Mac Baren 7 Seas Black Blend

This was my 2nd wholly underwhelming experience with a Mac Baren tobacco & it will probably be my last. I wish I could get 1% of what's described but there's just nothing there beyond a wonderfully full, mouth watering aroma when you first open the bag. Then, nothing but disappointment. I wanted very much to experience all of the great things that describe this blend & in an effort to do so I tried it every way I could think of. I smoked it fresh & moist, dried & stale, barely lit & burned to death. I smoked it tight packed & lose packed in cheap cobs & nice Savinellis, filtered & unfiltered. I puffed like a freight train & slow smoked it all day long with the same results...a pleasant but mild room note & a tasteless disappointing smoke that I could've gotten from a bag of budget tobacco bought at my local gas station.

I thought that this was the worst of the 7 seas blend. The taste was just flat to me. I also got a mild tongue bite from it. The tin and room note are awesome. It just does not translate to the smoker.

Bought this in order to try out something other than the 3 different English-style blends I initially bought when I decided to try pipe smoking (S&G Squadron Leader, Dunhill Early Morning Pipe, Peterson's Old Dublin).

Opening the pouch, I was hit with the smell of raisins and plum. The smell of the "raw" tobacco is very strong and honestly, quite delicious. The tobacco itself is a uniform black, decently ribbon-cut, and my pouch was quite wet initially. Even now, 6 months down the line of pouch storage, the tobacco is a bit damp and sticky.

Lighting up the tobacco, it becomes readily apparent that while it had a very rich pouch aroma, almost none of that sweetness and fruit flavor carries over into the smoke. The tobacco tends to smoke hot, it leaves an acrid aftertaste on the back of the throat (none of the 3 blends I mentioned above do that for me), and it leaves a sticky mess in the pipe bowl after smoking. There were also a few instances of water buildup in the bottom of the pipe causing gurgling and at least once case of getting condensation into my mouth (it might have been more than once, but my brain has blocked out the traumatic memory, bleh!).

All in all, this tobacco is really more well-suited to working as an air freshener than for smoking, in my opinion. It smells great in the pouch, but smoking it has, every time I've tried it, been disappointing for me.