Boswell Pipes & Tobacco Northwoods

I’m not the guy to ask if you want a review with lots of food, dirt, and liquor metaphors. I smoke the tobaccos i smoke because they please me on a gestalt basis. And Northwoods hits on all 8 cylinders of my gestalt meter.

I was a big McClelland fan before they went down, and confess that most of my regular rotation tobaccos are VA’s and VA blends. About 50:50 aromatics, but not heavy/sweet aro’s. Not a big fan of the Frog Morton clan, although I liked FM Cellar quite a bit. My tastes have been drifting more toward Latakias and Orientals over the past couple of years, though.

I bought a 6 ounce bag of Northwoods about 6 months ago. Opening the bag, I thought I’d stumbled into a chemical weapons factory. The smells were almost overwhelming, although not entirely unpleasantly so. My first smoke was in a big Meer, which is how I like to try all new tobaccos. It smoked wet from the bag, and the flavors seemed to war with each other. I was not a fan. Second smoke was in a big old Peterson military bent (couple days later) and it seemed to have a smoother quality, mich more pleasantly so. I put the tobacco in a jar and promptly forgot about it until about a month ago.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been smoking more Lat blends lately, and maybe the blend has matured in the jar, I really can’t say... but when I popped some in a Meer again a few weeks ago it had become something really wonderful. Smooth, full-bodied, with plenty of rich Latakia flavor augmented by the rounded quality of the BC, and an under taste of VA sweetness. The vanilla topping, which was cloying at first smoke, had softened and no longer seemed to dominate the smoke. It seems I’ve come to really enjoy this tobacco, as 1 month later the jar is nearly gone. And Boswell is sending me a fresh pound of the stuff. I’m curious to open the new bag to see if it strikes me the same way as the first bag did. If so, I’ll pop it into a jar and let it sit for a good while.

A couple of smoking suggestions: this pipe weed benefits from a big bowl, as others have said; a deep bowl, like the churchwarden im smoking today, seems to really bring out the best in Northwoods; and slow smoking rather than puffing definitely reveals the best of it. Relighting seems to actually improve the flavor of this smoke.

So. Definitely a 4-star rating for this stuff. YMMV.