Sutliff Tobacco Company Court of St. James

UPDATE 6/11/18

Got a two bowl sample as part of a blind test. I nailed this one! My initial thoughts held up quite well... characterless, flat, dull, and the VaPer that looks up at every other VaPer I've smoked. A couple of years of age did squat for this one. There appear to be many more smokers that enjoy this than those that don't, so don't let me sway you from trying this. It's a very... uh... distinct blend, judging by how easily I named this one while smoking it blind. For my tastes, this one rates very poorly against all others in its genre, which I find typical for this blender. But that's just me, folks! Happy to report that I didn't get a bad tin for my original review... this stuff is just bad!

ORIGINAL REVIEW

Mostly walnut-browns with a fair bit of black pieces, the cut of this is sort of a cross between broken flake and ribbon. I liked the cut of this, as I've never folded and stuffed ribbons before, and it worked here. Kind of cool. Tin aroma was of latakia and some sort of topping that I couldn't place. Review is based on half a tin, as a buddy brought it over saying that Sutliff was getting into "serious" (his word) blends and not just aromatics or "matches" for someone else's recipe. Because he knows I'm a sucker for new tobaccos, he laid half his tin on me and smoked the other half. But I have to say that even with my mostly less-than-encouraging results from Sutliff blends, I was a bit anxious to see how they treated the venerable VaPer style.

I'll often scan other reviews before I write one but this time I read them all because I was disquieted by what I was tasting. Indeed, my impressions differ greatly from the other reviewers. I've posted on pipe chat sites that even after all my years of pipesmoking, I'm still discovering my own tastes. Whereas every review I've ever read is not just about the tobacco but about the symbiotic relationship between smoker and tobacco, this review will be even more about my tastes than about the blend.

I didn't get anything close to the "bursting with flavor" that is on the ad copy. What I got was a bed of almost completely characterless Virginia with the barest of smidges of perique flavor. The abiding flavor I got was latakia with a casing. Even those were light. I see where others can't taste the latakia and that's almost all I taste. I see where others are picking up the main components and I'm not. Viva la difference, I guess. I do have a high sensitivity to latakia and I can taste even a pinch in a blend. Conversely, I have a lower sensitivity to perique and often think there's less in a blend than there really is. Both worked against me here, as this blend was extremely boring to me... smoke with very little tobacco flavor. I'm not sure how the VA was when it was put into the blend but it suffered badly in the end; however, the typical Sutliff chemical taste was not as prominent here as it was in most of their other blends. The latakia was prevalent but even when I smoked a bowl while plucking out every black strand I could find, I found no character in the Virginia... no sweetness or grass or complexity, just flatness. Two things solidified their obviousness to me with this tobacco experience and that is that reviews are a minor tool to the reader (certainly the other reviewers of this blend would have unwittingly suffered if they'd shunned the blend based on my review) and that the Sutliff blending house holds almost nothing of interest to me. Their style simply doesn't fit my palate. Thankfully, I think both parties will get along just fine without each other going forward. 🙂 Incidentally, my friend got much less latakia than I did but confirmed that for his taste it was at the low end of the VaPer scale.