Cornell & Diehl Red Carpet

This should be a 3 star blend. It gets one star for two major and glaring reasons. MOLD! I thought I had seen some in a bulk purchase of bayou morning that I made several months back. I figured that I must be an idiot,I must be wrong, and because the white mold was limited, I kind of forgave and forgot. After smoking this, I am more convinced that the bayou morning I had purchased was indeed contaminated. These broken flakes (they cannot be called true flakes as I could not identify one full flake throughout the entire tin) are a bit wet by c&d standards, though almost immediately smokable. The other massive problem that plagued this tin were the massive and commonly encountered stems. I would bet that by weight, the stem portion would take up between five and 10% of the total dry weight. I am not exaggerating. Putting the above evidence all together would suggest that quality control measures have suffered significantly. Being that C&D has had previous troubles with mold that have been well publicized going back to 2016, it is somewhat frightening to see that this is still happening. This is really a sad state of affairs. I cannot think of any other tobacco manufacturer that has regularly had these problems.

The smoke itself wasn’t bad. Upon opening the tin there is a sweet fruity and sour fermented aroma. There were very few sugar crystals noted on my young sample. Right up front, there is some rich dark fruit leather. The red VA is sour and tangy. There is some nice pepper on the retrohale in the second half. The last third is all about earthy autumn leaf matter. If I was blinded to the above problems, and all stems were picked out prior to my smoking, this would be a three star blend. I would warn all fellow pipe smokers to look out for tins dated august 2020.

The tin note is a lot like C&D's Opening Nights, which is a good thing because Opening Nights' has been my go to since McClelland went out of business. Because of the tin note I thought Oh Boy this stuff might be pretty good! Boy was I wrong! Very harsh! It was so harsh I can't even comment on the flavor. Terrible! I tossed the tin. I've been smoking a fair amount of Escudo lately but I'm still looking for a better VaPer, something a little closer to St. James Woods... The search continues.