Meet up with Pipe Smoker’s Den and Dr. Grabow Collectors forum members to tour the factory in Sparta, NC. Sparta is a quiet little town and next to the Allegheny Inn was a Laconia Ale Works. Great beers and on Thursday was open from 4pm to 9pm. We met Rick Wooten, VP and General Manager of International Pipes & Accessories LLC at the Dr. Grabow factory. At the height of manufacturing they were producing over a million pipes a year. Now that a lot of drug stores stopped carrying smoking products their biggest customer is the Army PX. ...

Things are warming up around here an I have a hankering for a new burley plug. I used burley cased from this recipe. The Virignia was cased with plum casing. Recipe 87g Burley (53%) 58g Virginia (35%) 20g Dark Fired Kentucky (12%) Ranger So I did somethings differently. The image above is only 1 day after pressing the plugs. Earlier this week I pulled some Red Queen Plug that was wrapped with foil and put in mylar and had some books and case of mason jars sitting on it for six months. You can see how dark the plugs became. ...

Getting ready to make a new burley plug and tweaked the burley casing recipe. Ingredients (by weight) 200g Molasses 100g Water Handful of cacao nibs 1 whole tonka bean 1 cap full of white vinegar Bring to a boil while stirring and then let it boil for 5-10 minutes. Take off the heat and let cool before transferring to a container. I use a strainer to filter out the nibs and tonka bean. ...

So I wanted to see if I took the time to calibrate the cutter, how thin you could you go cutting up a plug. Started with an all Virginia plug that I believe is all red and brights. The cutter is a cheap Amazon meat slicer that does better than an antique cutter. The reason is there is a measuring guard that you push the plug up against. Slowly make the cut and perfect. The trick was setting the space between the guard on the back of the blade. There are two screws that determine the thickness of the cut. I used the guard itself as the size of the thickness. I took the guard off and put it between the screw and the blade and bring the nut snug. Do that with both screws and then add the guard and knob screws. ...

Update from https://blog.acefour.org/red-ribbon-experiment/ article. Smoking a bowl in the Talbert now and it is an absolute joy. You can see the top of the whole leaf perique that is fished through the jar like a Zippo wick in cotton. The perique leaf is quite dry now as it seems the rest of the ribbon has sucked the moisture out of the leaf. The jar aroma is getting that vinegar twang to it and I will probably remove the perique leaf at this point. ...

I was trying to look up the article on dating tins when I noticed after going to the next page of articles you could not go further. Slight technical glitch has been fixed and you can now page back to all the older posts. Sorry if you ran into this issue.

Had left over cased Virginia so I dropped in my 6" x 3" x 3" stainless steel tube and pressed it 2 days ago and transferred it from the frame press to a c-clamp. Today I wrapped the whole mess in aluminum foil and dropped it in the oven at 200F for 4 hours. After 4 hours I turned it off and retrieved it 2 hours later. Let cool outside before extracting. Smells like rye bread. Will slice up after a few days to settle down.

Red Queen is a Va/Per and the whole leaf recipe can be found at Red Queen V This is basically a two day process. First step is strip the stems from the Bright Virginia and Red Virginia. The Red Virginia had some nice leaves Red all done Next the Bright Virginia. When I de-stem I pull from the top of the leaf, one half of the leaf. I pulls apart easily from the top. ...

I created a discourse server (online community) that folks can join and chat about tobacco. I am not many tobacco forums and this allows folks from other forums to be able to chat about blending whole leaf, commercial leaf and enjoyment of the leaf and good life. Rules are simple, no politics nor slighting groups of people. This place is meant to be about enjoying life. If you want to bitch about people, politics, religion you can go enjoy Twitter/X and have the internet troll fight there. ...

Angel of Izmir (Virginia / Oriental / Latakia) Apertif Clone (Virginia / Oriental / Latakia / Cavendish) Basma Bastard (Virginia / Oriental / Latakia) Burley Plug (Dark Fired Kentucky / Burley / Virginia) God of War (Virginia) Grateful Plug (Virginia / Burley) Memphis Plug (Dark Fired Kentucky / Virginia) Monkel’s Best (Virginia) Orlik DSK clone (Dark Fired Kentucky / Virginia) Ranger (Burley / Virginia / Dark Fired Kentucky) Red Queen (Virginia / Perique) Ton 618 (Stoved Red Virginia)