What is your process to get your "tobacco flour"? I will be making my first attempt at blending my own pipe tobacco very soon but I'm curious if I can use some of the leaf trimmings &/or stems to make my own homemade snuff. The video was very helpful but I'm not sure how to get such fine powdered tobacco. Any suggestions?
I’m not the original poster, but I have made my own snuff in the past.
First, make sure your tobacco is as dry as possible before grinding, this is important for creating a fine flour.
I first used a blade type coffee grinder, which required shaking while it was running to keep the tobacco distributed.
Later, I used a rather entry-level burr style coffee grinder that I found cheap at a thrift store. The burr grinder required sending the material through the machine several times to get it fine enough, most likely because it isn’t the greatest piece of equipment, but of this I can’t be certain, since I have no experience with a better machine.
I then cobbled together a ball mill using a stainless steel vacuum bottle (thermos), some 1/2” ball bearings, and a drill running at low speed. This produced pretty good results, but it took a long time to do so.
There were trade-offs to each grinding method, basically. I will also add that I was only grinding rather small amounts at a time, around a couple ounces each batch.
Once the tobacco was ground, I sieved it for a more consistent product, in terms of particle size. I accomplished this by partially filling a mason jar with the flour, then placing a piece of pantyhose across the mouth of the jar, which is held in place by screwing the jar’s ring over it. I was careful not to stretch the nylon material, as this will enlarge the holes in the nylon, and allow larger particles than desired through.
The jar was then inverted, and shaken to move the material through the nylon mesh. This ended up being far too laborious, so I used an old barber’s massager (which has a vibratory motor inside), held against the bottom of the inverted jar, to speed the process up exponentially. I also tried a palm sander, which worked ok, but the massager was better, I believe due to the weight of the device and longer “throw”, I’ll call it, of the vibratory motor’s offset weight, which created a larger amount of “shake”, for lack of a better description.
This process was messy and time consuming, and it makes your hands numb from the vibration, but it produced some nice tobacco flour. There was, however, some fuzzy pieces present in the final product from the pantyhose, which I didn’t care for. I would recommend purchasing some micron screen material to use instead, or if you don’t mind investing a bit more, there are metal screens with a steel ring around them available for assorted purposes, or PVC ringed screens used for filtering plankton for research purposes, and they can be found easily on eBay. These can even be stacked to sort different particle sizes, as well. Sieving apparatuses also exist that combine a vibratory motor, as well, or one could most likely be added to a screen, or stack of sieving screens fairly easily.
I hope the rudimentary knowledge gained from my brief foray into small-scale home snuffmaking is useful to you. Good luck, and I hope your snuff turns out satisfactory.
