Samuel Gawith Black XX Twist (Rope)

Upon opening the tin you get a very nice delicate sweet smell from a very nicely packaged rope. I was happily surprised with packaging, the card over the top of the tobacco is a nice touch. Not sure why that impressed but it did.

So the tobacco is a nice oily black rope that is very silky to touch and smells very nice. You can pick up some of the traits from brown no 4. I am making the assumption that this is heated and pressed no 4. The rope is fairly large but not excessively so, I used a cigar cutter to cut some coins and rubbed them out. It was an easy process but I tend to go for ropes anyway. I left the tobacco to dry for a little while. I did this as I had a little bit of leaf that had unwound itself and it was damp with oils. So I thought it would be better after 10 - 15 mins drying.

I first noted the bitter sweet taste that is common through all of the black twist tobaccos. It was not as pronounced as the black bogie but much more defined than the black xxx. I could taste the smokey fruit and floral elements from the Virginias. I got a hint of I suppose ketchup sweetness and maduro cigar. This is why I have come to assumption that this is brown no 4 heat and pressure treated. It was Much the same flavour but a bit smoother and smokier. There was a lot of earthy tones with the introduction of the sweetness and maduro every so often. I am thinking that this is due to the blend and thickness. It was consistent throughout and no bite at all. Overall very pleasant and enjoyable.

I think I still favour aged black bogie. The blend is slightly more to my taste, sweeter and more floral. This would be difference between rope thickness and ratio of filler to wrapper. However I must say that you do not need to age this one. It is nice right out of the tin. I will be buying in some bulk. I like black ropes and this one is less time commitment with ageing but still very good. So as a run of the mill black rope it’s great, it’s the go to, the one for the car, the office etc. With my personal preference being Aged black bogie.

C3PO. Alone. Walking in the desert of a planet marked for destruction by the Death Star. 3PO, once a loyal servant, now an exile, a marauder on this desolate planet. He's running out of time. The heat of the midday's sun is beginning to fry his circuitry. Power reserves running low, he begins deleting non essential programming and memory from his memory banks, to conserve that power. He feels himself becoming dumber and more useless as he deletes his over 6 million forms of communication from his hard drive. He runs through what is left in his memory banks and settles on a distant memory. A memory of Anakin Skywalker and the early days of his own existence with the tiny master. Ironic he finds it, that this young boy would grow up to be Vader. The man who's followers will end up destroying him along with this godforsaken planet. It all screams irony, in his understanding of the abstract idea. Yet, it isn't surprising. In his memories, he recalls the anger always being there from the beginning, festering and perfecting itself inside of young Master Skywalker. He moves deeper into his memory banks and accesses one earliest memory of his Tatooine birth place. He sits on Anakin's bed as Skywalker remains in the corner, at his desk, rolling a deathstick filled with Gawith Black XX. Skywalker smokes the death stick and the dark, early forms of Vader surface. Skywalker disrobes and touches himself, then he touches 3PO, then he makes 3PO touch him. He accesses another memory: It is of Anakin mutilating a doll of his Slave master Watto, in effigy. Burning it with matches and stabbing needles into it. He moves yet deeper into the banks. In this memory, Skywalker is having relations with a Twil‘ek prostitute, while C3PO is forced to watch. Asserting his dominance would be a more accurate description. As the session ensues, the whore refuses some of Skywalker's more dangerous and sadistic 'in bed' suggestions. He beats her. To death. Her blood stains his clothes, and drips from his knuckles, which he licks clean. The look in his eyes would haunt 3PO until the end of his days. From the beginning it was obvious the kind of man he would become. Then the Jedi came. Those fools put a light saber in his hand and taught him how to use it. Taught him how to use the force, and none the wiser, perfected the killer Anakin Skywalker already was. Dark secrets that will die with C3PO. As 3PO's programming begins to unhinge and all his non- essentials fade away, a green light erupts in the sky, piercing the earth off in the horizon. As he gazes out, he along with the the desolate rock on which he stands are obliterated, left to float in the shadow of the Empire, as voices cry out in the force.

This is a very very interesting tobacco, it's a case of "what on earth where they thinking" and "how can this tobacco work?!"

It's interesting to first note how it's made. Its life starts as a Gawith Virginia, rolled in a rope. So far so good. Then it is "drenched in olive oil, wrapped in greaseproof paper, cloth, and then bound by a cord, and pressed while being cooked with steam for hours". The result is an oily black rope which I don't believe was conceived for smoking, maybe for chewing by miners - though I haven't dared. I don't believe this...thing can ever go bad, or dry out on its own after having been cooked with oil. Tobacco, cooked with oil. What the hell where they thinking?

The smell is faintly spicy from the tin but not giving much in terms of what's in stock.

I found that cutting coins as thin as possible, rubbing out and drying helps a ton as this tobacco will. not. light. otherwise.

Initial taste on first true light is...terrible, really sticky, stale, fairly disgusting oil for me. In fact I dumped the first bowl I had after a couple of puffs. Wait, you say, I gave it four stars and midway through the review I say "disgusting" and "dumped after two puffs"? Well you need to soldier on with this, at least I did. I took me 4 bowls to actually like it, and every bowl was better than the last one.

The taste is actually pretty complex, very robust, deep, and dark. The initial taste is burnt oil, and not vegetable oil but actually animal fat dripping on coals, maybe specifically lamb fat. Under this you get the taste of top notch, big and bold aged Virginia, savoury, somewhat spicy, very lightly sweet, and very strong. Not as strong as brown ropes in terms of nicotine but its taste is very full, it coats your mouth. The overall experience is strangely not bad at all. The exhale brings more of the burnt fat as an aftertaste.

While the burnt fat taste is not pleasant for me at all, the underlying tobacco is really very good. The weird thing is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, somehow the oil smell synergises with the tobacco, and the whole thing works. Think I'll keep it!

Oh a couple of points to note, this tobacco doesn't just ghost pipes, it ghosts rooms, your clothes, your face, your whole person with the most horrible sticky, oily smell of burnt rubber. I wouldn't ever smoke it indoors, even smoking it outdoors the smell is appalling.

It's something everyone needs to try once, most people will hate it but for me, for the right moment it is lovely. Edit: downgrade to 2 stars, it's taken me a year to finish the tin, and won't be buying again. A good experience to have but plain not enjoyable for me in the long run.

Ah, Black XX. The heavy artillery of my tobacco shelf.

When you open the tin, you're greeted by a dubious-looking, oily, dark brown/black piece of rope cut. It's very densely rolled/pressed, and emits a pretty intense smell of..... i'm not even sure. It's an earthy, somewhat bready and spicy smell, that much is clear.

As you might expect, this stuff needs a bit more preparation than any loose cut or flake you'll be used to. Cut just a small piece off the rope (Again, the rope is quite dense, so there's a lot of tobacco even in a small piece.), unravel the piece into the big, wide pieces of leaf it's made of, and then you're probably going to want to dry it for a while. Be mindful of how long you dry it though, because i've found that even though this stuff comes quite oily, it doesn't take much more than 2-3 hours for it to dry out completely. Though to be fair, smoking the tobacco a little more dry than i'd prefer didn't actually seem to have any adverse effect with this blend.

Packing your pipe with this stuff can be a bit of an art all of it's own, with how coarse it is. Though maybe it'd be best to rub it out and pack it in smaller pieces? I've not tried that, admittedly.

If you do pack your pipe with the coarse leaves as i tend to, you'll find that this tobacco is properly difficult to light. And it'll need a fair few relights throughout the smoke.

Either way, once you DO get it going, you'll find that after about ~20-30 puffs, everything goes black, and you awaken hours later in a park, wearing your trousers on your head and chasing the local wildlife with a spoon. Fear not, for this is the authentic Black XX experience. It's a rather powerful leaf, you see.

What you WILL remember of the experience however is the intense, incredibly savoury flavour of this tobacco. Like others have said, it's a very meaty, roasted sort of flavour. Personally, i would say the closest thing would be Bratwurst and roast potatoes, but that may just be because it's my local cuisine.

It gets some bonus points because i've found that despite the frequent relights, this blend is about as forgiving as it gets when it comes to cadence. Smoke it slow, smoke it fast, it doesn't care. It won't bite or lose flavour. Though if you go too fast, the nicotine might just be a little overwhelming.

It smokes relatively clean considering how oily the stuff comes, though i do tend to find that it leaves behind some big, chunky dottle. Again, probably not an issue if you try rubbing it out more finely.

So yeah, certainly not a blend i'd smoke every day. Or week. Maybe once a month, and only if i really feel like it. But when you do find yourself in the mood for bringing out the big guns, well, this is the right stuff for those times.

The foulest room note in a piper tobacco, ever. This stuff will choke the most veteran smoker. Yes, it is that bad.

Room note aside, this is a nicotine laden dark fired virginia, which is worth smoking for the anomaly of being the only dark fired, which is not pure bitterness. The pipe must be loaded with fully rubbed out slices, which are dropped, not packed, into the bowl until it sticks out about a quarter inch, then only pressed until level with the rim. Any further packing turns this from a quality smoke, into a tar bomb.

Remember when burger joints almost always used char-broilers? You will if you smoke this. After a bit of prep work I loaded this into a small basket pipe and lit her up. I was met with flavors very similar to that of charred meat and a HUGE amount of nicotine. That being said, I am absolutely crazy about this tobacco. I was on a quest for strong tobaccos and I have found a few, but this is the most unique by far. Despite it tasting like grill scrapings, something about it had be from the get go. It does ghost quite a bit, so make sure you like it before loading it into a Dunhill or something.

By all means this is a peculiar blend. From its name to tin design, to its structure and mechanics. And then smoking it is another experience. The simple tin art gives nothing of the blend, but may relate since it will get your head gears going akin to the gears on the tin. And now when you open the tin, you are welcomed, or rather hit by a pungent smell. I will do my best to describe. It smells like a butcher house that has a grill. And you're making sausage, lamb sausage with herbs and spices while getting a smell of the grill as well. or it smells like manure as others have called it. But the image I had in my mind whiffing the tin was that image I spoke of. my tin had a large oily, nearly pitch black rope and a small piece, probably to complete the weight. Now to prepare this. it gets a bit tricky. As soon as you start cutting the rope to coins, they start breaking into some flakes that are drowning moist. And you get all that aroma on your hands and in the air. from there you can pack it however you want, but from trying a couple of bowls, try chopping this as small as you can. I tried it both dried out and moist. And here is how it goes. It is easy to pack once you slice it small enough, then the pain begins. This blend has to be constantly relighted. And by constantly I mean 2-3 puffs then relight. and so on, that of course when you smoke it moist. And you'll find that it will expand considerably in size while getting all that moisture out. And if you smoke it dry, you lose most of the body sadly. so beware. Now to the body of the blend, it is definitely a strong blend, quite potent in aroma, taste and room note. This one won't make you any friends and you may lose some as well. But the good thing is the room note doesn't linger for long. The taste of it is consistent throughout the bowl, it tastes like charbroiled meat with a tinge of freshly ground black pepper all over it. I tried smoking it fast, slow and in between but the taste profile never changed, and with that it never bites or leaves moisture in the bowl despite being nearly wet rather than moist. through the mid bowl the peppery taste reminds me of a simple cigar without complex taste, or one that has been lit, put off and rested for a while before relighting it. It burns down nicely and leaves a perfectly fine grey ash that falls down with a single tap of the pipe. It isn't an all day smoke, and can be annoying to maintain but in its virtue, it delivers quite a kick both in nicotine, flavour and body. I recommend it for those who want a simple, strong smoke from time to time and won't mind the constant relighting

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning..." The little black turd smells as if it has some motor oil in it, the kind they used to grease steam locomotives a century ago. I wonder if there are any other tobaccos with an industrial nose note.

I smoke it in the mornings to warm up my internal engine. I slice it in thinnest coins and rub them into the finest shag, then it smokes like a charm with no relights. It's leathery and meaty-sweet, the kind of sweetness of a semi-raw steak cooked on a kerogas. Though a potent mix, still not overly so, I've never had light-head even when inhaling.

Very old-school, very manly. Highly recommended for the guys who love it stronger and fuller. Be aware it will ghost your pipe with the smell of burnt oil. I dedicated a pipe for this mighty weed, this blend is fully worth of a special pipe to smoke it in. "...That gasoline smell... smelled like... victory!".

My first smoke of this wasn't that pleasant. It tasted like a burnt cigar to me. Thinking this smoke was overrated, I put the rest of the oily turd into a jar and forgot about it for roughly a year.

I ended up finding it in the back of my tobacco stash and decided to give this smoke another try and let me tell you, I am so glad that I did.

So many variables are present during a smoke that I do not know what changed. It could be my tastes, the pipe, the weather and/or allowing the tobacco to age. This tobacco gave me the push towards trying other twists which I prefer now.

I can taste cocoa, caramel and coffee when I smoke this. It's surprising complex and sweet. It burns very cool with cool cream like smoke. This smoke tends to burn my nose if I exhale through it. This is a wonderful smoke that everyone should try at least once. Prepare yourself for the nic hit as well. Although I did not find it as strong as other reviewers it is very present in this blend.