Blender's Gold Rich Vanilla

Make no mistake: this is a cheap heavily-flavored aromatic tobacco, but it is surprisingly not a bad smoke like I expected it would be. It smells like you could eat it when you open up the pouch, very rich, sweet, and fruity. It has plenty of vanilla flavor when you smoke and the room note is not bad at all. It's tangy and fruity; the flavor reminds me a little bit of tart dried cranberries on top of mild tobacco, which was unexpected but not unwelcome at all.

It's definitely too wet straight from the pouch. It left visible condensation in the stem of my MM cob pipe, and I was unfortunate enough to get some of that foul-tasting liquid in my mouth over the course of smoking it for the first few times.

I dried out the whole pouch at once on a cookie sheet, then transferred the tobacco to a small resealable plastic bag. Subsequent smokes have been a little bit milder in flavor, and the excess moisture in pipe has been significantly reduced.

You'll find the odd twig/stem in Blender's Gold tobacco, but I think that's pretty reasonable considering the price. I think I would buy this tobacco again, but not for a while since there are so many others I still want to try. I'd recommend this for a fan of vanilla/other aromatic blends on a budget.

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Not my top choice..but like all tobacco if dried proper and smoked smooth...it can be enjoyed. That being said the tin note is of pop corn and butter very stomach turning. Good mouth feel but very very bland flavor. Overall its not the best line in blenders gold.. I can only say its a good tobacco to buy all the tins to have around for emergancy or blend the flavors creating your own cocktail.

I bought this as my first pipe tobacco when I first started smoking pipes. Mainly because it was so cheap at around $13-16 for it. When I first tried this tobacco, it was extremely wet. At the time though, I didn't know much about pipe smoking and smoked it like that. Talk about major tongue bite! As well as it having a type of ammonia like quality to it when retro-haling. And I don't know if it's just me, but it doesn't really taste much of vanilla. It is sweet overall which I don't mind too much but still tasted like tobak. So, I started pipe smoking at around 18-19 and I'm 21 now. And I've still yet to actually finish it all haha. Mainly cause I don't smoke very often. It was somewhat smokable after allowing it to dry almost a year and now, almost 2 it's a lot better. I still have half a tea tin left of it but by now, it's not too bad to smoke and is somewhat enjoyable. I'd recommend buying something different though. I'm just too cheap to throw away tobacco.

I wasn't too optimistic when I picked up a bag at my local Walgreen's, but never one to judge a book by it's cover I dug right in.

The humectamt is really overwhelming with this one, way too wet right out of the bag, and I ended up having to dry it in a paper towel by mooshing it with my hands before I would ever think of putting it in my pipe. It doesn't really smell like vanilla at all, it smells more like raisins. The vanilla flavoring is decent, though, and once I got past the fact that it burned hot and wet I decided to not throw it away (I hate wasting tobacco).

I have since dried it as much as I could in the open air and cellared it, hopefully the aging will help to round it out, although with the plethora of other things I could be smoking I'm not sure I'll be coming back to this one in this decade or the next. Somewhere, fifty years in the future, I doubt exactly what brand it was (and what it was like when I bought it) will make a difference.

If you want a semi-palatable drugstore tobacco and this is all that's around, go for it. If you have an option to smoke something else, though, I would implore you to. Save your money and your pipe.