Hearth & Home Cerberus

It was produced at the Sutliff Tobacco Company facilities until 2018, then moved under the wing of Scandinavian Tobacco Group for a couple of years, but soon returned to the Sutliff factory.

The tin was vacuum sealed, an uncommon occurrence for Sutliff. Also, unlike earlier editions, Cerberus was slightly "thinner" - the tin now contains 50, not 57 grams of tobacco. The tin was clearly packaged in 2021.

The contents of the tin are a mixture of coarse ribbon tobaccos, dominated by the darker varieties. The different tobaccos in the blend are easily distinguishable, you can tell that there is a fair amount of latakia, however, there is almost as much Kentucky. Judging by the composition, there is no point in aging this blend for years. Out of the can, the tobacco is a bit dry, despite the fresh kneading. I had to keep it in the glass for a couple of days before it reached normal moisture content. However, this is a common story with Ouellette blends. When the tobacco was moistened enough, I opened the jar and decided to try it.

The flavor turned out to be powerful and dense. The combination of latakia plus Kentucky reminded me of the peat bog fires that so plagued the residents of Moscow and the region in 2010. Freshly chopped chamois with its sour-smelling leathery smell, some chestnut, nutmeg, coriander, black pepper and allspice were added to this base. There was no Virginia in the bouquet, barely perceptible boiled fruit I felt only after a couple of minutes of inhaling the smell, a good rubbing of tobacco in my fingers.

The main flavor note was the smoke-enhanced peat. The blend, however, is not a latakia bomb, the Kentucky nicely smooths out its peaty flavor. However, by smoothing it out, it also nails the creamy note. The Orientals, with their tangy sweet and sour flavor, add nutmeg and black pepper to the flavor in the background. A bit of burnt sugar remains from the Virginia, but the tobacco becomes slightly sweeter as it is smoked. The sharpness of the perique, noticeable at the beginning, almost disappears by the middle of the pipe, leaving a little in the background. The taste of the tobacco is initially stiff, but doesn't bite, and becomes quite mild by the middle. Smokes dry, cool, and slow. The strength is medium, not higher - even in XL pipes I didn't get a nicotine hit.

The smoke from the tobacco is dense and persistent, the smell is still reminiscent of burning peat.

The general feeling is strange: "let's drop this one, this one and this one, and see if we get something". As a result, the doggie turned out to be quite a mess - after tasting the mix, a quote from Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Engineer's Finger" came to my mind: "As I supposed, Sherlock Holmes - still in his robe - was sitting in the living room, reading that column from the Times that publishes information about the search for various persons, and smoking a pipe. This pipe he used to smoke before breakfast, stuffing it with all sorts of leftover tobaccos-they were carefully collected and dried on the mantelpiece..."

Is this tobacco worth your attention? It's up to you to decide. I think once I finish a tin of it, I'm unlikely to go back to this blend. But someone may like it - it's quite mild, though peculiar.

This is a big lat. blend. Lat. is very forward and to me over takes the other components. That said, it is not quite one dimensional. The orientals do come forward at times and are a little musty, woodsy, with slightly floral notes that do help break up the monotony. The dark fired ky may also add to some of the nuance but falls behind this and never really comes to the front. The perique does add a slight spice but not much else and the VA's, although seen in the tin were never really present in the flavor profile for me. There is just too much lat covering things up. So all things considered this is not a simple lat. bomb that has nothing else to really offer but there is a time where the percentage of a tobacco crosses a line that it takes away from all that the other components have to offer. This did that for me.

On another note, one that I seem to be the only one with an issue with as well but I will say it for my own future reference. This tin in the Marquee Series came with a plastic rather than the standard cardboard paper cover between the paper and the tobacco. It looks like plastic, it had a basic plastic smell underlying it, it did not impart that smell into the tobacco but I know from experience that over extended periods of time plastic does do this so all tins in this series need to be opened and moved to jars IMHO.

Not complex, even flat, if not monotonous. Even though dark-fired Kentucky bring more dimensions, it make Cerberus harsher and distracting.

Agree with the Lit a Kia's review: "borders on a cigarette or cigar-like taste and aroma. Suspect the Kentucky, but who knows? Could be the Orientals and/or Perique too. "

Yes, I can tell you just because of Kentucky.

I totally agree with King Weed's review:

"The smoking qualities of this blend are also confined to a rather narrow range at the top of the bell-shaped curve. Compared to HH vintage Syrian it smokes somewhat flatly and never strays very far from that median taste and aroma position already mentioned. I don't find anything overtly wrong with this blend but, on the other hand, I don't find anything that makes it stand out from it's very crowded medium English field."

By the way, I have compared Cerberus with Black House side-by-side: it is much stronger than Black House, which is mellowed by the Black Cavendish.

Pipe Used: churchwarden

Age When Smoked: three months

Purchased From: 2 oz tins from pipesandcigars