Wilke Pipe Tobacco Vermont Maple Cavendish

I read all the rave reviews about Carole's deftness with aromatic blends and I love maple. Seemed like a natural fit. I don't smoke a lot of aromatics but when I do, I like the topping such as here to be more that just a whisper or a suggestion of maple. I want to be hit square between the eyes with the flavor of maple. You can't be all things to everyone. If you're going to be an aromatic than dammit go with it. Nothing bad about this blend but nothing to float my boat.

I would like to see more more maple flavoring in this blend as well. The maple scent is there in the pouch, but when it is smoked it is hard to taste. The burn quality is great. Burns all the way to the bottom of the bowl and no goop. The room note is pleasant to tolarable. If there were more maple flavoring like in Town Topic, this blend would be a homerun.

Tobacco quality is never an issue with P&W aromatics. You're always going to get a good or better grade of tobacco to go with your choice of flavoring(s).

The aromatic smoker need only find the right topping to be happy with these fine blends.

I found the flavoring in Vermont Maple Cavendish to be on the week side (although it did seem to amp up a bit after baking in my glove compartment for a week).

This isn't my favorite P&W blend but it might be yours.

* * 1/2

I much prefer this to its distant cousin Rum and Maple. I agree with lustra: this is tasty, to the point you could almost eat it, without it being overdone. Sure enough a couple of friends may point out: are you smoking a pipe or eating breakfast? Who cares? A good Cavendish blend, mild yet not prone to tongue bite, "cozy" and friendly. I imagine the use of Virginias helps to keep the maple flavor at bay (I'm not sure if the Cavendish comes from Burley?)

Excellent for those early autumn-morning-strolls, and to make friends wherever you go.

Since mine arrived quite moist it initially took a bit of effort to establish a steady burn rate. I found that significant dry time, as in five hours on a paper plate, helped, though it was still moist enough to tell that it had been sprayed with something to control burn rate. But as long I don’t taste any deleterious effects, I’ll look the other way.

At its best I feel that this could warrant a three-star recommendation, with the understanding that it is a simple, one-dimensional, comforting, soft-focus kind of Cavendish blend. However, I recommend a modest size bowl (something like my Stanwell 139) so you can finish it in one go. The problem for me being that the flavor always fades by the end of the bowl, enough that at that point I’m only going to give it two stars.

One thing’s for certain, despite all the glowing reviews, this is not a four-star blend for me. This is an important part of using TR – finding a reviewer whose palate seems to be similar to your own, and also: look at more recent reviews, not reviews that are a decade old. Things change.

What I’m looking for is 1) lots of flavor, which this has; 2) that has layers of flavor to keep my interest since I’m not really into mindless smokes just to have a pipe in my mouth, and this is kind of a one-note song; and 3) something that maintains its flavor from start to finish, which this doesn’t. Additionally, the maple flavoring is on the mild side, what I get is mostly brown sugar and generic BCA kind of taste.

For me it comes down to the fact that I have firmly in mind certain reference points in each genre which are unmovable anchors in how I rate blends. In this case, not even considering four-star blends, there are two aromatics, Thomas and Choctaw, which I have both recently given three stars to, and this one simply falls short of that mark.