Sutliff Tobacco Company Match Union Leader

Now here we have a match I can sink my teeth into! I've smoked quite a bit of the original from the early 1990's version to the latest and I've enjoyed them all, although the earlier version was better. This looks and smells like the original HoW and it's nearly identical in taste as well. It's a rich tobacco taste with a mulled cider/honey character, not enough to be called an aromatic but more of a standard OTC codger burley. It's not quite as deep in flavor as the 1990's version but I still could probably only tell them apart in a blind test because of....

What made me laugh out loud in appreciation over this one was how close it was... right down to the light tongue sizzle. Sutliff did a fantastic job on this match. The tongue sizzle was there as it was with the original, but it was toned way down. HoW was known more for creating interesting OTC recipes and not so much for using the best base tobaccos, so I can't help but get the feeling Sutliff used more of a mid-grade burley in this one so as to match the flavor more closely. Just a guess. I loved the original and this one tastes like it. I didn't love the original's tongue sizzle and this has only about 20% of it. So I have to grade this one as better than the original. This one I'll smoke a lot of - highly recommended to lovers of the original. As with Sutliff's ERR'd match, smoke this one and forget time-consuming and costly Ebay searches for the originals. This stuff is dirt cheap! You can't go wrong.