Wilke Pipe Tobacco Reserve Navy Cake

The Virginias are lightly citrusy sweet, grassy, a little earthy with very minor fruit and sugar notes. Very monochromatic with hardly any nicotine. The strength is very mild, and the taste is mild. Won't bite or get harsh. Needs some dry time. Burns cool, fairly clean and slow with a mostly consistent flavor. Has a light cigarette hit if you puff fast after the half way point. Leaves a little moisture in the bowl. Requires relights. Has a short lived after taste and room note. A completely plain Jane all day smoke.

-JimInks

This blend has been taken off the P&W website so i do not know if it is still available but i for one am not concerned. Carole has far better blends available and there are much nicer pure virginia flakes on the market.

This blend as a stand-alone is a boring low-flavored smoke. Used in a custom blend and it finds it's purpose. This tobacco has a dark flavor, extremely mild (like it was watered down) and difficult to manipulate due to it's elastic texture. Because it is so moist it is hard to get lit and many relights are required throughout a bowl. Once it gets going it's the kind of smoke that requires no concentration...good for puffing away on while doing other things like reading, driving, writing a review. My kids kept wanting the bag because they thought it was a bag of black "Gummi-Bears".

In the end I find that this is more trouble than it is worth, given the difficulty in rubbing, packing, lighting, relighting, etc. The payoff does not justify the work involved (sound familiar?).

I am normally a big fan of P&Ws offerings, but this one hasn't lived up to the others. I've not seen another like it in appearance: it looks like something I stepped in and scraped off my shoes. Quite moist, doughy, rubbery, it doesn't rub out very well; I could only cause littler chunks. Think composted tar paper. One must be careful in loading so as not to re-form the little chunks into a semisolid monolith. They are sticky and non-porous.

As a smoke, it's not that bad, just boring. Once lit, it is clearly a VA, but without the usual sweetness. Monochromatic, stoic, not much to recommend it. Mild in taste and nicotine. Cool burning and not biting. The room note is more cigarette than pipe. DGT simply returns more of the same, and it's still a challenge to keep lit. Bottom of bowl is remarkably bland as well, though I do like the sidestream smoke better. It finally develops some characteristic VA tartness but without enthusiasm.

Overall, it strikes me as overprocessed, like the soul of it has been extracted and I'm smoking the remains. I intend to use the rest of my sample as a blending base if I can get it to dry out some more. Even the most boring people can respond well to the right contacts, to paraphrase Rombauer in Joy of Cooking. I'm thinking of adding some Three Nuns to it so they can smack some knuckles with their perique rulers. (Post Script: I did, 20%. Very nice!)

There are many better VAs out there; my favorites are F&Ts. Pipeworks and Wilke has several outstanding and unique blends; this one just didn't make it for me.

Uncle Gar has perfectly summarized my feelings (and my notes) about this tobacco. I haven't tried Gar's trick of mixing it with Three Nuns, but I have mixed it with Full Virginia Flake with indifferent results. This really is tobacco processed to the point that it's not tobacco anymore.