Drucquer & Sons The Devil’s Own

(2.89)
Named for one of its most famous devotees, Sir Henry Irving, during the time he portrayed Mephisto in the London production of Faust, ca. 1885. The Devil's Own is a medium mixture with a wonderfully balanced taste and aroma. It is simultaneously somewhat sweeter and fuller than Inns of Court due to a greater proportion of golden Virginias and Cyprian Latakia. The addition of a little air-cured leaf and unflavored black cavendish add body and richness to the smoke. - Gregory Pease

Details

Brand Drucquer & Sons
Blended By G.L. Pease
Manufactured By Cornell & Diehl
Blend Type American
Contents Black Cavendish, Burley, Latakia, Virginia
Flavoring
Cut Ribbon
Packaging 3.5 ounce tin
Country United States
Production Currently available

Profile

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

Average Rating

2.89 / 4
1

6

2

0

Reviews

Please login to post a review.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 Reviews
Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Sep 30, 2016 Medium None Detected Medium Pleasant to Tolerable
Forming the base of the blend is the golden Virginias, which offer tart and tangy citrus, tart lemon, light sugar, some grass and spice, and a few pinches of toast and honey. The toasty, earthy, nutty, woody, lightly molasses sweet burleys also have a mild sharp note and rough edge in support. The smoky, woody, earthy, musty sweet Cyprian Latakia is not quite the equal of the burleys in proportion, but is significant enough to be just a little more than a condiment. The brown sugar, toast and slight caramel from the unflavored black cavendish adds a little smoothness in a minor role. The nic-hit is a couple of steps past the mild to medium mark. The strength and taste levels are medium. It won’t bite or get harsh, though the aforementioned rough edge will be a little more noticeable to a fast puffer. I recommend a moderate smoking cadence, especially as this blend does gather just a little more strength in the last third of the experience. A fairly complex blend with a slight inconsistency in its rich, deep, clean, sweet and savory flavor that translates to pleasantly lingering after taste. It burns cool and clean at a reasonable pace with an average number of relights. Leaves little moisture in the bowl. Has a pleasant to tolerable room note. Not quite an all day smoke.

-JimInks
17 people found this review helpful.
Please login to upvote this review.
Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Oct 13, 2016 Medium Extremely Mild Medium Pleasant to Tolerable
I remember the Drucquer blends from years ago though , living in new York , I seldom was able to smoke them . While re-issues can never be exact because we simply do no longer grow the same tobacco in the same fields, this smokes relatively close to the original . Devil's Own seems to be Virginia forward blend with burley and latakia present , though as minor players . The Virginia is fine cut and of the golden type . The quality of the Virginia is decent as are all of the included tobaccos . Though a minor player , the latakia is a definite presence .The burley gives the blend a bit of extra body . The fine cut of the tobacco causes to smoke a little hot down the bowl if puffed to hard. I found this to be a " woodsy" smoke reminding me of a fall day in New England . Going deeper into the bowl I noticed a sharper , more pungent taste . This is a complex tobacco very suitable to an afternoon walk or a quiet evening on the patio . I am in debt to Greg for making these classic blends available to us again . This seemed to me like a labor of love and we are , as smokers , embellished by his effort .
11 people found this review helpful.
Please login to upvote this review.
Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Aug 27, 2018 Very Mild None Detected Very Mild Tolerable
At our very first swap/sell show in 1993, when we were called Ohio Pipe Collectors (now known as NASPC), I met a guy that used to own a smoke shop in Zanesville, Ohio, and he had some Drucquers tins on his table. I had never seen them before and bought what he had. I liked them so much that I bought every English blend tin he had in his possession the next time he and I met. Now, here is the weird part; I have no recollection of smoking The Devil's Own. There are two possible explanations: one, he didn't have any tins of this blend in his old store stock or, two, I couldn't identify his tins of this blend that were open as an English mixture (he had boxes of old Drucquers blends and all had a specimen tin opened). This later explanation looms large in my response to the current tin I opened recently - I couldn't immediately identify it as an English blend. In the tin it kind of looked like Early Morning Pipe, though the tin aroma was weaker and not as English fragrant as I remember recent tins
of EMP being. It showed a rather fine cut that I thought a little odd for a pipe tobacco. It was a little moist for lighting and I set some out to air out for about thirty minutes. When I loaded up my pipe I noticed that the odor of the sample had decreased to a lower level and seemed to be more of a Virginia forward aroma, in keeping with reviewer Big Train's review of 2016-09-03. So, I lit up and discovered that I couldn't develop any taste or aroma in the smoke. This caused me to puff harder and learn the lesson of not heeding reviewer Jimlnks' advice 2016-09-30 that hard puffing would be rewarded with tongue scorch. I never got anything much out of the top third of the bowl. This blend did develop a little backbone in the middle third but stumbled a bit in the bottom third. The taste and aroma and smoking satisfaction were thin and weak all the way through the bowl and left me wanting more of everything. The only blend purporting to be an English that smokes weaker is Davidoff Royalty; a blend that I simply could not identify as an English blend. The Devil's Own most closely resembles Cornell and Diehl's Crooked Lane, though Crooked Lane is a little stronger. Not being offensive or anything, I rate this blend as two stars.
Pipe Used: Northern Briars sea urchin
PurchasedFrom: smokingpipes.com
Age When Smoked: 2 yrs old
6 people found this review helpful.
Please login to upvote this review.
Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Apr 13, 2020 Medium None Detected Medium Tolerable
Drucquer & Sons continues to blow me away. I got the Levant Mixture, and it quickly became one of my top 5 english blends, and I've been burning through tins. Then I tried Trafalgar and Prince's (both wonderful, but a little too light for my usual tastes). Blairgowrie fills the "aged Nightcap" role for me wonderfully. And now I finally got around to Devil's Own, and it may be my favorite of the bunch, at least partially because I have nothing like it in my collection. Unique and great.

I'm not a huge burley guy, particularly straight, but WOW if it isn't incorporated beautifully here. The nutty burley comes through with its lovely, crisp, acrid notes, and then gets blended back in with the cavendish and virginias.

The closest analogy I have for this blend is C&D's Americana, which is very close. The burley is a little more pronounced in Americana and the complexity slightly less there than Devil's. This is complex, but somehow remains an amazing every day mixture, appropriate sweetness and richness, no casing. Burley is the star player, but very very well supported by its compatriots, and never gets rough or overwhelming. The cavendish is the second-place component, and offers great body and mouthfeel.

Another popular comparison may be Haunted Bookshop, but they really are different smokes. Although both burley based american blends, Devil's Own has a much richer mouthfeel and more complexity due to the other non-burley ingredients at higher percentages. Haunted Bookshop has more "rawness" to the burley, which it puts more front-and-center than the Devil's Own (although Devil's Own has a nice burley vibe to it, don't get me wrong).

D&S continues to kill it. Wow.
Age When Smoked: A few months
4 people found this review helpful.
Please login to upvote this review.
Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Jan 06, 2020 Medium None Detected Medium Tolerable
I picked this one up on sale when I needed to reach the free shipping point on Smokingpipes.com after reading the reviews and also liking the tin design and name even.

The tin is dated 2-23-17 so it is approaching 3 years of age when I opened it on New Years Day 2020. Over the holidays, I had been smoking more aros than usual and I wanted something different than my usual flakes so I decided on this one.

The tin has an interesting note to it with the sweetness of the Virginias leading to my nose. The moisture content was great and the tin was stuffed to the top was ribbons of multiple colors of tobacco. The Golden VA's stood out against the darker ribbons. It was easy to pack and light. Burns easy with minimal relights required.

Taste wise I feel the Virginias held the high-ground with grassy/sweet-hay. The sweetness was not overpowering at all. The Cavendish might be contributing there I'd assume in support to the sweetness. The Latakia was in the woods somewhere throughout the bowls. My wife picked up on the campfire notes more in the roomnotes than I did in the actual smoke until usually the last third of each bowl. The latakia left a pleasant after-taste which is common with me. The burley seemed to stay in the background also. It comes through as maybe a little nuttiness or darker notes in the back.

For a blend with so many components, I feel that they work well together to give a complex easy smoke which pared quite well with a glass of bourbon or an English style ale as an after-dinner treat.

To me, the nicotine level seemed mild as I felt its presence but it "kick" me as hard as some other blends seem to.

This wouldn't be an all-day smoke for me, I prefer those to be "simpler" and require less thought but it might find a home in my extended rotation for times when more complexity is what I seek.
Pipe Used: sav 320, fat authors
PurchasedFrom: Smokingpipes.com
Age When Smoked: 2-23-17 tin
4 people found this review helpful.
Please login to upvote this review.
Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Oct 25, 2019 Medium None Detected Medium Tolerable
Based on a tin dated 10/2016.

I have never had the original of this blend. This review is of the version blended by G.L. Pease.

I mention in some of my other Drucquers reviews that I enjoy the classic tin art and the tobacco cans.

The smell of the blend is sweet and kind of tangy and bready. I don't really smell much Latakia, not like I did in Red Lion or Blairgowrie (I mention those because they have a supposed minor portion of Latakia, but still detectable, to me).

The taste is immediately tangy and grassy, even spicy, with a hint of Latakia. It can get a little harsh and does burn hot in the beginning, but taking it slowly can thwart all of that. There is a sweet, wineyness and fruit-like character. There are some of occasional cocoa notes that mix with a bread sweetness that develops. The Latakia is pretty noticeable when puffing, which I like when I get towards the middle and final third of the bowl. The Latakia offers a balance to the creamy, bready sweetness. At first, this tasted closer to Red Lion than it does Inns of Court. After weeks passed, my opinion changed and it is kind of closer to Inns of Court, and Red Lion is much different.

The strength and taste are medium, and so is the nicotine.

I really enjoy this. I would recommend this to people that like lighter mixtures. But, saying it's 'lighter' doesn't mean there is little flavor. This is flavorful, but it's not heavy on the Latakia. The Virginia provides a relative fullness and zestiness to this. It's an interesting blend with some complexity, but what I love most about it is that it's not overly complex. It's somewhat simple, and sometimes simpler is more special, for me. It burns well, the cut is easy to work with. This is consistently a joy to load and smoke, just as it was smoking through Inns of Court.
Pipe Used: Bent apple, Canadian, bent brandy
PurchasedFrom: Smokingpipes.com
Age When Smoked: 3 years
3 people found this review helpful.
Please login to upvote this review.
Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Oct 06, 2019 Mild to Medium None Detected Mild to Medium Tolerable
After Trafalgar, which I loved, this is my second Drucquer "replica" blend. A light-medium English, I could see this as a tobacco that fits as an alternative to Dunhill's Early Morning... if it weren't that it's a style that I actually don't care much for.

The aroma in the tin is nutty, ripe and delicious: not much Latakia, but good red Virginia and an obvious hint of Burley earthiness. The problem with me, is that the smoking experience is not exciting. It's a limitation of my tastebuds: I usually enjoy blends with no Latakia at all, or blends with a lot of Latakia and orientals, but I rarely enjoy "the middle ground". It has body (thanks to the Burley), it's a refined and nuanced complexity of flaovur, but for me it remains on the bland side.

Well made and with leaf of the usual high quality, but not my style, sorry. If you like just a bit of Latakia in your English blends, give it a try though: it might fit your taste much more than mine.
Age When Smoked: 3 years
3 people found this review helpful.
Please login to upvote this review.
Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Nov 11, 2019 Medium None Detected Medium to Full Tolerable
This is distinctive mixture, but I wouldn't call it an English. This is a Virginia/Burley/Cavendish/Latakia blend in which the latakia is mildly condimental. So what makes this memorable? The sweet and grassy notes are mixing with a delightful citrus note with just a hint of barbecue flavor wafting through on occasion backed up with just a hint of nuttiness. This burns very well and is a slight change of pace for the non aromatic smoker.
Pipe Used: Algerian Briar Bent Rhodesian
PurchasedFrom: Smokingpipes
Age When Smoked: 6 months
2 people found this review helpful.
Please login to upvote this review.
Reviewed By Date Rating Strength Flavoring Taste Room Note
Feb 12, 2023 Medium None Detected Medium Pleasant to Tolerable
Tin note of tangy vinegary fruit and fermented vegetation. Tobacco is a Ribbon cut of yellowish tan, light brown, brown and black. Moisture content is great. Burns moderate with few relights. The strength is medium and nic is mild to medium. No flavoring detected. Taste is medium and somewhat consistent, with notes of floral, tart fruit, very spicy, very woody, musty hay, lemon zest, very acidic, orange peel, dry, molasses, tangy citrus, spices, toast, bitter, grassy, sugar, a sour fermented vegetation background note, and a peppery retro. Virginia is leading with Burley and Cavendish supporting. Latakia supporting from the sidelines. Room note is pleasant to tolerable, and aftertaste is good.
Pipe Used: 1992 Ashton Sovereign XX Billard
PurchasedFrom: smokingpipes.com
Age When Smoked: 4 years
0 people found this review helpful.
Please login to upvote this review.

target="_blank"