McClelland Tastemaster

I judge aromatic blends by three distinct characteristics – room note, flavor, and performance. Sometimes an aromatic blend will have a wonderful room note, very little flavor but will be easy to pack, light, and will burn nicely without getting too hot. Other times there's a great room note, good flavor, but unruly, hot burning, overly cased leaf that causes tongue bite and off flavors will ruin the party. By my standards, if good aroma, flavor and performance are all present, then it's a blend worth pursuing.

Tastemaster performs well in the aroma and flavor categories, but after smoking almost an entire tin, (which by the way never seemed to dry out), I struggled to keep this blend lit and performing well. Typically the overall result was a nice first half-bowl, with the latter-half often overheating & morphing into an array of messy and undesirable bitter chemical-like burnt sugar flavors. By the end of the bowl there's a whole lot of moist dottle to be had. Tastemaster refuses even the most liberal amount of dry time.

Concentrating on the appreciable first half of a bowl, I'd say that Tastemaster's chocolate flavor is more of a malted milk chocolate shake or chocolate cupcake with a touch of coffee kind of thing. It's very sugary. In fact my daughter thought I was roasting marshmallows in the garage. The smoke is soft, light, somewhat creamy and fairly sweet. As you can imagine, the flavor is also quite simple, straight forward and not too fancy.

Altogether this is an okay aromatic mixture that unfortunately was not a stellar performer for me. Considering the price tag for a 50g tin, I wouldn't choose to buy this again.