Rattray Old Gowrie

To my humble opinion it's quite the same as Scottich Cake from McConnell but a bit stronger and a tiny little bit fuller .

A good offering.

Truly a great blend, I love everything about it. Tin aroma is spicy and bright, it reminds me of fresh hay. The cut is a real joy to pull apart and load up. Fairly strong nicotine content- if your tolerance is low a big bowl of this will definitely hit you.

Very, very, very nice VA/kentucky broken flake!

Hopwever, it lacks some vitamin N. But for the rest, it is very well done!

I predominantly smoke virginias, and enjoy milder examples.

Old Gowrie has some pretty fair reviews below - this is an unpretentious, quality tobacco, easy-smoking, mild but with a pleasant virginia dominant flavour, slightly ashy in the second half of the bowl, and a pronounced sweet and lingering aftertaste.

Smokers that are looking for a "statement" of flavorings will probably find Old Gowrie wanting - there is little apparent topping which suggests it is a plain sugar and vinegar treatment, in good balance, or a light hand indeed in what flavorings have been added. Very little perique, if any, certainly less than some of the best-known Vapers.

This is a bit of purist smoke for the plain, milder virginia smoker looking for nuance rather than bold statement. There is subtlety and pleasure in smoking it dry and slow. I'll cellar a fair amount - it would be an excellent blender with topped blends that are found to overbearing, or could take a pinch or two of latakia or perique in stride. Solid stuff.

It is a very nice tobacco. Beautiful fruity smell from the tin, it reminded me of a nice thick fruit cake full of raisins and currants.

A nice sweet taste of virginia but that was about it. In the UK we have to pay a little bit more for Rattray and it certainly wasnt worth that extra quid.

Very nice smoke but nothing special

Hmmmm...2 stars or 3 stars. This is high quality tobacco for sure. Nice pure tobaccos that don't have as much bite as I have found in other virginias. The only problem is that you really have to like that soapy taste and mouth feel that some tobacco has. I happen to dislike that taste, but I'll still rate it for what it is without my personal bias and just give you fair warning.

I've not smoked Old Gowrie for about 10 years, but it has changed beyond recognition. This used to be a straight virginia blend and altogether lighter in colour. It's now darker in colour, almost as if another leaf is in the blend, and I do detect a perique background - it's also lost its tangy virginia flavour that was so pronounced in its original composition. All this simply means that OG has not survived, un-scathed, the transition to Kohlhase Kopp blending unlike HOTW and Brown Clunee, both of which faired better and still retain their original composition - more or less.

All said and done, OG still produces a reasonable smoke as a blended virginia, but for the die-hard purests, there are better straight virginia alternatives.

Rattray is great name to see on your tin. Whether it is Old Gowrie or Hal' O the wind.

I just can't wait for my piggy bank to fill or to finish a new pipe. Then I go out and try a Rattray I haven't tried before.

This is my Englishish Rattray blend but i hate to label them that way.

Each blend can be tagged based on an old blend but the truth of the matter is they only use broad strokes. They must be looking for the best 21st century blend and not hoping to recreate last centuries fave.

Old Gowrie has a wonderful tin aroma, but it's far to wet to smoke straight out of the tin. At the risk of editorializing, I always scratch my head when I read reviews that criticize a tobacco for smoking "too wet"--unless one is dealing with a particularly heavy casing, most condensation and bowl gurgle can usually be dealt with by letting a blend breathe a bit before packing or switching to a higher quality briar (or a corncob, for that matter). But I digress.

OG is grassy, and less sweet than I was expecting from the tin smell. It's well- behaved for a virginia, which is to say it'll still bite easily enough if I get distracted. It has an oat-y note from time to time as well, and a nice, faint clover flourish that shows up once in a while near the end of the bowl.

Maybe I'd "get" OG better if I could afford to dedicate a pipe to it (I do keep my straight virginia pipe pretty clean), but for right now, I'm going to give it three stars. It's good for what it is, and maybe that's all one can ask of any blend, but there are so many other great straight virginias out there--Full Virginia Flake, Best Brown Flake, the McClelland 20's, etc.--that I really don't see what all the fuss is about.