Sutliff Tobacco Company Barbados Plantation

If we are to believe the historians, rum flavored tobaccos may be one of the earliest forms of pipe tobacco as the development of the Caribbean colonies, the planting of sugar cane brought from the Canaries, the horror of the “triangular trade,” the distillation of molasses into rum, and the mass production of clay pipes are all roughly coincidental: the late 16th to the mid-17th century. The men of the ships, so the story goes, would store their ropes of tobacco in used rum barrels and perhaps give them a little rum soaking both for flavor and to keep the bugs at bay.

I grabbed a couple tins of Barbados Plantation a few years ago at a pipe show. Sutliff, as the company often does, was offering tins of most of their blends as free samples. I opened the first of those tins a few weeks after the show and wasn't very impressed. What I found was a sopping wet mixture dominated by Black Cavendish with an intense, somewhat artificial rum aroma—far more intense than any other rum-spiked blend I'd ever had. Barbados Plantation was so wet that it sizzled at the match, even after judicious drying. Of all of the various permutations out there in the world of aromatic tobaccos, I'm most partial to the Christmas cake/Rum family. But I didn't make it through more than a few bowls of that first tin. I used up the remainder by blending it with some neutral Burley to create a light rum aromatic.

Tin #2 has dried out quite a bit, which is all for the good. The rum flavoring, however, has muted some, though it remains artificial. The strangest thing about this tobacco, is that it seems that the heavy dose of wet topping has sunk down to the bottom of the tin. The bottom of the tin is now crusted with black tar, like a simmering pot of black bean chili that someone forgot to stir. I've seen this kind of thing before, but in 40 year old tins, not 2 year old tins.

I've smoked a few bowls of this well-aged Barbados Plantation. It's marginally better than it was when it was fresh. But it is still not even close to the quality of something like C&D's After Hours Flake, a far superior rum-sauced Virginia. Tin #2 is destined for blending, too. It blends quite nicely. That's the only reason it merits 2 stars.