Re: Pipe smoking?
My preferences changed from all cigars to mostly pipes last year. Previous to then I had attempted to smoke a couple pipes I had bought at different times but I always burnt my tongue, smoked too hard, and had to relight constantly.
I find that the range of flavors is much wider with pipe tobacco. With cigars you are smoking something that is only a couple steps away from the raw material it is made with, and is only changed through natural process such as fermentation and aging.
Tobacco used for making a pipe blend goes through many more steps to adjust or replace the natural flavors of the tobacco. Some of these are non invasive like pressing the tobacco into blocks, to help marry the flavors, and others are more so, like adding a topping to the raw tobacco, which adds a different flavor or another level complexity. Or casing the tobacco which is soaking the tobacco in a soup like flavoring to drastically change it's flavor profile.
Like others have said, if the tobacco smells too much like fruit or something other than tobacco it is probably cheap Virgina or Burly tobacco that was processed into Cavendish and then cased with flavors to replace the natural tobacco flavors. Not all of these aromatics are bad but most of the cheap ones you buy in a store other than a tobacconist are. Most pipe tobacco will not provide as big of a flavor as smoking a cigar, this is a hard thing for cigar smokers to get at first, but after a couple weeks you'll hardly notice the difference.
|