Seattle Pipe Club Plum Pudding

Summary: a Balkan made sweet through the addition of Cavendishes with a plum-esque note from the Perique.

If you have not experimented with blending your own Englishes, this blend may seem like wizardry, but that is the same effect that makes your odds-n-ends jar seem amazing: when you add enough stuff together, the internal conflict makes the blend seem to have a lot going on, but the lack of balance means that it defaults to the lowest common denominator among its ingredients. In this case, that is sweetness. In this blend, I taste mostly Virginia sweetness boosted by both sweetened and unsweetened Cavendish, and on top of that, a somewhat mediocre Oriental-heavy English. This makes it basically a bad match for a mix of "My Mixture 965" and "Nightcap" with Cavendish dumped in like the Super Value "English Blend." It is however a great way for Sutliff to sell its $2/ounce blending tobaccos as a $7/ounce boutique blend promoted by influencers. There are many better Englishes out there.

I bought this as part of the battle of the blends deal from P&C and I am very glad that I did!Smooth. Mild. This is the tobacco daydreams are for. You light the bowl after picking a few chunks to break apart and you are rewarded with smoky goodness. Not anything harsh in this tin except the empty bottom after a week of smoking it. This is another wife approved blend!

I can't really add nothing that hasn't already been said about this top notch blend. This is without a doubt one of my favorite go to blends. It's a must try for every pipe smoker.

Mmmmm. This intoxicating incense is filled with a spicy deep aroma of cloves + BBQ + Chinese Five Spice + caramelized charcoal bits. If that sounds like a lot of stuff, its because my sniffer isn't refined enough to isolate a single smell in this bouquet. I'm not too sure where the plum or pudding part fits into the Latakia masterpiece, but who cares... this stuff rocks.

When my Bengal Slices were out of stock, I tried a tin of Plum Pudding, as it was suppose to be similar. While Plum Pudding was a bit more bright in note than the more charcoal orientated Bengal Slices, I would say they are fairly interchangeable.

Packing a bowl of crumble cake is an messy task, but worth the effort as these little bits of smoldering peat burn forever. Almost an hour later, my mouth was numb from the clover bite, so successive bowls of this pudding is out of the question. I like to smoke a periodic bowl during the week, as this is not a daily smoker (if it was, I would likely never taste another blend again).

** Note - I marked the flavoring as very mild, since I am assuming all the many flavors are just a natural part of the tobacco blends used, but this felt like a drug-fueled aromatic, so it is hard for this novice to tell what is really going on here.

Plum Pudding takes the smoker beyond what (likely) most folks would consider a pipe tobacco, liken this to smoking cloves in lieu of a cigarette.

Beautiful flake and fantastic tin note. Too much work to get going. I have worked with this blend numerous times. Ton of relights. Decent smoke once it agreed but then I did not care for the follow through. One of the few blends I consistently had gurgle with. I am in the minority so you will likely have better results but I like my Lat's....and this is not one of them.

Plum Pudding is a great name, but it could easily have been called Kitchen Sink. There has a bunch of good leaf in them thar tins! I really enjoy smoking this tobacco but I have found that it is one that you really have to concentrate on in order to fully appreciate it. The tin note is very subdued compared to what is inside. I can get Latakia and some figgy perique and the Virginias give it a grassy hay scent. Not strong at all, which surprises me each time I open my mason jar. The crumble cake comes in what look like slabs of beef jerky. I like crumble cakes and this one in particular I found that if you carefully cube it out, either by hand or with a knife. Rubbing it out can turn it to dust which ends up in your mouth and takes away the fun. When you pack this right, cube it up and gravity fill it. After a good first light, not really your typical charring light it loosens up, I then tamp it down good once to get that "soda through a straw" draw and then it burns to ash with no relights, repeated this a dozen times. Now the taste: Like I said earlier, this is one to contemplate. I get the orientals as the lead; spicy, woody and dry. Right behind that are the Virginia's and perique. The Virgina's and fruity, not sure if they are but they seem to be stoved that mellow and round them out. The perique is peppery and not very heavy but you know it is there throughout the bowl, especially on the "out through the nose" exhale. I am not really sure if this is a truism ( a word?) but in blends like this the Cavendish acts like a flavor glue that brings all of these great leaves together and harmonizes them, rounds the other flavors out and brings them together. It also adds body to the mouth feel. This to me is a 4 star smoke but I am only giving it 3 because I have found that if you don't sit and think about the flavors and really contemplate the smoking experience, it is missed and becomes a MM 965 like blend. You miss all of the beautiful nuances. I have smoked a few bowls of this while working in Excel and when milling out some lowers. It is still a great smoke but the real beauty is missed.

Plum Pudding is a tasty Balkan. All of the components work perfectly together. Nothing overwhelms in this blend. Good smoky flavor from the Latakia, nice spice and perfect natural sweetness. It's brother blend, Mississippi River may get all the hype, but Plum Pudding is everything MR strives to be.

It's fun to break this stuff up and try to identify all the different components. There's bits of pressed flake & all sorts of ribbons and chunks, in every color that tobacco has ever come in. Lots of components here, it says something about how much work had to go into making this blend.

The flavor is balanced. Unlike other blenders who need to throw one condiment or the other in your face while the rest of the smoke limps along in the background, Plum Pudding smokes like a careful tightrope act. The Lat is always there, the sun cured is always there and never too harsh or perfumed, the Perique comes and goes, the Virginia increases in flavor over time, everything does what it should.

This is one of those blends that gets creamy about midway through, it is super pleasant. It has a little bitterness on relight, but that only lasts a puff or two so it's a small price to pay. The chunks of pressed tobacco do a good job of moderating the burn rate after the cake is rubbed out ... it's a slow, cool smoke.

Plum Pudding is as good of a Balkan as an American blender has ever made. It was hard to get for a while, and it doesn't come cheap now, but SPC should be proud of this blend. Instead of chasing re-releases of long-gone Balkans with famous names, maybe Plum Pudding should be the stick by which the rest are measured.

Not much I can say that hasn't already been said about this great blend. Complex, but never overwhelming. So many things going on. If you are curious about this blend, just go and buy it. If you don't like it, I am sure someone will take what is left off your hands.

Regarding room note. I live alone, so I don't know how others perceive it. I enjoy it.