Sutliff Tobacco Company Creme Brulee #701

If there's ever creme brulee on the menu wherever I eat, I usually get it. Love the stuff. So, when I saw this tobacco, I was excited and intrigued.

Then I opened it.

Not sure what it smells like in the pouch, but it's not creme brulee. My wife agreed. I could smell some vanilla, sure, maybe maple, but that's all I could make out for sure. Whatever it was, I liked the smell, but I had already lowered the bar for it tasting like creme brulee, and I was right.

Packing my pipe was a very unpleasant. It looks incredibly moist, but when you grab a pinch, it feels like it was cased with Vaseline. Made a horribly, greasy mess all over my fingers, the rim of my bowl, and because it was all over my fingers, it got all over the bowl itself. I could hear it squish while packing it. Had to wash my hands after packing.

Lighting it was a bit laborious. I do the 2 step lighting, with the first light intended to char the top of the tobacco. Took quite a bit of effort to get it charred. When I tapped the charred tobacco down, it was a crunchy, sticky mess. Kind of like tamping Rice Krispy treats. Speaking of, when lighting it, it sounded like a bowl of Rice Krispies--popped and cracked so loud and hard, that at times, a teeny, red ember would jump out of the bowl. It required re-lighting fairly often. Lots of gurgling throughout. Tried several different pipes, with and without Denicool crystals and Nordstrom keystones--didn't make a difference.

The taste was really mild, with hints of something good coming out sporadically, almost accidentally. Vanilla maybe? It wasn't very aromatic tasting, nor was it pure tobacco tasting. Hard to explain. But the actual taste wasn't displeasing, it just wasn't worth all the effort I described above.

Room notes are enticing. People like it. Smells sweet, with that classic, pipe tobacco smell people love.

Another reviewer mentioned getting an "oil slick" on his tongue. I think I experienced that, too, although initially, I wasn't sure if it was bite or some oily film. After smoking a few bowls (this was a lot of work), I came to the conclusion that the oily feeling is not the bite--because the bite is definitely there, definitely strong and definitely changes the way you smoke it--but it's either truly some kind of oily residue or it's chemical irritation, from the casing, I suspect. Kind of feels like your tongue does after spraying Chloraseptic in your mouth--kind of phenol-y and kind of a tingling numbness. This phenomenon affected the borders of the top of my tongue--front and sides. The bite seemed to attack right in the middle of my tongue.

Cleaning my pipe afterwards was a labor of love (for my pipe), as it was akin to scraping out a glob of melted asphalt from my bowl. I don't think drying it out beforehand will help that much, because it was way more greasy than wet.

I might try sprinkling some to my other overrated tobaccos (Old Mixture 79, BLWB), which are similar to ripping open cigarettes, dumping the tobacco in a pouch and calling it pipe tobacco, in order to give them SOME flavor and to maybe slow down their burning rate.