Mac Baren Virginia No. 1

This is a very light, honey sweetened Virginia. It has a nice toasty sweet flavor, but alas it *always* bites the ever-loving daylights out of me. Too bad, because for a mild Virginia it tastes good. My advice for the daring is to smoke this in a small billiard. Sip it *very* slowly. It tends to burn hot, so as soon as your pipe gets on the hot side, just stop for a while. Keep some water on hand, and sip between puffs. Perhaps you will have better luck than I did...

I found this to be a somewhat sweet and relatively bland one-dimensional blend. It didn?t offer much to get my taste buds excited. This is probably due to the fact that it does tend to burn hot and this will dissipate and diminish its flavor. There are better VAs available that will please much more than VA #1 and that won?t require your full attention.

A cigarette is to be smoked. A cigar is to be enjoyed. A pipe is to be savored.

I rate this tobacco 6.0 out of 10.

Mac Baren is a strange company. They have top flight production facilities and use high quality leaf. Then, seemingly in an effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, they do something to every blend I've tried to ruin it.

This can be terrific stuff, if, and only if, it is sipped very slowly. How slowly? We may never know, because it is so blisteringly hot that it challenges the technique of the most advanced smoker (you may pat yourself on the back at this point if you have mastered it). It is the pipesmoker's version of Zeno's Paradox- one can never smoke a bowl of this, because first one must smoke half a bowl, which in turn must be preceded by a quarter of a bowl....

I quite enjoyed the last bowl I smoked, but only because I was in the midst of preparing caramel, and had plenty of molten sugar with which to sooth my tongue.

Like to save seven bucks? Simply touch your tongue to the engine casing of an idling Harley. Voila. You've just experienced VA#1.

As I am just starting to experiment with Virginia blends I was eager to try this. I have to say however, that I am disappointed. It tastes nice and is definitely sweet due to the honey casing but that is about all there is. I was hoping for a more profound tobacco taste from the Virginias but it just wasn?t there for me. I found the tobacco taste to be rather bland and covered up by the sweetness. I?m a puffer and this does smoke a little hot but it wasn?t a problem for me, good thing I?ve scalded my tongue over the years with strong cigars. My local tobacconist has turned me on to one of their own blends of Red Virginias and a touch of Perique. I think I will stick with that, it is much more flavorful and without the casing.

Nothing remarkable about this blend, aside from the minor fact that I get more bite out of this than a handful of hot peppers. It?s not bad in a mild sort of way, provided you beware ? draw lightly and infrequently, otherwise you?ll not have taste buds for a week. A bit on the over sweet side, probably due to the addition of additional sweetening agents. I like to blend this with a blending Latakia or Perique. Adds a bit more dimension. Price is relatively reasonable to make it ideal for this sort of thing.

Book #1, Chapter #1, In Which God, Through the Agency of the Mac Baren Tobacco Company, Plays a Dark Joke Upon the Virginia Tobacco Smoker...

So why not, after all, given that God has a great sense of humor, take a beautiful broken brown flake, for which any Virginia smoker would fall down and praise the heavens (ah! the quality! ah! the cut! ah! the consistency! ah! the deep rich taste!), and add HONEY to it? Or sugar, or some other infernal Danish black-magic sweetening agent, --and turn that beautiful broken flake in one's pipe into napalm on a stick? Make it not only good and bitey, but make sure overlying all that luscious Virginia flavor, is nice treacly sweetness a la your average garden-variety Ameerican aromatic? And for a final trick, once you've rendered this beautiful tobacco incindiery and sweet as a Pepsi, why not just go ahead and make it IRRESISTIBLE. Yup, that's it, the dark joke to beat all dark jokes. This stuff is great! Everything in me, all of my hard-won purist natterings, go by the wayside when I'm around this tobacco. I invariably smoke some, I invariably love that weird combination of pure sugar and meaty Virginia taste, and I invariably burn my tongue, even if only a little. And I invariably want another bowl as soon as I'm done. Somehow Mac Baren gets me with this stuff every time and God gets a good laugh as I sputter again, for the hundredth time, all the reasons I should hate this stuff. And I just keep on smoking it. I suppose Virginia #1 is the way I work on my Virginia technique. One day I will perfect it, and I won't need Virginia #1 anymore. But I'll probably still smoke it. And every time, I'll wonder why as I load yet another bowl.

(In all fairness to this tobacco, it only bites the unwary smoker like a crazed wolverine during the first half of the bowl. The second half is quite nice and cool, you'll think as you smoke it--but be warned, of ye of child-like trust, that you'll wake up the next morning and realize you've burnt away the tip of your tongue, again.)

I'm a rather new pipe smoker, having done so for about a year now, so my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt. The first virginia I ever tried was Dunhill Light Flake and I really loved it. I bought this tobacco hoping that it would be more like a ready-rubbed version of that, but to my disappoinement it is not. While in some objective sense I can appreciate that this is a reasonably high quality tobacco, I feel that the Virginia taste that I was looking for just isn't there in sufficient quantity.

This tobacco seems to want to be smoked cool in order to bring out the flavor, and even then I don't feel like the effort to do so is well rewarded. For me anyway, it's difficult to smoke this stuff cool without it going out constantly. It's also a little more moist than I would really like, and I'm guessing that has something to do with the casing. I just smoked half a bowl of it in my Savanelli churchwarden, and it's pleasant but just not that captivating for me.

Being ready rubbed to an ideal size and with a perfect moisture content, this brownish tobacco packs evenly which results in a uniform burn. The sweet tin aroma was transformed into quite a tang that bordered on harshness @ the beginning of the bowl. Smoke this blend in a large bowl to minimize its tendency to burn hotly. It seems that the VA flavors have been enhanced (??) with honey or some sweetener that I just didn't enjoy. Although no where near an aromatic, I feel that other straight VA tobaccos or VA blends offer me a richer and more enjoyable smoke.

I bought a pouch of it out of nostalgia, for the review, and also to smoke new pipes. The ready rubbed cut, simple neutral flavor, low strength and a fair amount of sugar are a combination of factors that come into play when preparing a pipe for regular smoking.

Appearance: a 40 gram pouch released in November 2020. The tobacco is a blend of roughly chopped Virginias of three varieties, but dark literally a fraction of a percent, the base is made up of yellow and orange varieties, causing the blend to have the color of wheat bread crust. The moisture and consistency of the tobacco is perfect.
Flavor: a rather dense herbal note, a light honey-caramel smell, faint woody and earthy tones, a little bit of citrus. All very simple.

Taste: Persistent note of sweet dried grass, honey and caramel on the second roles, light lemon sourness, a little woody notes. The tobacco is slightly pungent at the start, giving off a small but noticeable amount of acidity. Mac Baren claims that all the sweetness and honey-caramel notes come exclusively from the tobacco, and the finished blend has no topping, but I'd be willing to believe that only if the honey note didn't fade during the smoking process. I'm going to assume that the leaves were soaked in diluted honey-sugar syrup before processing, pressed into a cake, and then chopped to get that rough cut. The flavor smooths out fairly quickly, acquiring the overall bouquet of a fairly decent, for its price, Virginia blend, with the herbaceousness clearly leading the way. Unfortunately, the tobacco clearly lacks density and volume in the flavor - there are almost no bread notes, and the woody tobacco loses woody notes in the process of flavor formation. The blend is empty, which is aggravated by its rather modest strength, a large pipe does not cause any hint of nicotine hit. The tobacco smokes smoothly and coolly, but unfortunately for a beginner, it is extremely intolerant to overheating, instantly losing the original flavor, acquiring bitterness and biting quite strongly even after three years of aging. The mixture burns into whitish ash, but its fraction is quite large. Aftertaste of tobacco is very weak, woody, slightly astringent.

Smoke from tobacco is almost indistinguishable in the room, has a slight herbal odor, quickly weathered.

What's the bottom line? Well, if in one sentence - during the reviews I met worse blends. This tobacco has a number of advantages - it is simple and pleasant in flavor, does not provoke overheating of the pipe, has a low strength and a fairly democratic price. Of course, it also has some drawbacks.