Samuel Gawith Skiff Mixture

[Mad Hatter]

On a dumb whim I bought a pound of this a couple years ago. It was an english oriental blend. I liked english oriental blends, or so I thought anyway. Well, I'd been smoking a lot of Balkan Flake and I thought "what the hey" and ordered this stuff in addition to my next order for Balkan. Well, I got it and while it had a great smokey latakia flavor, I just really couldn't find much else about it that I liked, so I stuck it on the shelf and gave it an occasional try here and there, but still I found nothing special about this.

Today I got it down again to give it another try. I looked at the contents of the jar in their course small cut pieces..... diced ribbon cut? Overall it is a dark brown with a bit of black mixed in and a smattering of some medium brown. According to a distributor this contains Orientals, Latakia, Turkish and VA, in a "well-balanced" blend. Ok, if you say so. Anyway I packed it up, lit it up and puffed away. Same as before , nothing spectacular..... just smokey. Not too far into the bowl it started getting a bit toasty as it was a little on the dry side after its time in storage, so I began doing short and easy puffs and suddenly there was this musty flavor that hadn't been there before. Wow. Not Wow! Just wow. Ok so I slowed it down a little more, and somehow achieved the perfect smolder. As the temperature dropped even more, suddenly there was sweetness as well, that immediately swallowed up the mustiness which had long since swallowed up the smokiness. Wow. It wasn't a strong sweetness. It was subtle and it was the only flavor there.

Fun's over so I'll make a long story short and say that I decided to warm it up again and I got the reverse and then the same effect as before as I began to cool it down. It went from a strong full smokiness, to a light mustiness and then back to a subtle sweetness, and each one seems to appear at different temps, never quite touching nor interfering with one another. This tobacco is a little more complex than it appears at first and I'm sure it will be a lot of fun smoking in the future.