Charatan Eventide

After Dunhill discontinued their tobacco products, Charatan released a series of tobaccos designed to replace them. Eventide is their version of Nightcap, which has long been one of my favourite English blends. As soon as I heard about this, I couldn't wait to order some and try it out.

When it arrived, I immediately did a side-by-side comparison. I then smoked several bowls of Eventide in a few different pipes over the course of the next week. Here is my experience with it:

Upon opening my tin of Eventide, I was greeted with that old familiar smell... Nightcap! In terms of appearance and tin note, the 2 are virtually indistinguishable. As someone who was very fond of Nightcap, this put a smile on my face right away. I was fully expecting there to be little to no difference between the 2 blends. Unfortunately this is not the case when you light up. The first thing I noticed is that Eventide has a honey-like sweetness that isn't present in Nightcap. It is definitely not as strong in the nicotine department and also doesn't contain as much Latakia. There are some similarities but not enough to make Eventide a suitable replacement for Nightcap in my opinion. For a blend that allegedly contains the same variety of tobaccos, it borders on being one-dimentional. You get nowhere near the level of complexity and depth you would find in Nightcap.

Having said that, it's not a bad smoke. It packs well, burns well, doesn't get too hot and has a fairly pleasant taste. While I probably won't be picking up any more of it, I won't have any trouble finishing the tin I have.

Is it a match for Nightcap? No, but it is still worth trying.

Having never had the pleasure of smoking Night Cap, I can't comment on the similarities between the two blends but I'm even more disappointed I missed out on Dunhill's flagship after smoking Charatan Eventide.

It is near perfect moisture from the tin, burns to white ash and does not bite but it does burn rather fast and if pushed hard will heat up your pipe.

Three and a half stars from me.

I’ve been loving the Charatan match blends. Not because they taste like the fabled old Dunhill blends (I wouldn’t know but surely doubt) but because they are unique and have merit on their own terms.

That said, today I decided to compare Eventide to Peterson Nightcap (I know, this Is not the version of NC they were trying to match). I’ve been really enjoying NC recently and thought it’d be fun. These are my thoughts….

I smoked Nightcap first. Eventide second. Upon light up of Eventide and throughout most of the bowl I got a nice flavor of a sweet casing -whiskey maybe- that I didn’t pick up smoking on al its own (seemed to be casing as opposed to a topping). There was also a good amount more perique spice and a little stoved fruit coming through compared to the perique in NC. It reminds me of a blend my boss came up with (minus the perique) as an homage to Frog Morton’s Cellar, a blend he came up with at the demise of McClelland: Frog Morton’s Crypt which was a mixture of a English Oriental Supreme and Highland Whiskey.

Of the Charatan match blends this has been my least favorite *BUT* that should not demean the wonderful quality of this blend as all of them have been wonderful. I’ve enjoyed it even more as a follow up bowl after NC and will probably continue to use the blend in this way in the future.

At the end of this review I wish to encourage you to try this blend, not because it is a match blend, on the contrary; I think it is better to approach it as a blend unique to itself (as I would recommend with most “match” blends).