Samuel Gawith Balkan Flake

As I've said in other reviews, I typically smoke matured virginia plugs/flakes. In the last several years, I have been re-enjoying hearty english blends or more precisley, Balkan flakes/plugs.

Perhaps I have received different lots of this fine flake tobacco, but I find this to be a very nice Balkan Flake. I like everything about it, other than its not in plug form. I smoke a lot of SG Commonwealth which is a 50/50 virginia/Latika mixture and enjoy it very much. It is not as refined as I find this Balkan Flake, but both offer the smoker a wide range of taste and flavors. While this Balkan may be one dimentional, it none-the-less, appears to be more complex than many would think.

I smoke this in a group 4/5 straight billiard and do enjoy this any time of day. Coffee in the morning and a single malt at evening time, enhance this experience. Of course, as many have said, taste and flavor are very subjective. A pipe smoker for more than 48 years, I'm sure my taste are quite different from someone else.

...a pipe is to be savored.

Let's get any misapprehensions out of the way first, SG in their wisdom have christened this "Balkan" Flake even though there is not a hint of Turkish or other Orientals in the mix, go figure. What you do have is a very toothsome combination of Virginia and Latakia.

The presentation is dark and mysterious, with a rich smell of tar and leather out of the tin. The flakes are quite moist, so I prefer to rub out and leave to dry for a bit, it leaves brown stains on your finger tips!

Light it up and you wonder how a tobacco that provides so much flavour can be so easy and cool to smoke. The leatheriness comes through in the mouth, along with some bitter, dark chocolate and yet there is a faint honey sweetness on the after-taste. Beautifully balanced to my mind. I will add that I am smoking this alone at the moment, for all its positive attributes I am not sure that others present would regard the room note as amongst them!

I will add one final thought as a result of a response I got after discussion with another smoking friend. I wouldn't describe myself particularly as a Lat fan. This blend of course has it in abundance, but for me there is something about it that just works. As is sometimes wonderfully the case, an enjoyable smoking experience is greater than the sum of its parts. So if you have half a mind to check this one out without prejudice then please do, you may be pleasantly surprised.

Highly recommended.

Balkan Flake is indeed a mellow smoke with a variety of flavors as you work your way down the bowl. It has a nice, rich complexity that will keep your palate entertained. The flakes are beautifully put together and as one who rubs out his flakes, I found that to be an easy chore. The tobacco packs very evenly, burns the same, and was an absolute delight to smoke.

Most of the pipe smokers who are members here and submitted a review of this particular offering found Gawith's Balkan Blend to be an eloquent smoke and I concur.

This is a superlative smoke. A beautiful flake, in the top rank of SG's finest, and that's saying a lot.

As everyone else has observed, there's no oriental in this "Balkan" flake, just virginia and latakia as advertised. (Though a couple reviewers, including Pseudo Nim who contacted SG about it, learned it's called a Balkan flake because the virginia originates from the Balkans.)

This reminds me very much of Commonwealth, but subtler, richer and more complex. Though SG usually brags about adding some special "essence" to their flakes, they are conspicuously silent about it with this one. Maybe there isn't one here; but I would be very surprised if there isn't, because I don't know how else this flake's unique hints of cool sweetness would occur otherwise. It's not like the whiff of vanilla added to Perfection, but something slightly minty, or menthol (as others have suggested), or even "medicinal" as one reviewer put it. Indeed it's vaguely reminiscent, to me, of that unique flavor in old-school cough syrup that was a kind of cool metholated herbal mint which I loved as a child. This very subtle sweet coolness, whatever it is, perfectly fills an interstice between the not overly sweet virginia and smoky latakia, and it's lovely. The sugar crystals that cover the flakes like the dusted frosting on a powdered donut (in my tin, at least) augment the delicate sweetness to push the experience to the next level.

The flakes are thick and moist. I find that drying them for an hour really brings them to life. And I didn't see a need to rub them out -- folding worked just fine; and a single double-light was usually all that was required for the entire bowl.

A topnotch flake for the latakia lover. This one's a keeper for sure. Highly recommended!

Samuel Gawith - Balkan Flake.

Note, this is one of the blends I reviewed a few years back after shortly being discharged from hospital after suffering a head injury; it wasn't too articulate.

The term Lat-Bomb was invented for this! That could be the review, lol. Basically, if you enjoy Latakia this should rock your world: it's very cool, highly smoky, quite slow burning, and bite free (to me). The Latakia offers a lot more of the formidable smokiness instead of the cedar woodiness some often give, and this smokiness properly pushes the Virginia out of the way. There's no extra flavours, nor underlying nuances: it's a steadfast Lat-Bomb!

The nicotine's a little above medium, and the room-note's superb; superb, if your a pipe smoker'. I'm guessing non-smokers would loathe it!

Four stars, and straight back into my favourites list!

Highly recommended.

Update 13/09/2008 As there is so much fuss over this flake being or not being a Balkan, and I, in my ignorance, not being sure, I decided to contact the Manufacturers and ask them what they thought a Balkan was, and with 216 years of blending experience behind them, seemed like a pretty good bet they would know what they were doing. I was told that "The Tobacco's for Balkan come from the Balkan Region" and if I cared to look on the tin, I would see a map OF THE BALKAN REGION, and that is where these tobacco's come from. Now that to me, seems a pretty straightforward answer, and a pretty good point to boot. Now had the tobacco come from Harry Grime's greenhouse in Gassworks Street Wigan, there may be a point to argue, but they don't, and there is'nt. So

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IT'S A BALKAN !!!!!!!!!! At least in my book anyway.

Okay chaps, this probably isn't Balkan, but then I don't know what Balkan is, I bought this to compare with the gratis pouch of Erinmore Balkan Mixture I had received. As soon as I tried the first bowl, I knew this one had found a home, Balkan it may or may not be, as Sam Gawith says, it's 70% Virginia with a shovel load of latakia, and here I am, lighting it up, and and setting fire to a pile of lorry tyres, but I like it.

Its a good quality tobacco as you would expect from such a fine blender, cool smoking with loads of taste and flavour. Enough said from me.

There's something about a Lat/Va blend that pushes all the right buttons for me. Haven't smoked one yet that I didn't love. This one is no exception. I think it's the contrasting flavors of the two components that does it. It's a stark contrast and it wakes up all my taste buds. Medium in body and taste. 4 stars.

Medium bodied, earthy, spicy and salty. A satisfactory smoking for every season, every hour. It is 70 Virginia and 30% Latakia, could be mistaken for a lighter version of Commonwealth, in fact, it is NOT! The flake cut makes the difference.

Winston Churchill is supposed to have remarked, a propos a fellow member of parliament named Bossom "What! Neither the one nor the other!" To my mind Samuel Gawith's Balkan Flake also manages to fall between two stools.

The absence of orientals leaves a bit of emptiness which the virginia (FVF?) cannot quite fill. I do enjoy virginias with just a teasing hint of latakia - as also smoking virginias in latakia soaked pipes - and Balkans with varying proportions of latakia and oriental leaf. But this Balkan Flake falls into neither kind of experience.

Still, it smokes cool and has good virginia and good latakia. I got this along with a Balkan Flake by Bonds of Oxford Street and far preferred the latter. Unfortunately the establishment seems to have shut down.

REVIEW 15 SEPTEMBER 2008. So far I had changed my opinion of only one mixture, Odyssey. Now I must change my opinion of Balkan Flake. Since writing the original review (based on the consumption of one tin) I have smoked upwards of half a kilogram of it and it has grown on me. If one gives up expectations of Oriental leaf, this is a very good experience of smoking a latakia flavoured virginia, the virginia coming first. At the moment of writing, it is the perfect companion to the Goldberg Variations. Recommendation raised to four stars.