Red I'd use that) and Turkish. Add in a lot of Latakia. Remove the mid ribs and spray the strips with a honey-water solution with a teaspoon or so vanilla extract and some licorice extract. Toast in the oven at 250F degrees until dry, flipping the strips over once in the middle. Take it out of the oven and spray again with the solution, but this time add a shot or two of Scotch whiskey, put in a ziploc until the moisture is absorbed by the dry leaves. The most important thing I did to get a smooth smoke was to toast the leaves. Then layer the leaves on top of each other (I sprinkle Latakia and Perique in because I don't have any whole leaf for those varieties). Then I take the pile of leaves, compress them as much as I can, cut them into rectangles, stack the rectangles on top of each other, put it in a ziploc freezer bag (left open) and pressed them overnight between two boards with a C clamp with as much pressure as I can get. The plug will turn black from the juices coming out. If the plugs are still too wet to store you can dry them in an oven at 140F degrees.

 

[Jitterbugdude]

I think I might be the rare pipe smoker. I do not like blends. I smoke only pure varietal strains. For instance, when I smoke BBS-Maden, I want to taste BSS-Maden and nothing else. Same goes for my other pipe varieties.

 

[SmokesAhoy]

Naw I keep all my varieties separate too, I do blend them occasionally by taking a pinch of each when I want to some to mix. Normally it's the stuff I grew this year, I derib them crispy dry, then smash the leaves until they are all small and put them in a tin with some vodka to hydrate. I've been thinking of trying some hydrated with bourbon lately tho, gotta get around to it is all. Powdered burley and bright leaf sometimes gets mixed that's nice too.

 

[Seanz]

I was making flakes of va havanna and burley with some aztec in them but now i am being a heathen and just grabbing leaf crushing and smoking

 

[DonH]

I think I might be the rare pipe smoker. I do not like blends. I smoke only pure varietal strains. For instance, when I smoke BBS-Maden, I want to taste BSS-Maden and nothing else. Same goes for my other pipe varieties.

Do you inhale? If not then pure unprocessed strains would taste fine. But inhaling a pure, untoasted Burley would be a little rough.

I inhale.

 

[SmokesAhoy]

+1... but we've all tried lol

 

[Seanz]

Every third or so puff goes in the rest just mingle in my mouth and nasal area.

 

[Knucklehead]

I take a few puffs to keep the pipe stoked and then inhale also. I didn't realize so many were smoking single varieties. I thought you mostly used blends like cigarette blends just different leaf. I need to crumble some leaves and give all my varieties a good taste then.

 

[DonH]

Every third or so puff goes in the rest just mingle in my mouth and nasal area.

Yeah, I don't inhale every puff either. I take several small puffs to stoke the thing then inhale a big one. Do that maybe four or five times and that's a session.

 

[Knucklehead]

I think I might be the rare pipe smoker. I do not like blends. I smoke only pure varietal strains. For instance, when I smoke BBS-Maden, I want to taste BSS-Maden and nothing else. Same goes for my other pipe varieties.

So what are your favorite pipe varieties?

 

[Boboro]

When yall start talkin cegars an inhellin it makes me think of Bill. When I here cegar I think Monica.I dont think I could smoke I cegar with out bustin out laufin.

 

[Jitterbugdude]

So what are your favorite pipe varieties?

For the record, I'm just like Bill Clinton... I do not inhale!

Some of my favorite varieties for pipes are
BSS-Maden
Copan
Monte Calme Brun
White Flower
Big Gem
Silver River- occasionally
Tasova
Mopan Mayan- I've only tried this once but will be growing it this year.

 

[Knucklehead]

Bloody hell!! If you blokes don't quit adding to my bloody grow list I'm going to get really brassed off. Brassed off I say!!!

 

[Irishhorsemaster]

I used to have a quite a few recipes and I have kept them in another computer which is no longer working now. I did take out the hard drive and hope to download the data to another computer when I can. I may be be able to pass on some of the recepies then. Chocolate powder, cocoa, sugar (brown, molasses, etc.) seem to be in a lot of these blends. The big European companies put the ingredients they use in their pipe tobacco so going to their websites can be a tresure trove of information.

 

[johnlee1933]

I used to have a quite a few recipes and I have kept them in another computer which is no longer working now. I did take out the hard drive and hope to download the data to another computer when I can. I may be be able to pass on some of the recepies then. Chocolate powder, cocoa, sugar (brown, molasses, etc.) seem to be in a lot of these blends. The big European companies put the ingredients they use in their pipe tobacco so going to their websites can be a tresure trove of information.

I just had the same problem. for $25 I got a "hard drive caddy" that accepts the hard drive and plugs into a USB port on the new computer. Voila ! Instant data retrieval. Might work for you. -- John

 

[Irishhorsemaster]

I just had the same problem. for $25 I got a "hard drive caddy" that accepts the hard drive and plugs into a USB port on the new computer. Voila ! Instant data retrieval. Might work for you. -- John

Thank you John. I will check up on these as it sounds just like what I need.

 

[Knucklehead]

Don's Dominican Ligero - straight up in the pipe. I know its not homegrown but this was great by itself in a pipe. I tore off a hunk and balled it up like a piece of paper and stuck it in the bowl and tamped. I used my Dr. Grabow stuff it and puff it pipe that I use for sampling. It was really an awesome smoke out of the pipe. Had a nice little cigar flavor but not overpowering and I inhaled about every 3-5 puffs. It was very smooth with no throat bite or harshness. I think this would be good in a pipe blend with some Virginia. I may play with this some.

 

[MaManus]

I dont inhale every puff but when I do...I french inhale

 

[Knucklehead]

ew grody