Hearth & Home LJ Heart Burley

This one just did not excite me at all. I found it to be a lot like Carter Hall, but not quite as tasty. It, no doubt, had less of the chemical humectants that irk so many pipers including myself, but I still would prefer to smoke Carter Hall. As you may tell it does not fare well from my view point. I don't typically expect big flavors from predominately burley blends, but this is just too bland. Perhaps I am just too used to these burley blends carrying more of a topping than I otherwise detect, I am not sure.

I will say that I am a big fan of ABF, and as far as I know, it does not have a heavy topping (I subscribe to the school that all tobaccos have some topping.) Nor does Uhle's Blend 00 which is becoming one of my favorite Burleys. I don't think it is fair to slam this blend on that alone, but I also find H & H's own Classic Burley Kake to be vastly superior to this blend. It is for this reason that I cannot really recommend this blend.

At the same point, I can't give it one star as nothing really repulsed me about the blend. It is comfortable enough to smoke, It does seem to be pretty natural in taste and appearance, the moisture content was great and the burning properties were fine as well. It would probably work fantastic as a blender. It is for this I will somewhat Recommend.

Without aging, this is the most schizophrenic blend I have ever tried. Un-aged, it is has a pleasantly mild, slightly sweet burley flavor for the first half of the bowl, then it suddenly swings to a rough, bitter, overbearing fire cured burley flavor which is remarkably similar to the flavor you get at the bottom of the bowl when breaking in a new briar. Aging mitigates this, but it was not until I aged my sample a full year that the entire bowl was enjoyable. The black cavendish gives it a nice room note, though it's flavoring is only slight while smoking. All in all a good, but not great burley blend with good packing and burning characteristics. After aging, it is somewhat like C&D Haunted Bookshop, with a better room note but not as good a flavor.

The two ounces of this I received in my Hearth and Home sampler pack were so dry you could crunch them like cornflakes. I smoked a bowl right out of the bag like that, and while it burned quickly and produced a large volume of smoke, it did not bite. I proceeded to rehydrate it, and it absorbed some of the moisture from the wet towel, but not much.

Whenever I am sampling a tobacco that is new to me, I give it a couple of smokes in a Missouri meerschaum corn cob, a regular meerschaum, and then in one of my briars. This smoked fine in all of them, left very little fragments of tobacco at the bottom, and hardly any moisture, despite it burning so quickly.

So why the low rating? The taste was simply not there. There was a slight nutty flavor and a little touch of sweetness, but nothing more. I've sampled burley blends like Prince Albert and Carter Hall and this was similar. It is okay, but nothing special. It produces more smoke than flavor and that makes it not worth purchasing a second time.

I never thought I'd say this about a burley blend, but this stuff just won't burn. Much like C&D Crooner, it's relight, relight, relight. I get tongue bite from the constant application of flame. It's not that it needs to be dried out, either, as the bottom half of the bowl, when I get tired of trying to smoke it and dump it out, is pretty much completely dry.

Something is seriously wrong with this stuff.

UPDATE Jan 20 2010: I dried some of this out earlier today for a good hour in front of my laptop fan, and after smoking 2/3rds, the remainder just absolutely will not burn, even with an Old Boy butane. I smoke pretty much anything, and usually give blends a good amount of time before I move on, but this will probably be the first bag of any tobacco that I end up giving away. It doesn't like to burn, and even when it does, the smoke to me is thin and acrid, probably due to the deer tongue.

I'm a little less enamored of this blend than most others, I guess. LJ Heart Burley is not at all a bad tobacco, but right now we pipe smokers are awash in intriguing, innovative and often excellent Burley-based blends. Burley is the new black, or something. Anyway, I can't see this tobacco as sitting anywhere beyond mid-tier in the Burley quality hierarchy.

The tobacco arrives exceedingly dry. So weightless is this stuff that a fruit fly passing gas nearby is enough to blow the little fish food flakes across the desk. I'm aware that most of us resent paying for water when we buy tobacco, but this is a bit much.

It's not the easiest tobacco to load, but it does behave well in the pipe. I found it curiously prone to bite, but that must be just me, given the bite-free experiences of other reviewers.

Where I fault LJ Heart Burley is in the lack of integration of its flavors, which seem to swing like a pendulum between Cavendish-induced sweetness and a dry and woody Burley flavor. I'm fond of Burley and fond of smoking it in cobs, but I have to confess that the flavor profile of this tobacco reminded me most of the taste you get when you start to smoke the shank at the bottom of a cob bowl. And that, my friends, is not a pleasant taste.