Anthony Cranswick Grey Castle

A pungent oriental blend featuring Virginia (both bright and fire cured), Orientals, and Syrian Latakia. This blend is a heavy English and not for the faint of heart. It is an old style tobacco and quite dry. It will test your speedometer and force one to rev up their puffing cadence due to the wonderful flavor. This one is meant to be smoked slowly though, to pick up the leathery taste of the Syrian without antagonizing the deeply rich Virginia leaf that should also be savored.

Pipestud

This blend to me tastes like it dried out . Most blends on the market are at least good ... this is one of the blends that is on the lower end of it all . If you want a bland english blend ... then this is it

In taste Grey Castle is both hot and dry. Of all of the English and Balkan blends I have smoked, few have had as much tendency to bite. The Virginias are thoroughly unremarkable and near flavorless and the Orientals are barely noticeable. As a result the overwhelmingly hot and sweet flavor of poor quality Latakia is predominant in the blend. With what is supposed to be the base leaf giving such a paltry performance, the Latakia is rendered almost chokingly hot and acrid.

I smoked all of it that I had, but I believe that this was due to the fact that I will not waste tobacco, and to the tin in which the tobacco came, which is very attractive in its classic simplicity of design.

This is an attempt at an English blend that will happily become a very obscure footnote in the annals of tobacco.

Regards, A. Morley Jaques

This is a medium latakia blend. It has a slight bite, but this is a new tin. Perhaps with a bit of drying...

Update: Tried another tin, smoking it from moist-as-opened to dried-as-time-went-on. Bit every time. Could not keep from singing my tongue no matter how careful I was.

Looks and smells like pretty much every blend of its ilk. The cut was kind of choppy and it resembled more of a rubbed out tobacco than a ribbon. A few clumps. This is based on a 1.5 oz sample.

In smoking this, I find it to be neither as bad as most reviews say nor as good as the heaping praise review. The Virginias were neither the citrusy variety nor the baked bread variety. They provided little sweetness and even less presence. Throughout the entire sample, I don't think I tasted the Orientals, although there was a slight sour-floral character that popped up on occasion. The latakia was light but lent a pungent peppery character to the mix. In other words, this was not an "earthy, grassy, smoky, woody" blend, but more of a... "huh?" mixture. Really not much to say about it. It was boring, and the flavors of each constituent tobacco were dumbed down. I'm not sure how anyone could find this anything but bland - it's certainly inoffensive. I'm glad it was gifted to me, as I have a tendency to pay large for older stuff I haven't tried. If you see a tin on Ebay that is reasonable, you might find a use for it.