Cornell & Diehl Burley Flake #2

I decided to let Burley Flake #2 serve as my introduction to the quartet of flakes that now form this little C&D collection. On paper, it appears to have the least condimental leaf, so it seemed to be a good place to get a sense of the base Burleys in these Burley Flakes. Luckily (or not…we'll see) I already own tins of the others, because if I'd based future purchasing on my experience with #2, I doubt I'd ever get around to adding them to the tobacco shelf.

The flakes are familiarly C&D—that is, fairly thick in the slicing and more loosely pressed than most other flakes. Tin aroma is slightly grassy with a mild, chutney-like sweet-and-sour quality. Moisture levels were well-nigh perfect and I decided to rub out the flakes on most occasions.

Truth is, nothing I did seem to make any difference with this flake. Rubbed out, folded and stuffed, rolled into a plug, fresh from the tin, dried, aged for six months…Burley Flake #2 remained irredeemably dull. On the palate, the smoke remained a little bitter and a little astringent. The smoking qualities were fine—dry, biteless, pleasingly smoky—but the flavors are painfully muted. I confess that I consigned the last half dozen bowls of the tin to rolling papers, and it seemed to fare much better there. Burley Flake #2 now occupies the top of my list in the cigarette-ish pipe tobacco category.

It's entirely possible that my expectations were too high for this flake from the start. I'm a huge fan of numerous C&D blends and C&D Burleys in particular—Epiphany and Old Joe Krantz, for example, are favorites. I suppose that in those tobaccos the condimental leaf rounds out the Burley base in ways that are more appealing to me than does the red Virginia in this flake.

It's also true that in the back of my mind, I may have been looking for a local competitor to my all-time favorite Burley, Solani's Aged Burley Flake. If so, Burley Flake #2 falls way short of the Solani standard. Where the Solani product benefits from the aromatic hangover of standard Burley casings such as cocoa and coffee, Burley Flake #2 seems pale and thin tasting because of their apparent absence. Some will no doubt prefer #2 because of this. But I'm afraid that I'm not one of them. I prefer more richness, depth, fatness, oomph...whatever you want to call it.

I'm still looking forward to hearing the rest of the quartet, but I can't say that Burley Flake #2 has lit a fire under my easy chair and inspired me to pop them open any time soon.