Sutliff Tobacco Company Mixture #79

I picked up an ounce of this blend because SmokingPipes was having a sale on Sutliff bulk blends, and I wanted to try the blend that everyone seems to hate.

Sutliff's Blue Note has a similar amount of hate on TobaccoReviews, but I actually kind of like Blue Note, so I figured maybe this one might have something to it as well. It doesn't. This is an intensely muddled blend, I really don't even know how some reviewers pick out all the various toppings. The first few puffs seemed to me to taste/smell like some sort of cleaning product, chemically bitter and foul. Someone else said a "urinal cake", and I'm not even kidding... that's pretty accurate. I'm not saying that to be insulting, or to imply that it taste like urine... it just really does have that same chemical scent, like deodorant or... yeah, a urinal cake. I actually like black licorice and anise... the problem is, I don't taste any of that. I also like Lakeland blends... this is nothing like that.

Halfway through the pipe... it's mellowed out and become more smoke-able. It's only now that I'm starting to even taste anything other than horror. Before now it was just an overwhelming muddle of perfumed cleaning product. It's weird... that chemical taste is starting to transform into a root beer-ish taste that isn't totally unpleasant.

It actually doesn't taste half bad now, I can pick up the anise and a kind of nice burley taste. I won't buy this again, but I'm going to experiment with the rest of the ounce I have. I'm going to try drying it out quite a bit... and trying to "burn off" the nastiness by packing the pipe, lighting it up, and letting it sit. I'll do that a few times, lighting it up after it goes out, and then see if it makes it past the "grossness boundary".

Bottom line: First half of the bowl is pure horror; second half is mediocre.

Sutliff Tobacco Co. - Mixture #79 (#600).

I don't get this blend. The alcohol doesn't really give an actual idiosyncratic flavour, just more of an alcohol sharpness. The anisette/liquorice goes hand in hand with this, increasing the piquancy. If it weren't for the vanilla assuaging things it would become even more cutting a taste, but the slight vanilla note smooth's things out, somewhat. Something that the vanilla can't placate is the heat, it's far too warm. As well as being warm, another negative from #79 is the speed.

I don't like the note, and the nicotine's medium.

I hate to slate a blend, but try as I may this doesn't work for me. I can only give it one star:

Not recommended.

Ok, I am all for a heritage blend, I am a historian, I love appreciating a slice of history and thinking about the context and time from which it came. Dunhill Durbar is one of my favorite blends, the oldest in the Dunhill catalog and one of the most polarizing, but it the grandfather of Balkan blends and truly for the pallete of another time. Both Prince Albert and Carter Hall are favorites for their simplicity and elegance, a stark contrast to our time when we are bombarded with "flavor bombs" and complexity explosions. I wanted to feel this way about No. 79. I read the history, I know it's legendary, my father used to smoke it, I really wanted to like this- it sucked. The pouch note was that of anise, which I like in food and thought would be tasty in tobacco seeing as it was a standard condiment in the early 20th century. But the pleasantries ended the second I lit the bowl- it was nasty, soapy and perfumed, it tasted like my grandmother's closet. I got a 1/4 way into the bowl praying it would transition into something magical, but I kept getting disgusted with every puff- I had to ditch it.

Taste is indeed subjective and I'm sure the millions of people who listened to Montovani back in the day were surely into something I must not be getting through my modern perspective, just like No. 79....I just don't get it.

Oh, and not only did this ghost my pipe after 1/4 bowl, it ghosted my mouth, I had to gargle and rinse as the tobacco I loaded in a different pipe immediatly after still tastes like it. May have to do the Everclear/salt purge....and then do it on my pipe.