Our Tobaccos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pipe tobaccos come as either aromatic or flavoured blends or non-aromatic which is mostly just natural tobacco ingredients. Aromatic blends undergo a much more intense casing or flavouring process than non-aromatics. 

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There are various types of blends of tobacco leaf. The two main types are Burley, used mainly in cigarettes and as a base for pipe tobacco as it is very mild and air cured and Virginia, a sweet tobacco grown in many places and again used as a base mix for many pipe tobaccos but can also be smoked in its own right. 

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There are then tobaccos like Latakia, Perique and and Oriental (Turkish) that add an immense amount of flavour and only needed in smaller amounts. Latakia is incredibly dark and intense with a smoky flavour, originally grown in Syria and now mostly from Cyprus. Perique is only produced in St James Parish, Louisiana and is fermented and cured to give a unique heavily spiced flavour, while Oriental tobaccos covers a group of small leaf tobaccos grown in the southern Mediterranean around Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. 

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American blend tobaccos are based mainly on Burley leaf but may also contain some Virginia leaf.

Balkan blends typically have a higher content of Latakia and Oriental tobaccos in them.

English blends originally were Virginia base flavoured with Latakia and Perique as the United Kingdom Tobacco Purity Laws required these blends to have only pure tobacco and no additives so these rich intense tobaccos were added to give flavour. This law was repealed in 1986, and there has been a shift to use less of these stronger tobaccos in the blend. 

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There are then different cuts of tobacco such as ribbon-cut or ready rubbed, flake, plug and twist. 

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Ribbon Cut (Ready Rubbed)

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The tobacco is layered and pressed and then mechanically cut into thin strands and so is ready to be put straight into the pipe bowl and smoked. Gawith's produce a number of ready rubbed pipe tobacco including best sellers such as .............

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Flake

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Flake tobacco originated as a way of preserving tobacco longer for sailors on long sea voyages. The tobacco was pressed into square flat cakes and thus held in the moisture better, as well as taking up less storage space. Flake tobacco is broken up or folded into small bits before being put in the pipe bowl to be smoked. 

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The pressing of the tobacco allows the different tobacco varieties to blend together. Gawith's produce many different flakes.........

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Plug

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This is a small square condensed bar of tobacco which again retains its moisture. 

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Twist

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Originally developed by sailors to spin into rope and still made by hand in the traditional way, the tobacco leaf used is of the ……. variety. The leaf is initially moistened  to soften it and then left 24 hours, before being passed to the Twist department. Here the ladies sort the leaves into longer ones for the external wrapper and the shorter leaves for the filler. Each leaf is smoothed and stretched out. It is a time consuming laborious process. The leaves are then assembled into a long ‘sausage’, with the shorter leaves being placed inside the longer wrapper leaves and the tobacco being continuously fed into the spinning machine.

 

Originally spun on hand spinning tables, mechanically operated spinning machines were introduced in the early 1900’s and in 1977 the company acquired the current machines.

 

Twist is spun in four different thicknesses - Thin, Pigtail, Medium and Bogie and available as ‘Brown’, which is as it comes straight off the spinning machines, or Black, where the twist ropes are treated with Rapeseed oil, bound in cloth ad cord and placed into hot presses and cooked for 6 hours. Next the twist ropes are transferred to cold presses where they remain under pressure for between 3 and 5 days.

 

Twist can be used as chewing tobacco or can be cut up and used for smoking in pipes.

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