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What have I made???

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squeezyjohn

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As an attempt to get a solution to my hanging woes - I processed lots of this year's crop by making carottes of tobacco in the traditional way - each carotte I made was a single variety of tobacco. The process was to take out the mid-ribs, loosely roll many colour cured leaves together in canvas and then compress this down very tightly using a thin rope coiled around the canvas and pulled as tight as possible.

I've just unwrapped the ones I made in October to have a check. The tobacco has totally transformed in texture and aroma. For the black stalk mammoth which was a nice medium brown and had a sweet grassy aroma (although as a tobacco chewer myself it was very bitter) - the centre of the carotte has now become a shiny black surface with the texture of beef-jerky and the aroma smells more like malt or molasses than tobacco to me. In comparison - the bit at the end which didn't get compressed is still light brown and has a grassy aroma.

What have I made??? It tastes quite nice to chew, but is a little sour and still a bit bitter.
 

leverhead

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You could have allot of things happening. The center would be the the part that was the best insulated from the outside world. The last part to loose or gain moisture, with no self heating, the most stable in temperature. I would suspect that some self heating was involved, so it was probably the warmest part. In general, it sounds like a good place for an experiment to start.
 

squeezyjohn

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The centre of the thing smokes very nicely in a pipe when a coin is cut off from the cylinder and rubbed out. It has a much more "ripe" full smoke flavour than the end bit I tried which had not been subjected to the pressure - the uncompressed tobacco tasted much more like a cigarette tobacco.

I can't believe that this method is any different to a pressed block of tobacco made using more standard equipment. Do you get that kind of transformation in flavour from grassy to ripe, nutty and molassesy in only 2 months if you press regular just colour cured tobacco in a plug?
 

squeezyjohn

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Origins of the word perique?

A bit of information I have come across while trying to find out what has occurred ...

The reason the the carotte form of tobacco is sometimes referred to as a Périque of tobacco is because that is the shape in which perique used to be prepared for export after it had gone through the fermentation process.

The reason for the name perique existing is because these hard carrot or sausage shaped rolls of tobacco have a remarkably phallic shape ... and in the New Orleans french accent the work "prick" becomes "perique" - hence the word for the fermented tobacco made in St James' parish.

I don't know if that is true ... but I really hope it is!!!
 

FmGrowit

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Keep in mind, the carottes would have been stacked and bundled while making the voyage back across the ocean. Additional fermentation would have occurred within these bundles. Also, being on the ocean for 2 - 3 months would have kept the tobacco in near perfect order. So a single carotte would need to be kept in similar conditions to produce the same result

It wouldn't surprise me if the bundles of carottes would have been turned several times throughout the journey back to Europe.
 

squeezyjohn

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I'm certainly not complaining about what this tobacco has become - I have had enough tobacco to detect flavours I know to be used in certain pipe blends and I think in nasal snuff blends too - but I'm just very surprised how quickly it has taken on this ripe fermented flavour given that the video I took the process from suggested that the sailors would have made theirs from this years colour cured tobacco leaf left it about 6 months at least. So I am assuming it is a convenient way of force ageing tobacco for smoking.

My process was to make the carottes as tight as I could with the rope and hang them up by a window at room temperature.

Now they have been taken from their rope and canvas 2 months later, they stay as a solid lump, very unlikely to flake apart. So I'm going to wrap them in tissue paper and set them aside in a box. I may experiment with further grinding them in to snusmaking tobacco flour, or save some as gifts for pipe-smokers who I imagine would appreciate this tobacco.
 
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