McClelland Tastemaster

(3.00)
Smooth, creamy, chocolate-flavored, gentle on the palate and abundantly flavorful throughout, owing to the excellence of the superior tobaccos chosen for this masterful blend.

Details

Brand McClelland
Series Premium Aromatic
Blended By McClelland Tobacco Company
Manufactured By  
Blend Type
Contents Black Cavendish, Burley, Cavendish
Flavoring Cocoa / Chocolate
Cut Coarse Cut
Packaging 50g Tin
Country United States
Production No longer in production

Profile

Strength
Mild
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Extremely Mild -> Overwhelming
Flavoring
Medium
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
None Detected -> Extra Strong
Room Note
Very Pleasant
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Unnoticeable -> Overwhelming
Taste
Mild to Medium
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Extremely Mild (Flat) -> Overwhelming

Average Rating

3.00 / 4
10

13

8

1

Reviews

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Displaying 1 - 10 of 32 Reviews
Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
May 26, 2016 Mild Medium to Strong Medium Very Pleasant
The burley is nutty, though you seldom notice it. I really can’t say I notice the gold cavendish either. I taste a little vanilla, which probably comes from the black cavendish, though it’s possible a little is in the topping. The chocolate is more like milk chocolate and is rich, deep and creamy smooth. I got a minor sense of caramel, too. No chemical notes to be found. The topping is between medium and strong. Has almost no nicotine. Won't bite even if pushed, and burns cool and clean. Needs a light dry time, and will require some relights. Leaves a fair amount of moisture in the bowl, almost to the point of goop. No harsh, dull spots or weakening of flavor at all. Has a very pleasant after taste and room note. A mild all day smoke that won’t wear you down.

-JimInks
7 people found this review helpful.
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Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Jan 01, 2015 Mild to Medium Mild to Medium Mild to Medium Very Pleasant
I like this one. I'm in the process of smoking my first tin. My go to aromatic has been Sweet Vanilla Honeydew. Tastemaster is a milder smoke with less tongue bite. It has a lot of nice chocolatey flavor and room note. You'll like it and Mom will like the room note, too. I admit to being a life-long chocolate addict. In fact my perfect smoke might be a Hershey bar in one hand and a pipe in the other, alternating back and forth. I've never tried that, but I'm getting goofy just thinking about it.
Pipe Used: Dunhill Billiard
PurchasedFrom: Smoking pipes.com
Age When Smoked: New
7 people found this review helpful.
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Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Oct 08, 2013 Mild Medium Mild to Medium Very Pleasant
I judge aromatic blends by three distinct characteristics – room note, flavor, and performance. Sometimes an aromatic blend will have a wonderful room note, very little flavor but will be easy to pack, light, and will burn nicely without getting too hot. Other times there's a great room note, good flavor, but unruly, hot burning, overly cased leaf that causes tongue bite and off flavors will ruin the party. By my standards, if good aroma, flavor and performance are all present, then it's a blend worth pursuing.

Tastemaster performs well in the aroma and flavor categories, but after smoking almost an entire tin, (which by the way never seemed to dry out), I struggled to keep this blend lit and performing well. Typically the overall result was a nice first half-bowl, with the latter-half often overheating & morphing into an array of messy and undesirable bitter chemical-like burnt sugar flavors. By the end of the bowl there's a whole lot of moist dottle to be had. Tastemaster refuses even the most liberal amount of dry time.

Concentrating on the appreciable first half of a bowl, I'd say that Tastemaster's chocolate flavor is more of a malted milk chocolate shake or chocolate cupcake with a touch of coffee kind of thing. It's very sugary. In fact my daughter thought I was roasting marshmallows in the garage. The smoke is soft, light, somewhat creamy and fairly sweet. As you can imagine, the flavor is also quite simple, straight forward and not too fancy.

Altogether this is an okay aromatic mixture that unfortunately was not a stellar performer for me. Considering the price tag for a 50g tin, I wouldn't choose to buy this again.
7 people found this review helpful.
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Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Jul 09, 2009 Mild Medium Mild to Medium Pleasant
The question of "Do tobacco blenders put their best stuff in tins and their less fully realized stuff in bulk?" is one for the ages. With McClellands, I think that question has been answered: They do.

Now is that a bad thing? With their VA's and Vapers, is it wrong or deceitful to put a more aged version of a very similar if not identical product in tins and the more youthful version in bulk? Not at all. Their bulk VA's and Vapers age nicely and the bulk sales presentation package isn't as nice.

Is it wrong for aromatics, which don't age well? Again, I don't think so. But after smoking various samples of McClelland bulk aromatics, I always felt their claim that they used the best tobaccos and the blend, while sweet and soft, was of a higher quality than other blends was a bit of codswallop (the new balderdash). With Tastemaster, I think they've hit that mark.

Ok, aromatics aren't my thing, it's true. But this one is of the high quality they've claimed. It's a chocolate/vanilla (to my taste and nose) blend that is sweet and soft but also flavorful and of high quality. It tastes and smells quite good, burns well, doesn't leave a goopy heel and is as satisfying as an aromatic can be. Now I'm not in any real hurry to do so, but I believe over time I'll try their other tinned aromatics. They've proven with this one that they can blend in this style, and do it properly. If you like aromatics, try this one.
7 people found this review helpful.
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Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Dec 19, 2010 Mild Mild Mild Pleasant
Tastemaster... The tin says chocolate aroma, and there sure is, loud and clear. But will it come thru in the taste? This type of a blend always feels too moist, so as normal, I gave it 15 or so minutes, under my desk lamp. Don't know if it makes much of a difference, but that ritual has become my SOP for newly opened tins. Wanting to see what this chocolate / tobacco was all about, I loaded up a bowl, with a very gentle tamp. Light up is amazingly easy for a tobacco with a almost feels sticky to the touch. Mindlessly puffing away, I found this stuff to be very mild, and would you believe with a “dark chocolate taste” as promised. Smooth, mild, nice aroma / taste, adequate N hit and absolutely no bite, very impressive. As a personal note; I would not complain if there was bit more tobacco flavor, a bit mild for my taste. Because of that I can't see much of a future using this stuff as blending tobacco, but really, who cares about that. Being such a gentle smoke, you can go thru one bowl after another, without a care in the world, making it a good, but expensive, candidate for an all day smoke. 3 Stars.
3 people found this review helpful.
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Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Dec 04, 2018 Mild to Medium Medium to Strong Medium to Full Very Pleasant
This was a very good chocolate topped blend, with the strongest "peanut brittle" note in the room note out of any chocolate topped tobacco I have tried. This would win over any sensitive nose anywhere. Sadly no longer available, it was perhaps the standard chocolate aromatic.

It was a mix of black cavendish with a smattering of golden virginia that was stained dark brown from the topping.

If they ever produce these blends again, unlikely since the company is now gone, this is one I would buy.
Pipe Used: Various
PurchasedFrom: Mostly tinderbox
2 people found this review helpful.
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Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Mar 31, 2016 Mild Strong Mild Very Pleasant
** 25% Granger, 25% Prince Albert and 50% Tastemaster makes a terrific all day smoke with a bit of strength and female approved room note! **

Ok so this isn't the first time I have been shnookered into buying a tobacco that I thought was a new (to me) blend but is in fact the same as another. In this case Tastemaster is the exact same blend as GKPC Chocolate Silk (which I absolutely adore) so instead of writing another long winded review i'll just keep it short but both blends are black Cavendish with a smattering of Gold Virginia and topped with McClelland's Chocolate Sauce... Both are amazing, smell like heaven and will make you an instant hero around women with a working shnoz, the unbiased and official room note reviewer, my Japanese Chin "Lilly Bell" attacked the tin which she does with Chocolate Silk so it has her rating of 4 paws... Seriously I have both blends in front of me and I cannot tell a difference which is fine since they are world class aromatics but had I know they were the same I would have purchased the Chocolate Silk to support the Greater Kansas Pipe Club... I am considering adding a pinch of a top shelf Cherry blend to a bowl, not letting it blend in a jar but a pinch on the top of a bowl to give the rest of the smoke a Cherry hint.
PurchasedFrom: Tobacco Leaf, Henderson, Nevada
Age When Smoked: 2013 tinning
2 people found this review helpful.
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Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Sep 28, 2015 Very Mild Medium to Strong Mild to Medium Tolerable to Strong
Undated ebay tin. This, and the others from McClelland Premium Aromatic series, are sticky-wet out of the tin. A lot of people don't like this, and while I'm not overly happy with the moisture left in the heel of my pipe, I actually find the gumminess helpful in packing, especially with the Frank method that I favor.

The initial light brings the strongest flavor. A rush of pure sugar followed closely by an unassertive sweet chocolate. Not too promising. I like the sweetness, but it's a bland sugar-water flavor without character or development.

It is quite slow-burning, even given all the puffing I did trying to extract some flavor. All the good points here are mechanical: packs well, stays lit, stays cool (even with all the sugar) doesn't bite. It burns evenly and slowly, giving off fluffy grey clouds that disappear almost instantly. Fun to watch, which is good, because the smoking itself is boring. Oh, there we go. Stoking it a bit- something's changed. The mild sweetness turns to a dirty, acrid taste. Slowing back down, we return to insipid sugar water. That's what I get for trying to taste something. The smell off the bowl is a sour, old-urinal aroma, but the evanescent smoke seems to leave behind a mildly pleasant trace of waxy, candle-like chocolate. Eh. Burns nice and slow, though. Got 50 minutes out of this bowl, which is on the smallish side of medium. No strength to speak of, even for this nicotine lightweight. That felt like a small plus for this smoke today, even though I like a little kick on occasion.

I think I remember trying and liking another of this series (Town Topic, if I remember correctly). That one had the same cut, same high moisture, but none if any of the flavor issues. I wonder if operator error is to blame here. I don't smoke often, and I don't smoke while doing anything else , so I like my tobaccos to be something of a special occasion. This is a lawnmower blend- I can see it being perfect for mindless puttering around the garage, if one is looking for that sort of thing. I wasn't, and I won't be buying this one again, unless someone tells me that it's way better from a fresh tin.
Pipe Used: Ascorti Business rhodesian
2 people found this review helpful.
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Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Oct 22, 2014 Mild Mild to Medium Mild to Medium Very Pleasant
I really like this chocolatey tobacco. The flavorings don't destroy the tastes of what are obviously high quality tobaccos. The tin smell is great, and replicated in the smoking experience. Subtle smells of vanilla and chocolate, with a tobaccoey undertone. Nice combinations, not sugary sweet like many of today's aromatics. A very nice relaxing and tasteful smoke.

I'd like to buy more of this, but living overseas it's difficult to come by and international post is expensive. Does anyone know if one of the Maclellan bulk blends comes close to this TasteMaster?
2 people found this review helpful.
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Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Mar 26, 2012 Mild Mild Very Mild Pleasant
It is sweet, but i wish they had blend it like Town Topic. They say it has chocolate-cocoa taste, but try Boswell Chocolate Cream and compare. Now, add one star for the absence of chemical taste. Add two more for being a good quality aromatic tobacco,which won't bite, smokes cool and is good for all day smoking.There you go three stars.
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