"thrice brewed" style rustica twist for 2016

[squeezyjohn]

Due to a bad summer and low nicotine levels due to lack of sunshine in all my plants (especially the rustica) - I have decided to follow some advice given on here and make a sauce along the lines of thrice brewed nasal snuff to treat my rustica with prior to twisting up. The whole point of this type of tobacco is that it makes a chew that you need so little of that it can be used in the upper lip like a snus portion - and for that it needs to be strong ... that is the only real reason to use N.Rustica rather than N.Tabacum.

I've actually only gone for a twice brewed! In that I took half the rustica leaves (all the ones with holes in that were less than perfect for rolling up in to twists) and boiled them down with the spices, liquorice and salt that I normally use to sauce my twists. When dry - the leaves nearly filled a large stock pot, but when boiled/steamed they mushed down like spinach. The sauce mix was boiled for an hour to extract all the goodness from the ingredients and then strained and reduced further to give a nicotine boosting sauce to spray the leaves with prior to twisting.

I may further change the recipe to include some alkali (probably sodium carbonate) for some of this year's batch.

I'm only half way through the process at the moment. But I will let you know how this goes.

 

[Alpine]

Have you considered to cook stems and stalks instead of whole leaves? That would give you a nicotine sauce without leaf loss... Just a thought.

Pier

PS or a disgusting but effective insecticide for next season...

 

[squeezyjohn]

It's a thought ... but the amounts of nicotine in stems and stalks is shown to be pretty low compared to the lamina of the leaf and I always have some raggedy ones which are fine to grind in to snus flour but are not suitable for making twist from. At the moment from testing by rubbing on my gums there is some nicotine present but it isn't super strong ... however in addition to the leaf it should raise the levels somewhat when the twists are dried out as well as boosting the tobacco flavour.

I've just sprayed half of the solution over the leaf to bring it back in to a low case ready for twisting up. This year I flavoured it with liquorice, cinnamon, allspice, meadowsweet and woodruff along with salt and ammonium chloride ... this is giving a nice natural cola type flavour.