Orlik Tobacco Company A/S Golden Sliced (Red Tin)

I'm reasonably new to pipe smoking, and started off on the Gawith Hoggarth range. Recently though I have bought a huge selection of small samples from smoke-king. Seeing as I use this site I lot I thought it best to add my own opinions, as useful or not as they may be.

The flakes are thin and the perfect level of dryness to me - thy don't clump and packing the pipe is very straightforward. After 2 charring lights this tobacco burned slowly and evenly - very, very easy to keep lit and smoulders away nicely.

The taste is nice, nothing that knocks your socks off but it does have a bright flavour - a bit hay-like and summery. It almost has a marmalade taste creeping in for me.

I do get bitten by virginias, but this one was not bad at all. It was a creeping bite which could be kept at bay by smoking slowly.

All in all, good easy smoke 🙂

A delightful, sweet, flavored Virginia blend. Delicious hay, bread, and delicate fruit scents in the tin. Bright and sweet in flavor. There is definitely some of the "juicy fruit" flavor here, but a good, slow cadence will keep it under control so it doesn't dominate. If there is indeed Perique in this blend, I can't taste it.

Definitely recommended for those interested in trying Virginia blends. Not a good example of a VaPer. Highly recommended for those who enjoy lightly topped fruity aromatics.

Pretty decent smoke. Naturally citrusy with just the slightest hints of prune to it. Had a little bit of trouble staying lit for me, but i'm not known for having the greatest technique concerning flake tobaccos. Pretty well-rounded.

UPDATE: Have more experience with this blend now. Usually I get the flavors of hay/straw first, but the almost orange-like citrus (which I thought was prune originally) comes out later. The only hints of perique I got was the occasional pepperiness, but I can't really taste it. There's likely only a dash in there anyways as a seasoning.

Updated after finding a three year old jar of it hiding in the back of a box. The soapy perfume was gone, as well as the powering citrus it did have. Replaced with what I will say is a pleasant melted butter taste, like when I melt a stick on top of a chuck roast in the crockpot, and a bit of added sweetness. I went as far as getting another tin and was back to not caring much for the fresh stuff, but took less offense to it. Added a star for cellaring a few years, which is exactly where this new tin is going.

original: Soapy Hay hay hay... well, that about covers this review, but please read on. I like Virginias when the base is a good Burley. With all the good reviews I thought just maybe, maybe I can enjoy a sweet Virginia flake. I was terribly wrong, my bad. There is no sweet to it. GS is like a grassy hay bale covered in perfumed soap to me. Add citrus rind to that and I have a tongue wondering what it did so wrong to be abused like this. I would only suggest this to people who say they only smoke Virginia.. I will try it again in a year or two from the cellar, maybe the soapy will go away.

Well, that was my initial thoughts on every bowl I kept trying "when first lit" and top of bowl with a clean palette. Being the cheap old coot I am, I wanted to finish this tin.. and it dawned on me that I was coming back. Something was bringing me back. It seems once the initial perfume soapy light is over and I get a quarter of the way down the bowl, i didn't mind finishing it. This brings me to Schweppes tonic water, which taste like grapefruit juice to me and I enjoy. Not something I always drink, but I like the taste as tart as it is. With that in mind and the citrus in this tobacco I decided to test drinking Schweppes before lighting this up. All the soapy perfume went away! It finally presented me with the proper flavors and I actually enjoyed them! My assumption is that , those that enjoy this blend must be citrus soft drink smokers, which I am not. And yes, for those that do, I would suggest this blend to them highly. I may or may not buy this blend again, but at least I now understand why people like it.

Ok, so.. Orlik Golden Sliced!

This is not the way I wanted to make the review, I actually started to write the review after I opened the tin (so I can take note of the first tin note, first taste etc.) but then I lost it. I don’t know what happened, if I deleted it. I searched for it everywhere, I tried to find it with programs for deleted files, but to no avail. All I can remember is that it didn’t have any taste of perique. It had a nice smell, the taste was ok, it had a great room note, but I had to rewrite the whole review.

So, the tin is from 7th July 2018, I’ve opened it and put it in a hermetically sealed jar on 18th of May 2019. I’ve smoked it since 18th of May until the end of August (I think) and then got back to my English and Balkan blends. I smoke straight virginia in the summer, at a terrace, with a good cold drink.

Now, since May 2020 until today (29 June 2020) I started smoking it again (along with other virginias). So this review will be based on my experience since May 2020 until today.

The tin note, which now is actually a “jar note”, is very sweet and fruity. Very sugary and natural, definitely a very good tin/jar note.

The flakes present themselves in a wide shape, but they are cut very well, they are neither too thin nor thick, just perfect to fold and even rub. (bonus: a lot of sugar crystals, yum yum!). They don’t have a dominant color, there’s some dark yellow, some brown and some black which is probably the perique (?). Also, they are (still) quite moist, i usually keep the flakes out to dry for about 30-60 minutes, and usually take two flakes, but in Orlik GS case, I take one and a half to fill up my bowl and leave it to dry for an hour.

They are quite easy to pack when folded, which is great since I’m not very good at packing folded flakes.

Now, talking from the perspective of both the folded flake and the rubbed flake... I believe it tastes better if rubbed (don’t ask me to explain why.. I don’t know) but nothing special.

Lights up easy and burns very, very well, but doesn’t deliver much taste, which is weird because I remember it had a sweeter taste than what I’m getting now.

Good cold smoke, but it’s tasteless. I can’t feel the perique either. If they say it has perique, ok, but I think it’s a waste of that tobacco since it’s put there but you can’t feel it, you can’t enjoy it, all it could probably do is to blend with the virginia to change its taste a bit, but other than that, I personally can’t understand how it helps this blend.

It tastes like a straight a virginia, but not the sweet virginia type, it’s more like the citrusy, bready and hay-like virginia. I’ve seen people describing the taste as ‘bready’ when they refer to virginia and I didn’t really understand what they meant by ‘bready’, how can a tobacco taste like bread, like crumbles of bread, but yeah, this one kind of tastes like bread. So the taste is quite different from the tin note which is very sweet.

It does smell very good however. If you go somewhere where people don’t like the smell of cigarette, cigar or pipe smoke, this one should be ok to light up since it has a very good room note.

Nonetheless, the taste is quite mild and it’s not as special as I’ve expected it to be, after I’ve heard so much about it. So I’m kind of disappointed, but then again, it could be the reason that I opened the tin, put the tobacco in a jar which again I opened and reopened so maybe the taste has been affected in a way by this process, i don’t know.

Getting back to the perique... even if you retrohale, you don’t feel any perique. Actually you don’t feel anything. There is some spiciness near the end of the bowl, i’m not sure if it’s the perique (which should be influencing the blend as a whole) but yeah, indeed it appears to have some perique, but if you’re smoking a blend that is labeled as a VaPer, the perique should be constant from the beginning or at least from the middle to the end, not just at the bottom of the bowl where there could be many reasons for this spiciness.

It’s smooth, mild, it doesn’t bite, it doesn’t get hot. It’s just... ok. If you want an all day smoke, or a tobacco that you can smoke around people who don’t like the smell of tobacco, then it’s good. But it’s not a tobacco for special occasions.

I’m not particularly an expert in straight virginia, but if I want to smoke virginia I want it to taste sweeter. If it only has this hay-like or grassy taste, it’s not for me. I mean, I don’t want to feel like I’m smoking grass, I want to feel that I’m smoking a tobacco that has a natural sweetness, some fruity notes, a little bit of hay is ok, but for me a good virginia would mean a very good and natural sweetness. This one is just too mild in about everything, in taste, in flavor, in strength.

Good things: Packs easy, smells great, burns great. Other than that I don’t find anything interesting in this one.

It’s just not ‘my thing’. Not my type of straight virginia (or “VaPer”), but anyway.. to each his own! I would recommend it to some people but I wouldn’t say highly recommended.

I for one did not know that this blend contains perique, until I decided to look it up on this very website and write a few lines. Frankly I don't feel it there, and that's that for me. The virginia, on the other, now there's a totally different story. The tin I have smoked is the round version, not the rectangular one in the picture depicted by the website, while the flake was somewhat a big hump folded together - looking like the long hair of a fine blond lass, again unlike your rectangular flake in the picture. The aspect, non the less, was very welcoming and the nose was sweet and hayish. It was not overly wet out of the tin, and I hardly allowed it any dry time - although the final bowls did dry up as I forgot the tine in a cigar humidor (I know, weird). The smoke was very pleasant, sweet, smooth, with a uni level taste of something between honey and sugar cane. Not bad, but not something that would leave a lasting impression either. It's a good smoke, but not wow. It could be an all day smoke for the virginia lovers, although some care is advised as it may bite.

Voila! A zesty Vager... whoops.. a VaPer. Tin note and during smoke it gives taste of some very ripe orange fruit. Perique presence gives just a small burn in the nostrils when retrohale and those Virginia's continually reminds its presence with sweetness and hay like taste. Glad I chose my smooth finish straight billiard with the wind cap on and kept an extra 9mm filter in case if it's choked with moister as flake were moist out of the tin but tonight it's bit windy cool and dry so didn't use spare filter. I like my flakes bit on a moist side which in this case was perfect. I took one and half flakes folded and squeeze with my fingers to loosen up and filled the pipe. It lit easily and took couple of relights during the whole smoke. It will bite if pushed too hard but I find it a very satisfying smoke for all day any day. A very good VaPer with lots of Virginia's sweetness and some Perique pinches to shake you up.

I'm still an amateur trying to find my tastes in straight Virginia's, so my palate is uneducated, but I quite enjoyed this. Not at all educated in Periques yet, either, but I'm with Pipestud - if I can't taste it, what's the difference ?! Fold-and-stuff worked fine for me, burned well, no tongue burn, good tasting and decent nic content. My favorite VA flake to date. Looking forward to ageing some and revisiting. A good old venerable blend : 3.5 stars

Nice grassy, hay like smell. I do not smoke this very often but mainly due to the fact I can't stay on one pipe tobacco too long. It starts out great and stays that way pretty much to the end. After a few days I move on to something else, no fault of the tobacco. It really is a fantastic VA.