Gawith, Hoggarth & Co. No. 1 CC blending

Bought some 50g loose for blending experiments and for saving or enriching any already existing blends/mixtures. This review is for mixing and smoking pure......

Appearance :This is bright yellow leaf in fine cut ribbons.

Aroma: is basically clean grassy with a slight wrights coal tar soap aroma.

Taste; This stands up as an epic Virginia in its own right,up there with any of the good Virginias.

Clean yet full lemony sour Virginia with no bite.The lemony sour factor tastes like it is a property of the natural tobacco ala lemongrass.

Burns nice and not too hot either;i don't detect anything artificial in this,a well behaved easy Virginia. My pipe is a vintage falcon bantam (like a falcon but with a slightly shorter stem) and being a narrower diameter smoke tube/draught it amplifies the virgina tastes that get lost in wider draught pipes.

More on taste: the Virginia is juicy sour and sweet of its own virtue,it has a certain golden corn flakes body to it and something I really like about this tobacco leaf is that it has a subtle yellow English mustard paste hotness,a certain zingy factor of peppery and maybe even mildly salty English mustard. Might be even French mustard but its there and it gives me nice face sweat like when eating something spicy that catches you out..But its not a burning pepper,this is not bite,it is taste.

There is no soap factor or anything Lakeland in this gawith hoggarth Virginia,only a slight floral factor which being a leaf anyway is not surprising really.

Burn time is good.

Mixing: I have mixed it 25% with 25% oriental and 50% latakia (also from G&H) to produce my own English in the spirit of commonwealth mixture. This tasted as good as any English I have tasted from a master blenders.. Even though my ingredients were only aged 30 seconds in the jar I used to shake it all up before smoking, I felt the ingredients smoked well together like they were singing the same tune and not a counterpoint mishmash.

The Virginia in my mixture retains the same properties it has when smoked on its own and the zingy lemon and mustard factor comes through between the herbaceous oriental and smoky latakia without losses.

4 stars**** for smoking on its own and 4 stars**** as a blending base.

I haven't actually used this as a condiment yet but I am looking forward to the opportunity of seeing what a pinch of this sour ,lemony ,mustardy ,cornflakey, tasting leaf would do when used as a condiment rather than a base to other blends,i have feeling it will contribute an enhancing kind of citrusy squeezed lemon. What can I say? ;its nice to have lemon on your fish and chips so to speak.