G. L. Pease Fillmore

Before I tender this review, I have an issue that I think needs to be addressed. I will try to fall within the guidelines of this site in addressing it. If I step out of line in any way, I do humbly apologize. But for those of us with a true passion for this hobby, there is a perpetual learning curve. Anyway, here goes.

There are many fine tobaccos out there, Pease among the top tier. One of the things that I think alot of smokers do not realize is that tobacco shares alot in common with wine. The better it is, the more fussy it can be. By that I mean you can always rip open a pouch of drugstore blend and you get what you get, good or bad. The point is, it probably is as good as it's gonna get at the moment of opening.

The opposite is true with the fine blends offered by many, such as Pease and the like. I have found through careful experimentation, that fine tobacco likes to breathe just as fine wine likes to do. It becomes "dumb" in the tin. It needs oxygen to "open" correctly so that all of the nuance can be enjoyed and percieved.

It also generally comes too wet. This is a precaution for tin preservation. A fine tobacco should have a chance to rest once opened. By all means give it a try, but don't put alot of stock in that initial bowl 5 minutes after opening the tin. That kind of haste works with peanut butter, but not fine tobacco.

My general experience is that I pop the tin and leave it uncovered for an hour or so. Then I replace the lid and let it sit for about a week or two, opening the tin briefly for a few minutes every few days. After about two to three weeks, the tobacco is almost without fail, stunning! I rarely experience excess moisture and am assured of smoking nearly every bowl to the bottom dryly.

Well, that's all the preaching that I have in me today. I hope I have helped some and not offended anyone. On with the review.

Fillmore is one of my favorite Vapers. It is probably one of the most balanced between the savory/sweet deep red va, and the rich perique dried fruit/spice. The flake is broken rather finely and I prefer it that way. I am only rarely an intact flake smoker. I like the rubbed out version better. Yes, it will smoke alittle hotter, but that will give you a bit of practice for your technique. Never a bad thing.

The flavor starts of with the standard hay and grass. Developes quickly into a far deeper and rich smoke with the hints of coffee, chocolate and yeasty baking bread. A fantastic combo to be sure. Smoke it slowly and you will be rewarded with one of the greatest tobacco flavors ever available. Dried appropriately, it smokes cool and dry to the bottom of the bowl.

I have aged this tobbacco for as long 5 years to great benefit. I'm shooting for 10 years on a pound or two. Will ahve to let you know how that turns out.

Thanks for reading, and sharing.

Obviously, the palates of true pipe smokers worldwide do the hyping of Pease blends and Filmore is just one of many examples of the blender's skill at creating blends with staying power and mass appeal. This can never be called a typical Va/Per even though the components are... well, typical for a Va/Per. Pease does something with this broken flake to make the Virginia leaf and healthy dose of Perique really shine. The flavor is more sweet than typical for this type of blend and also a little more powerful (which I thoroughly enjoyed).

Fillmore burns to a dry ash and can heat up just a tad if you get carried away with your puffing cadence. Keep the suck meter ticking at a very moderate level and the reward will be electrifying. Truly a remarkable smoke!

Wow! When I smoke this I keep saying to myself, "just right". The Virginias are some of the richest I've encountered. They need to be. For me there's a fine line between too much Perique and just the right amount. This blend walks that line like an expert tight rope walker that never falls over that line. It's just right. The richness of the Virginias doesn't allow the Perique to overwhelm them. Sweet and very spicy with notes of fruit down to the 3/4 mark. Then the spice mellows, the sweetness increases and it brings you down nice and easy. Artfully done. I'm am independent cuss and consider myself to be no one's "fan boy", but if I keep having these great experiences with Pease's blends I might have to just give up and roll with it.

There's less dark fruit sweetness from the red Virginia than I would normally expect. It has some earth, wood, bread and grass notes that get a little more obvious by mid-bowl, though the tanginess is consistently evident. That's all due to how it's aged before use. It's not a complaint, just an observation. Also sports a minor floral hit. The earthy perique is very noticeable in a raisin, fig, plum and peppery way and is a tad more than a condiment. I also perceive a light undercurrent of smoke, earth and wood from the Cyprian Latakia. The strength and taste levels are medium. The nic-hit is just past the center of mild to medium. No chance of bite, and has no harsh or dull moments. It does have a few small rough edges. Burns at slightly less than an average pace, cool and clean with moderately rich, fairly smooth, very consistent flavor from start to finish. Requires some relights, and leaves little dampness in the bowl. Has a lightly lingering, pleasant after taste. The room note is a little stronger. Not quite an all day smoke.

-JimInks

UPDATE 11/8/10

Still no love for this one. The excessive "periquey-ness" toned down a bit with the additional aging but I find this one harsh and monotone. I stated "flat and boring" below but I was referring to the other blends mentioned. This one was harsh. Additional aging tones that down a hair but I still cannot smoke this one. I'm donating what's left of this 2nd tin and my unopened 3rd tin, as I don't see this improving to the point where it is smokable. Too bad, as GLP blends are starting to come together for me. Not this one, however.

ORIGINAL REVIEW 3/24/09

After smoking a tin of several GLP blends, I'm going to do one simple review of all of them... Fillmore, Haddo's, Telegraph Hill, Embarcadero and a few others... because they all share the same issues. They all appear to be promising blends whose time has not yet come. With all the hype surrounding these blends and all the positive reviews, I couldn't help but try a bunch of them. But they all seem unrealized... flat and boring, without the complexity of taste and aroma that blends from McClellands uniformly have. There's not the balance of Dunhill Elizabethan or the pure explosion of flavor that Escudo or Davidoff Flake Medallions or some of the Rattrays blends have. There are many others too numerous to mention that seem to have in spades what these GLP blends claim to have but sorely lack.

I've decided that perhaps the tins of these I've smoked are too youthful, too insipid due to a lack of aging. Indeed, the ingredients, the cut and the color among other things make them appear to be of high quality. I'm going to cellar the rest of what I have for a couple of years and try again. GLP blends have largely let me down so far but we'll see what happens after a maturation process. Rather than write a bunch of less than flattering reviews, I'm going to wait these out and try again.

G.L. Pease - Fillmore. A Perique lovers dream!

The broken flakes are all uniform in size. The title 'Broken Flake' can occasionally be a bit of a misnomer; sometimes the blend is hardly broken yet in other tins it can resemble ribbons. With this the flake has been broken evenly leaving long pieces all about a quarter, to half a cm wide. The tin note is stereotypical of a strong Perique blend. Slightly sour, a little figgy and somewhat sharp. The moisture of the tobacco is great so zero drying time is needed.

For me, this blend falls into the category of three L's: load it, light it, love it!

It's easy to get lit and then the burn is good for the whole journey giving a mid temperature, bite free smoke. Straight away, I feel I'm dealing with a heavy Perique blend. As I've said before, sometimes with strong Perique tobacco's I get a cool/sharp feeling on my tongue from the piquancy and this gives me that sensation. The Virginia is far from un-noticeable, it's just tamer in comparison to the Perique!

The nicotine is about medium in Fillmore. It suits me!

This is my favourite G. L. Pease blend to date. Highly recommended:

Four stars.

The first time I smoked Fillmore I thought to myself "Wow this is heady, tangy, spicy and a bit smoky even!" When I popped my first tin I could have sworn I caught a fleeting whiff of Latakia clinging to the underside of the pull top lid. Nowhere is Latakia listed in the ingredients but I later found out that there is a bit in here, however only in trace amounts.

The thing I admire most about this blend isn't that it's tasty, well it does happen to be very tasty, but I love how substantial the taste is. Some tobaccos are great for mindless puffing, but Fillmore is too rich for that. It's one of those mixtures that has helped to shape my cadence some. That said, I file this one into the Haddo's Delight section of the VaPer phylum. Strong Virginia/Periques with a twist if you will. Like Haddo's, Fillmore has layers of flavor with each puff giving a subtle variation of the one before. Some puffs are bitter-sweet and spicy, while others are earthy, smoky & tangy. Fillmore also has a creamy fig like richness that comes through in bottom of the bowl that's reminiscent of Esoterica's Dunbar, another darker tasting VaPer that I have grown to enjoy. Typically, I prefer Virginia Perique mixtures that are sweeter and brighter but much like Dunbar, Fillmore is an exception for me.

While I wouldn't favor this as an all day/every day pipe tobacco, it's definitely one that I will sock away a few tins of for future enjoyment. To get the most flavor that Fillmore has to offer, I prefer smoking this is a wide shallow bowl. A humble pot works perfect.

Having tried Union Square, I was interested to see how other Fog City tobaccos tasted. So when the opportunity to try some of this came up, I didn't hesitate to acquire a tin.

A good whiff of the tin revealed earthy notes with hints of fruit, possibly something figgy. The flakes were nicely coloured as I've come to expect, medium and dark browns blend into each other subtly well. The flakes themselves break apart easily making packing easy. It is a little damper than I am used to with Mr Pease's stuff, but it's nothing a little drying won't solve. Even without that, the number of relights is hardly an issue. The smoke itself is where fun starts. It's rather strong from the off, so if you have a pipe with a small bowl, it's highly recommended for this stuff. It smokes a good long while too, even on a small bowlful so no worries on that score. The flavour for me was one of earth tones with a decent side order of figs and a light garnish of lemon, with occasional hints of plum. The only downside apart from the strength is that it does tend to gunk up the pipe a bit, however a little extra pipe cleaning after each smoke soon stops that being a problem.

I don't know what it is but there's something in this that reminds me of Peterson's Irish Flake, perhaps it's the fig flavour, but it lack the mustiness that I found in IF and is nice straight off the bat instead of having to rub out and leave for a couple of months that I found IF benefited from. The strength , the dampness and the gunk of this do slightly take the sheen off this but they are so easy to get round they don't detract from what is, for me, an excellent tobacco.

Fillmore is a deliciously rich pipe tobacco. The tin aroma is fairly smokey. The taste of Fillmore is pleasantly sweet (but not cloying) and spicy. The Virginias and Perique are well balanced throughout the smoke, neither predominating but both present from start to finish. At the beginning of the smoke, the Perique is a bit more prevalent but, by the finish, the Virginias come to the fore. The overall flavor is that of citrus, raisins, cinnamon, coffee, chocolate and leather.

The broken flakes benefit from a bit of drying out but are easy to pack and light even straight out of a fresh tin and burn completely to a dark ash. The taste is a bit stronger if not rubbed out and the tobacco burns slower, making for a longer, richer and more enjoyable smoke. However, even if rubbed out and smoked rather fast, there is no bite.

I would have to say that Fillmore one of the best GL Pease tobaccos that I have tried.

Fillmore, one of the G.L. Pease Fog City Selections, is a strong entry in the Virginia/Perique sweepstakes that has now been available for a decade. The Fog City series included eight mixtures, generally those that could be considered Virginia dominant.

Open the tin and you discover a brown broken flake mottled with some lighter colored flecks. The aroma is spicy and fermented, although the fermented note comes more from the perique than the vinegary tang that some fermented Virginias exhibit. The broken flake is a bit more moist than is typical for Pease blends.

Fillmore lights easily enough, even when not allowed to dry out a bit, but I do normally require a couple of relights in the course of smoking the full load. The Virginias, apparently both stoved and unstoved, exhibit the sweetness of red Virginia, although I suspect there are several varieties of this leaf present.The perique is obviously present, not strong enough to obscure the Virginia sweetness, and not in the quantity to qualify as a perique bomb. To my palate the perique taste is more present here than in Pease's Haddo's Delight and Cumberland, but those two blends have a more complex mixture of constituent tobaccos, a factor that tones down the taste of the perique element a bit.

Fillmore has a wisp of latakia, strictly a condimental amount, which does not offer an obvious latakia note to the taste but nevertheless gives a subtle darkening to the flavor. The nicotine content ranks somewhat above medium. This is not a nicotine bomb, but it will affect those sensitive to Vitamin N.

The taste of the smoke meanders between the sweetness of the Virginia and the rancid fig of the perique. Fillmore shares a strength common to Pease blends in that there is a complexity of flavor. The taste varies puff to puff as the bowl is consumed, sometimes creamy, sometimes raisiny, sometimes tangy.

I smoke Fillmore in the pipes that I normally use for Virginia and Virginia/perique blends, but on occasion I will use one that normally gets only aromatic blends, which works for me OK. The room note is pleasant, the Virginia base predominating.

Smokers who have not tried Fillmore but who like perique will find this offering a delight. Differing tastes determine which blends make the regular rotation, but I cannot imagine a perique lover who will not greatly enjoy Fillmore. Fillmore is also recommended for those who puff on perique blends only occasionally. Again I emphasize the variety of flavors offered in the course of smoking the full pipe load.

For the segment of pipe smokers who do not like perique: Fuggedaboutit!