History and info on using coffee in a casing sauce?

I've been playing around with coffee as an ingredient in casing recipes for cigarette tobacco. Mostly hot and cold-brewed espresso, in small amounts to not result in a coffee aroma or flavor but rather to nudge the tobacco's aromas in certain directions. Something like a tablespoon of brewed coffee in 4 oz of an invert sugar-based casing recipe.

First, the question - does anyone have knowledge they can share about the results (purported or observed)? Or the history? Or links to recipes or information?

I'm asking because so far, googling hasn't revealed a whole lot. I can see that RJ Reynolds lists it in their general ingredients, but not broken out to specific brands (Alpine's comment below). And there obviously seems to be a history (FmGrowit's comment below).

Some posts by longtime members here piqued my interest initially.

There was Alpine mentioning that Lucky Strike was cased with coffee:


And FmGrowit mentioning the casing #3 he sells/sold (vanilla/coffee based):


And Gdaddy using the old green coffee recipe for cigar tobacco. This one was kind of a special case - I'm assuming Alpine & FmGrowit's were discussing brewed, roasted coffee beans:


Anyway, just wondering if you know of any other resources. Thanks!

Welcome to the forum, @Cobler. Feel free to introduce yourself in the Introduce Yourself forum.

You raise interesting questions about casings. The recipes of proprietary "secret sauce" are...secret. Decades of lawsuits, and parsing of millions of documents attempted to reveal those secrets. If you spend some time and effort, you may be able to discover useful content in the database linked below:


But be warned, my simple search of that database for the term, "coffee", returned 221,123 hits.

Bob

deluxestogie said:

Welcome to the forum, @Cobler. Feel free to introduce yourself in the Introduce Yourself forum.

You raise interesting questions about casings. The recipes of proprietary "secret sauce" are...secret. Decades of lawsuits, and parsing of millions of documents attempted to reveal those secrets. If you spend some time and effort, you may be able to discover useful content in the database linked below:

Industry Documents Library

www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu

But be warned, my simple search of that database for the term, "coffee", returned 221,123 hits.

Bob

Click to expand...

Thanks! Just spent an hour and a half scrolling through search results... So far, looks like there aren't many brands that DON'T use coffee flavor.

My guess is that coffee is used for its acidic qualities. Perhaps also its bitterness as well. If this is the case (pun) then cold brew and expresso may not be what you want to use. So not for the flavors but for the chemistry. I see this as a theme in casings.

Juxtaposer- said:

My guess is that coffee is used for its acidic qualities. Perhaps also its bitterness as well. If this is the case (pun) then cold brew and expresso may not be what you want to use. So not for the flavors but for the chemistry. I see this as a theme in casings.

Click to expand...

Good points. So for acidity, maybe hot brewed drip with a lighter roast might be better?

The turnaround for proper casing, pressing and resting is so slow, I may use a trick from one of the industry docs I was reading yesterday - injecting individual rolled cigarettes. It won't be the same as proper casing and resting, but it might point me in the right direction quicker.

Just a drop of various brews of coffee (and invert sugar syrup) at the tip of a cigarette made of my base blend.

That should pretty quickly show the difference between various coffee roasts.

... and another ingredient I'm looking at: cocoa, and different ways to extract it.

To get around the turnaround I am concentrating on the taste of “young” tobaccos relative to “done” tobaccos. Sort of a palate education.

BTW @Alpine could you elaborate a bit more on your comment that Luckies were cased with coffee?


Was that something you read or heard? Or your own tasting notes or just word-of-mouth?

Hey @FmGrowit , can you share any information about the backstory of that vanilla/coffee casing (No. 3) you used to sell?


Was it just known that coffee was a good base? Did the lab or consultants come up with it?

As @Juxtaposer- pointed out, should I be aiming for a lighter, more acidic roast coffee in my experiments?

Cobler said:

BTW @Alpine could you elaborate a bit more on your comment that Luckies were cased with coffee?

Was that something you read or heard? Or your own tasting notes or just word-of-mouth?

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Sorry for the late reply. It was everybody’s tasting notes: the coffee note in luckies was very noticeable 30 or so years ago. No idea what luckies (or any other commercial brand tbh) taste like nowadays, I smoke my own tobacco since 2015 or 2016. The only commercial baccy I buy are aromatic pipe blends for the (very occasional) pipe bowl.

pier

Alpine said:

Sorry for the late reply. It was everybody’s tasting notes: the coffee note in luckies was very noticeable 30 or so years ago. No idea what luckies (or any other commercial brand tbh) taste like nowadays, I smoke my own tobacco since 2015 or 2016. The only commercial baccy I buy are aromatic pipe blends for the (very occasional) pipe bowl.

pier

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Thank you! This is very helpful.

The Lucky Strike non-filters these days are quite good but quite expensive. Like twice the price of any other cigarette pack.

I've been keeping the coffee content of experimental casing recipes pretty low, so that there's no obvious coffee aroma after the tobacco has dried a bit.

Sounds like I could go a bit heavier with it, and leave a slight coffee aroma. And see if I can determine how it influences the smoke aroma and flavor.

IIRC "coffee" is one of the few additives that wasn't included in the Leffingwell "Tobacco Flavoring for Smoking Products" book, so I'm gonna have to figure out its effect on my own without any hints.

There are over 1000 chemical compounds in roasted coffee. Good luck in your search.


Bob

EDIT: "There are also some compounds which on their own might smell pretty unpleasant, but in chorus with the other compounds add nuances to the aroma; for example methanethiol, which has a smell described as like that of rotten cabbage, and which is also a significant contributor to the smell of flatulence."

deluxestogie said:

There are over 1000 chemical compounds in roasted coffee. Good luck in your search.

The Chemical Compounds Behind the Aroma of Coffee

Whether you're a coffee connoisseur or completely unfussy about the manner in which you get your caffeine fix, there's no denying that the smell of...

www.compoundchem.com

Bob

EDIT: "There are also some compounds which on their own might smell pretty unpleasant, but in chorus with the other compounds add nuances to the aroma; for example methanethiol, which has a smell described as like that of rotten cabbage, and which is also a significant contributor to the smell of flatulence."

Click to expand...

Hehe.

Coffee probably IS in the Leffingwell book, just covered under all the constituent compounds. e.g. guaiacol is in there with the entry saying it adds a sweet flavor and aroma to the smoke.

I'm going to work empirically and just test how, for example, lightly cased burley fares compared with burley that's had double the number of spray bottle squirts.

I'm guessing coffee is going to end up like cocoa in that it just has a ton of compounds that are either shared with tobacco or complement it.

One interesting point was that @FmGrowit's old vanilla/coffee casing was for both air-cured AND flue-cured...

Other studies (can't locate them at the moment) of combinations of flavorants suggest that as the total number of simultaneous flavorants approaches about 30, none of its individual constituents can be identified.

Bob

EDIT:
Found the reference:

This is exactly what we want in a casing, to white out the unpleasant edges. So in the testing please notice not just what is there but also what is no longer there. I do suggest an uncased control sample In this regard.