Scandinavian Tobacco Group (STG) Velvet

This is a drug store burley. Burns well down to ash. It is the mildest tobacco I have ever smoked. Very flat tasting, Prince Albert would be preferable because the burley in the Prince stands up and shakes your hands better than this. Wallflower of the tobacco world. I'm not saying its bad, there is bad out there, it's just very ...'smooth' I guess as advertised.

Good smoke, easy on the wallet and quite consistent as far as taste and cut are concerned over the years. good all day smoke for those that love burley.

Now here is a very good, aptly named, simple, well behaved no frills Burley. Its smooth, creamy and nutty. It's mild and easy on the tongue. Like most burleys this sings in a cob, but also smokes great in a Meer or briar. This is one that can be smoked while doing any activity and if smoked to fast, does not loudly protest by biting. It packs easy, burns clean and even to the bottom of the bowl. Smoked slowly while relaxing with a beverage of choice, brings forth the creamy nutty flavor a good burley will. The price is also agreeable.

Doing my own tour of the old "drug store" tobac's, I've spend some time with this blend. My intro to this blend was in college when I smoked up a pouch bought in the student union book store. I recall a reasonably pleasant smoke but it tongue bit me big time. So I set it aside for all these years. A couple of months ago I bought several old pocket tins, unopened, and have smoked a little from each, as well as from a newly purchased foil pack ($1.75 about a month ago) I got at the local grocery store. My oldest tin, with no bar codes, was manufactured by Liggett and Myers; the newest by Pinkerton but referencing "The Liggett Group". My pouch just says Pinkerton.

The new pouch revealed a slightly moist, unexciting burley that packed and lit easily. Not much casing, if any, here. A hint of sourness behind a simple burley smoke. Didn't bite me at all this time, wasn't wet in the bowl. I probably won't go back to this very much. I'd prefer PA or Kentucky Club, as personal preference.

The old tobac, however is a different thing! Very dry in the tins (no suprise, it's years or decades old), smokes very cool and has a nicely understated aroma that I believe is from a fermentation as opposed to casing. I wish I could describe it, just a tiny bit sweet but with an honest burley taste in the foreground. The older tins are a wonderful smoke and I'll smoke all of the old stuff I can get my hands on. (3/05)

After reading Jon's earlier review, I was not sure I wanted to try this blend, although I'd heard from others that it was a decent tobacco (for an classic 'drug store' style blend). Fate intervened in the form of a 14 oz can of Velvet I acquired at a 'garage sale' one weekend. The unopened can taunted me for a couple of days till I was bold enough to give it a try. I cracked the vacuum seal to find an aroma that smelled not so sour as 'boozy', as if the blend had been topped with some kind of alcohol. Whether this is true, or whether this is a fermented tobacco aroma, I'm not sure, but it has a rich and appealing aroma. The tobacco itself is mottled brown and coarse cut, and is very soft to the touch, not at all tacky or clumpy as some cavendished blends are. The tobacco loaded and packed easily, and upon lighting, delivered a smooth, nutty, but very mild smoke. Expecting a much stronger flavor from this burley, I proceeded slowly, and the bowl soon went cold. On relight, the smooth and mild flavor resumed, both surprising and encouraging me to puff away and enjoy the ride. There is undoubtedly some kind of topping in the blend, but it was neither obtrusive nor distracting, and the mild, no-nonsense burley flavor continued throughout the bowl and down to a grey-white ash-topped dottle. Occassionally blowing back into the bowl kept any moisture from accumulating in the stem, resulting in a fairly dry smoke, with only one pipecleaner run through about mid-way in the 45 minute session. Several subsequent bowls, in a variety of pipe types and sizes, resulted in the same experience, with the exception of a hotter smoke in the smallest pipes, and the coolest (and dryest) in a meerschaum calabash. This very mild blend should offend few smokers, but likewise, the mildness won't impress those who expect a more rich and bold-flavored bowl. If you expect all burleys to be rough and hot smoking, this blend may surprise you. It is, as advertised, a smooth smoke.

With an aroma that I can only describe as sour, this blend had me weary from the get go. So odd was the aroma of the first pouch I opened, that I bought several more from various locations to see if I had just stumbled upon a bad lot of it. It seems not, all of them had the same sour aroma. Once I got past the aroma and packed a bowl of it, the acrid taste replaced the aroma as my chief annoyance. Also, this blend is so heavily cased that it began to gurgle almost immediately. It took me an average of a dozen pipe cleaners to maintain a moisture free smoke with this blend, an amount of work that is not equal to the amount of pleasure it provided.

During my recent exploration of old time American Codger blends, I had to try this. I procured a pouch in December 2019. I opened the pouch in September 2023. The tobacco inside is still quite moist and need some drying time before I can smoke it. Bag note is overwhelming anise flavor. I wasn’t able to detect any underlying tobacco through the flavoring in the bag note. I recommend drying this tobacco about 30 mints before firing it up, or leaving the pouch open for a couple weeks to breathe the air. Once I fire it up the anise flavor didn’t seemed to be that pronounced. I can still taste the flavoring but the underlying nutty, earthy, and woodsy burley comes through fairly easily. Burns really cool, doesn’t get hot even when pushed. The flavoring in this tobacco may ghost the pipe a little. The ghost will go away with a couple of bowls of something else. Nicotine level is medium. Doesn’t get harsh or loose flavor when pushed. Could have been more palatable for me with a milder dose of top flavor. A middle of the road two star blend for me.

Well, it was a rite of passage, I suppose. When I started smoking a pipe in 1979 I started right off with Dunhill and Balkan Sobranie and a few house blends from the tobacconist. For forty years I never even looked at drugstore OTC blends. But come down-time during the Covid shutdowns I thought maybe I’d systematically explore all the old codger classics. So I did. A dozen of them. Some I actually enjoyed, some were of decent quality, and then a couple stood out as being bad. This was a baddie.

But my reaction could have been expected since I hate cherry flavoring in tobaccos, and can take chocolate only in small doses. For those of you who enjoy cherry blends you may very well find velvety luxuriance here. To me it tastes like a cross between Middleton Cherry + Lane 1Q, or Luden’s cherry lozenges covered in cheap, stale, waxy chocolate like you find at the dollar store. Tried drying and that reduced the candied cherry somewhat, only to reveal a new unpleasant taste: wet cardboard.

I tried three times in three different pipes, but could never make it through a whole bowl. Worst off, in a moment of glaring insanity, I tried my first bowl in a vintage Barling bulldog. Yep, it was ghosted by this ghastly abomination. Had to do the salt treatment. The other two times I tried it in my cheapest cobs.

I had to laugh when I saw a YouTuber who favors this blend and admonished all pipers to have patience getting to know a blend, and that you don’t really know all the mysteries of it until you’ve had fifty bowls. Bollocks. Sometimes you know from the first minute, so why keep beating your head against the wall? Anyway, this probably deserves two stars for being so smooth and velvety, but I’m giving one star because I don’t think sufficient warning has been given about the ghosting.

Smoking now:

The pouch note has an aroma of chocolate, cherry, and anise like an aromatic pipe tobacco. It also has this plastic Halloween candy smell, like sticking your nose into a plastic pumpkin with Halloween candy in it. Others describe it as a play dough smell. It’s odd. The tobacco is fairly moist. Opened the pouch a day before smoking giving it some air time before smoking.

The initial lighting had the most foul chemical taste I’ve ever had from a pipe. Good news is is that that goes away. The taste is very mild but it’s artificial cherry, chocolate. Leaves a play dough after taste that I did not welcome or enjoy and I’ve ate actual play dough… as a child of course. The retrohale is more of the same taste, very very mild burley nuttiness, plastic cherry, chocolate, and a harsh cigarette smell. Dried my mouth out and left my tongue angry and that subjected it to multiple bowls of this. Eventually I had to just stop because it was biting my tongue. Of the OTC burley blends I’ve smoked, this one is last on my list. I’m no tobacco snob but SWR I finished the pouch gladly. Carter Hall, Granger which I actually like, even Captain Black I’ll smoke before this again. Your grandpa might have smoked this but if he had access to what we have in the twenty first century he probably wouldn’t have. Literally gave it away to a tramp at the greyhound bus terminal for his RYO.