Peterson Early Morning Pipe

I tried the Peterson branded one. I liked it, even though I'm not a big English blend fan. It's called Early Morning Pipe, but it's not one I'd start the day with, personally. More of an afternoon smoke in my opinion. I've got more of a sweet tooth, so I'd go for something sweeter and more mellow to start the morning.

Give it a try if you're into English blends. No complaints from me.

Though one of the classics-- Im going to break out of the norm, and say this is a bit of an abuse of Orientals and Latakia. Compared to other Oriental/Latakia heavy blends, like Skiff Mixture, It seems as though EMP's Flavor isnt full enough, This does not make for it to be an unpleasant blend. This one of my first smokes, and a few jars will always sit on my shelf as a safe smoke on non-creative days. A solid 2.4 Stars.

Imagine you and your wife setting up your best friend on a date with your wife's best friend. The plan is that all 4 of you will go out to a nice dinner together. Soon after everyone is seated and the wine has been poured, your friend looks down at his phone for the entire night, and your wife's friend brings up politics. Soon everyone is frustrated, disinterested, and confused. In the half-yelling confusion, you spill your wine all over your wife's dress (a dress which she borrowed from the same friend sitting across the table). You and your wife escape, leave, go home and watch a movie with popcorn and cheap beer. You two look at eachother and say: "wow - what just happened?"

That is EMP. Ok, maybe not quite that bad. But I have to ask... what happened? Golden and matured Virginias taste great together. So do orientals and latakia. So do all these tobaccos when blended together into a nice light English mixture (see, for example, Presbyterian). But for whatever reason, it seemed like each tobacco was just not quite there - each one was just disinterested in the others. The latakia was not doing its role as a nice smokey seasoning. The orientals were just there, but did not wow me. I couldn't tell what the Virginias were doing but they seemed to not get the memo to bring their sweetness or grassy A-game to Peterson's all day light English mixture.

This blend aimed to be what Presbyterian achieved: an all-day, light English smoke. This objective was not aquired. But, as I said, you and your wife still made it home for popcorn, cheap beer, and a movie - so not all was lost. It may taste like smoking burned hot air, but the tin note and room note are pleasant enough. I hope I just got a bad tin and that I'm wrong in my analysis because after all the EMP hype, I wanted to love this tobacco. I just can't.

This is a tobacco that I’ve been waiting to try for a long time. Finally, I decided to open an aged tin (almost two years). I had to smoke half a tin, using four different pipes, with and without filter, in order to give a final word on this blend.

It is a renowned blend and appreciated by generations of pipe smokers more experienced than me and I didn’t want to hurry with a verdict, but here I am, coming with my own, personal and subjective opinion. What I like may or may not like to another, what I feel and what another feels can differ. Remember t his.

So... we open the tin after almost two years and we smell.... we take a good sniff and... no special smell coming. It has a normal tobacco smell, more like a rolling tobacco or cigarette tobacco, but with a slight smell of oriental and latakia.

At first, I had to leave it to dry for aprox. 15 minutes, but then I began smoking directly from the tin. Now, when writing this review, I’m smoking it directly from the tin, in a straight biliard pipe with the filter removed. I only needed two lights and everything went perfect. It burns excellent, you don’t need to relight it and it doesn’t bite at all, even without a filter.

I realized that smoking this blend without a filter brings out more of its aroma. I also recommend this to be smoked in a nice ambient, in your room, in quiet and peace, at night... yea, at night with Early Morning Pipe. You can smoke it very well in the morning too, with a coffee it goes great. But I prefer to smoke it at night when it’s quiet and peaceful, so I can enjoy the tobacco and pay attention to what I’m smoking, having my senses more developed at night when my mood is calm.

The first draws were easy, letting the tobacco to light up on the entire surface. Further, the next draws brought a cool, smooth smoke. All tobaccos can be detected easily, and are very balanced, none of them getting in front of the other, but they’re all making a team. It offers a slightly smoky taste, of burned wood and a slight sweet taste of virginia. It has “something of it’s own”, a taste that makes it pleasant. I begin to taste the latakia only after approaching the half of theh bowl and towards the end. If I take a break, it leaves a good aftertaste of latakia and oriental which I can enjoy even after smoking.

My personal problem with EMP is that it’s too light, both in strength and in taste. Being a smoker of strong cigarettes, I like to feel the smoke. Even when I smoke cigarettes, you won’t see me smoking Kent, Parliament or anything light with no tobacco taste. I smoke Marlboro Red, Chesterfield and Camel, strong cigarettes with strong tobacco taste. The same applies with pipe tobacco. I like strong blends. I love tobacco and I want to feel it at maximum intensity. And EMP doesn’t help me with this... After smoking Nightcap or Elizabethan, I was waiting for something special, but in my case, it wasn’t. In my case, this is a daily tobacco, which I smoke when I’m walking my dog in the park and enjoying a walk in fresh air. Yes, unfortunately this is too light for me, the latakia is hard to detect (i’m a latakia fan), so if you’re crazy about latakia and you like strong blends, this might not be your type of blend.

Yes, it’s ok to smoke in the morning, but not to wake you up like a cold shower, but to wake you up slowly, peacefully... but it is too vapid for me. I like it, it’s ok, but just ok. It didn’t blow me away.

The Room Note is quite pleasant. It’s a bit similar to cigarette smoke, so cigarette smokers would prefer this in the detriment of a heavy latakia blend.

I think I would recommend this tobacco to beginners in English blends because it’s easy to smoke. And I would also recommend it to those who no longer smoke cigarettes, although they might need a bigger nic kick.

I hope I haven’t offended anyone, I am aware that I’m talking about a very special blend for extremely many smokers. But for me, it just didn’t work out.

I like Oriental-forward mixtures a lot. This one just doesn't do it for me. I loved Dunhill's Standard Mixture Medium and I love others, like Presbyterian, Gordon Pym, McClelland's Wilderness, and C&D's Tuskegee Airman. This one just tastes muddled to me and I have never had a wholly pleasant smoke with it. It's not terrible, but just kinda boring. Overall impression: Meh.

A straight forward mild flavored English-Oriental blend with a bit too much nicotine for my taste. On charring light Early Morning Pipe is semi-sweet in flavor and the Latakia is immediately noticeable. The first portion of the bowl is quite nice and I get a slight coffee note on exhale along with a twinge of an ammonia-like flavor. A pleasant spiciness does build a bit but it’s never overwhelming.

EMP performs well and stays lit nicely. It does seem to burn pretty fast but it still remains relatively cool in the bowl and on the tongue.

By Mid-bowl the flavors and strength build some and I start to notice a few more of the fragrant qualities found in quality oriental tobacco; there's a musky scent that's simply delightful. It seems to always be at this point where I hit my stride and experience something that is much more to my liking. However, this is also where the nicotine creeps in. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a show stopper, it's just not what I look for in a light English blend. As far as overall strength goes, EMP's tobacco flavor strength is Mild to Medium, but by end bowl I'd rate the nicotine build-up as Medium to Strong.

If you fancy milder flavored English blends but prefer more nicotine strength, EMP would be a nice choice. However, I can think of about a half a dozen other blends in the same category that I would rather smoke. GLP's Meridian comes to mind as does Sam Gawith’s Skiff Mixture, Rattray's Red Rapparee and also Presbyterian Mixture. These share the Oriental-forward flavor characteristics without turning up the dial on the nicotine drip.

I have often spoken up for a more restrained expression of English blends in the past. A via media, to use the Anglican term, is what I think best sought when dealing with bright Virginias and the always temperamental Latakia. Here is a mixture that has rather fallen short, though not by adulterating the smoking experience with a massive and pretentious quantity of Latakia.

Perhaps I am never again to be fully satisfied with an English blend, but even the more restrained approach taken with Early Morning Pipe, for me, fails to deliver. Upon lighting up one is titillated with the musky tang found in so many other fine Dunhill English blends. This is not to be the lasting or predominate flavor, however. The smoke very soon gives way to a mundane note of bland, hollow blonde Virginia that tastes like poplar wood smells like when it is burning. Perhaps one or two more times that true English flavor will reassert itself, but again it is not to last.

For my part, I will always reach for a far stouter and heavier tobacco to have with my tea in the morning, and do not generally understand the sentiment that lead to the formulation of Early Morning Pipe. It would seem that the experience I have had smoking this is similar to what others have described when experiencing what they perceive as the uninspired blandness of Dunhill's Elizabethan Mixture. Elizabethan happens to be among my favorites and I will be sure to take it over Early Morning Pipe any day.

Regards,

A. Morley Jaques

Based on my first few tries, maybe 10 pipes worth, this tobacco is over rated. I just put it in a jar, so hopefully that helps.

The tin note is nice. It has an inkling of an English but a little sweeter. The room note, at least at first, is also pleasant. The problem is that it tastes bad, like foul.

I've only been able to finish one pipe of this. The other 9 pipes have been tossed halfway through. At first I thought it was my pipes, so I cleaned them. Then I realized it was the tobacco.

From the tin, it's far too moist to smoke. I made the mistake of loading a few pipes without letting the tobacco dry. The moisture builds up in the dottle, so as the pipe burns towards the middle, the taste turns sour and a little like garbage. It's really foul.

So, I learned to dry it for 5-10 minutes, and that helped some, but I still couldn't finish the pipe. Finally, I dried a bowl's work overnight. This got rid of the garbage flavor, but it's still not "good".

Based on recent experiences, I'd never buy this tobacco again, but I do have more than half a tin moved to a jar, so hopefully it will age well - enough to make it smokeable.

Update: after aging this four months, it only improved slightly. No more taste of garbage, but I've got better tobaccos to smoke. One of the few tobaccos I've ever thrown away.

This one is quite hit-or-miss for me. I smoked it next to a cigar (Upmann) and i enjoyed it very much, it seemed spicy and lively. One time i smoked it next to Dunhill Apéritif, and it seemed absolutely tasteless... and even without any direct comparison, it sometimes wowed me, but generally didnt impress me... maybe because i usually smoke on the evening, and after a full, tasty meal, my palate is saturated and just doesnt care for EMPS delicate nuances...

For those who enjoy many pipes a day, i understand how this might be an interesting choice for an all day smoke, i can hardly see myself tiring from this taste, but for those like me who want to keep their smoking to a minimum, and who wish for every bowl to be an experience, well, i feel that EMP doesnt have much lasting appeal.. It is a delicate, lighter english blend, and thats it.

2017-06-21 Update: after about a year, i can definitely say that I do not really care for this tobacco. Its a fine blend, and following a few comparisons, i can now say that even though it is labeled as a ''light'' blend, this is still a rather full bodied tobacco, with lots, LOTS of leather, and also something meaty and bready about the core Va / Or taste, the latakia is there in support but not the star. It is not airy, or delicate, it is just muted. Overall, i find this blend rather bland, not tasteless, but bland.