McClelland Frog Morton on the Town

This subdued and sweetened version of Frog Morton is tolerable, and in fact, downright likeable!

You must sample a tin of this at least once. It has a sweetness brought on by the cavendish and Basma. It also contains enough latakia to be earthy in flavor and delivers a nice rich, blue smoke. Because of the casing in the blend, though subtle, there is enough to prevent this blend from staying lit easily. If you don't mind the use of a few extra matches, believe me, the effort is worth it.

This is a blend that a lot of people will be pleased with - a very light all day sort of thing.. with a mysterious and alluring flavor and aroma - almost incense like.. My personal take on it is that it is missing a solid core that i prefer in an english/oriental/or balkan.. though for what it is it is good.. I also do not care for the way it behaves in the bowl and it certainly leaves behind a lot to clean up and a substantial ghost.. it might be the casing or the basma but I find it annoying and it destroys what enjoyment i find in the subtle latakia and oriental flavor.. wheter enjoyed slowly or smoked faster you will invariably find a lot of moistness at the bottom.. I think a touch of virginia would have really made this blend shine for me.. and in fact i blended this with escudo once and got very interesting results - something close to night cap.. Anyway don't hesitate to try this pleasant tobacco you will probably not have my personal quibbles because there is a lot to like here..

edit.. this smokes great in a corn cob.. very mild pleasant smoke with a great room note.. I'm going up to 3 stars.. with no mess to worry about in the cob.

This is a really nice smoke, but for my taste it falls just short of being perfect. The Latakia and the Basma are just right and very tasty. No complaint there. There's just not enough Virginias in this to suit me. A little more sweetness and this would be heavenly. Burn was spotty straight from the tin. Needs a little drying time.

Mild to medium in body. Medium in flavor. I'll doctor this one just a little and make it perfect.

FMOTT is a very nice English blend andI have enjoyed smoking it. Moisture level is good, high quality leaf, and a nice flavor. I would recommended it to anyone who likes a mild to medium English blend. However, I don't think that I'll buy it again. There is a sweetness and a topping that I don't really want in an English type tobacco. The topping is restrained, but I can't seem to get past the sweetness that is in the smoke. Don't misunderstand. It's a good tobacco with many positive qualities, which is why I give it three stars. Just not my cup of tea. There are so many other English blends that I like better and I like a bit more "nic kick" in my tobaccos. Don't let me dissuade anyone, but Frog on the Town's not for me.

This is a very easy intro to an Oriental-forward Lat blend. If you want something to put hair on your chest, there are much stronger choices out there. But let's not mistake strength with quality. If you want a pleasant intro to this style, you can't go wrong with this one; a base similar to McClelland's very subtle Three Oaks Syrian with some wonderful orientals added in (someone mentioned Basma; I wonder if there isn't a hint of Drama in here too?) along with McLelland's unique virginias. A cool, spicy all-day smoke.

2014-03-30 Blended FMOTT with Three Oaks Syrian in a 1/3 to 2/3 ratio and let it sit for a week. Really good! Adds just enough spice to the Three Oaks to make it sing.

2014-04-27 Added a pinch of FM Across the Pond to the above blend and it's even better. Ratio is about 3:2:0.7 Three Oaks Syrian, OTT, ATP. Calling it "Tree Frog." 🙂

2014-05-15 Bought a tin of Samovar. Exactly what "Tree Frog" was aiming for.

2014-08-26 This one's losing some of its lustre as I find myself liking more complex English and Balkan blends. There also definitely seems to be a subtle casing (vanilla?). Still a nice smoke and a great bridge between the aromatic and English worlds.

To start: FMOTT is NOT- it's NOT a Balkan, it does NOT have that smell typical of McC's ketchup, and it's NOT an aromatic....what it is.... FMOTT is a very well - blended, sweet and tasty English. It's the 2nd FM I have tried, better than Froggie when he was by my camp out here in da bayou-that fo tru:)

What it is....well, its is, a very well balanced, smooth, lighter than creamy, low level Vit N blend. It is forever slipping soft-sweet undertones of ....marshmallows type yumminess into the high quality well prepped baccy [English ] blend.

It's akin (literally) to McC's Legend-which employs Basma's sibling Drama to achieve a subtle earthiness. Basma is just plain sweet, but in FMOTT it's more of a turbinado sugar sweetness, a kind alternative to casings in that it comes across as what it is, a very sweet time-hybridized Va. It's to sweetness what Perique is to spiceness.

I'll try the rest of Froggies blends, even he Stave-based solely off the 4 star reviews. Then I will then decide if its a 4. FYI, this tin was nearing 3 years in the cellar, as I have finally learned the value of aging tins prior to smoking. Spot On McC, well done indeed!

First I would like to say that when I first bought this I was not very impressed as I'm used to smoking much stronger blends of tobacco so after I had smoked a couple of bowls I simply put it away in a drawer and basically forgot about it. Then last week as I was packing things up to move to a new apartment I found this 100 gram container of Frog Mortons On The Town that I had put away back in 2009. I had fully expected to just throw it out as it had been sitting in the drawer for nearly 7 years but to my surprise the tobacco was still in near perfect condition. So I did what every other pipe smoker would do. I packed some into a pipe and smoked it. I still found it to be somewhat weak in flavor but then I'm used to smoking strong English blends which are heavy in Latakia but I found that this tobacco had aged quite well and I would actually go out and buy more, if for no other reason than to stash it away for another 7 years and surprise myself again.

This is a very fine blend. Generally speaking, it is bit less rich than the original Frog Morton, but with a bit more depth and complexity - The latakia is not quite as far into the foreground as the original blend, but the addition of the oriental leaf (basma, I believe) adds that little bit of tang and spice that really carries the blend.

The tin note is very woodsy and smoky, and would lead you to believe that the latakia will be more dominant in the smoke than it actually is. The cavendish and the hint of topping add a bit of sweetness to the tin note, while the oriental (and the typical McClelland "twang") add something a bit bright, spicy, and citrusy.

The blend does come just a bit moister than I would usually prefer, so I've found that a few hours drying time is helpful - it also helps mitigate some of the relighting that typify most topped/cased blends. Drying is certainly not necessary, as the tobacco isn't so moist that it won't stay lit - it will save you a few matches if you dry it, but it won't cause you heartache if you don't.

The smoke itself is terrific. The latakia is its usual campfirey, woodsy, smoky self, but rather subdued. The cavendish adds some body and sweetness to the smoke itself, and the oriental makes it shine. FMOTT hits the sweet spot for complexity - there's enough going on that the bowl changes throughout and different leaves shine through at different times, but not so complex as to confuse the palate.

Perhaps the best way to put it is to say that all of components play very, very well together, without getting in each others way, and each having a chance to shine in their own right without overshadowing the other players.

There is a topping here, but I'm not sure what it is, exactly. Some other reviews mention vanilla, but I'm not picking up on that...there is a certain added sweetness at play, but I've found it to be a very non-specific sweetness.

As you'd expect, the intensity of the topping is substantially impacted by age. The fresher the blend, the sweeter the topping is; age goes a long way to dull it's influence. I'm currently working through 14 year old tin, and the sweetness of the topping has all but vanished, replaced by a different kind of sweetness that comes from the aging of the Virginia in the blend. To my own palate, age (even at 3 years) goes a long way to improve an already solid blend.

Although FMOTT works nicely in cobs and briars regardless of shape or size, I think it's at its best in a briar with a fairly large bowl. The added size gives the blend time to make the most of its complexity, and the added smoke filtered through the tobacco at the bottom of the chamber gains a greater richness.

Ideally, I'd give FMOTT 3.5 starts, but I'll round down to account for the tin moisture and the topping which can be just a hair too present in a young tin.

After clearing my palate with a roll and a bit of green tea I got out the tin of Frog OTT that I purchased a few weeks ago and popped it open. I was immediately met with a plesant smell that I perceived as sort of floral and citrus-like mixed with the familiar smell of latakia. This is interesting and not quite what I expected, but then again I'm not that familiar with oriental tobaccos. I'm not sure how much of this to attribute to topping and how much to the tobacco, but I suspect that at least some of it is topping.

After lighting up a bowl of OTT in my Savanelli churchwarden I experienced a cool rich smoke similar to that of Frog Morton, but with significantly less latakia and significantly more of something else, which I can't quite place. I want to say this something else tastes and smells almost like orange peel or something. This stuff is much sweeter than any other latakia blend I've tried. Like the plain old Frog I would sware that the smoke seems almost too cool and I'm tempted to say that there may be a touch of menthol or something in this, but if so then it's so cerefully measured that it doesn't effect the taste. This stuff appears to burn down to a clean gray ash, and for some reason (maybe I was just trying harder than usual to smoke cool) I found this going out more easily than the original Frog.

Perhaps I'm just a latakia nut, but I think I actually liked the original Frog better. This may grow on me though, and I have a feeling I'm going to be buying more than one tin of this in the future.