John Middleton, Inc Hickory

This is the drugstore tobacco that gives drugstore tobaccos a bad name. I love drugstore tobaccos, generally. I don't like that Smoker's Pride stuff. It's a Johnny come-lately, anyway, and doesn't deserve to be compared with the old, classic "codger" burleys. Come what may, I'll always fall back on the blends I can buy in plastic tubs from the local Rite Aid.

Hickory, though, is just awful. From the sad, little orange flecks of warehouse floor sweepings that the blend consists of, to it's bizarre, artificial fruit and nut smell, to the way it bights your tongue no matter how you smoke it or what you smoke it in, to it's gutless, pointless, abysmal lack of any nicotine. It's bad, you see, and I don't like it. If Hickory were the only pipe tobacco left in the world, I would seriously consider smoking autumn leaves liberally mixed with earthworms and dog droppings as an alternative. If hickory were the only pipe tobacco left in the world, I would likely resort to picking cigarette butts out of the gutters near a homeless camp in order to get a fix. If Hickory were the only pipe tobacco left in the world, I would think that anybody who smoked a pipe was a fool or a masochist.

Thank heaven; thank heaven, say I, that Hickory is not the only pipe tobacco left in the world.