It certainly was a fun year of pressing tobacco. Still trying to figure out the elusive straight Virginia recipe. I have gone through a couple of my old straight Virginia plugs to see how they develop. The first one I did was a Bright/Yellow Virginia plug and it is not bad. Not grassy and more of rye bread. I will try a few more odd ball ideas in 2024 Logo’s were fun and made a few t-shirts of Grateful Plug logo and gave those away in various tobacco bombs. Also made a Zippo Grateful Plug logo lighter. That was a bit of annoying interaction and will just leave it at that. ...

I had some left over plum cased Red Virginia and blackberry cased Bright Virginia. Made a 200g plug of about 60% Bright to 40% Red. Total YOLO plug. Then I really screwed up and forgot it was stoving in the oven. It had been in the oven 7 hours at 200F while under pressure in the steel mold with a c-clamp. I went off to play a local poker game and got a text from my wife asking if she should turn off the over. Ooops! So she did and it cooled down overnight before pulling out of the form. ...

Now I have an antique plug cutter made of cast iron and a new blade made by Bingham Knifeworks. It cuts like butter. It is fairly expensive and it takes time to cut the plugs and you tend to have inconsistent thicknesses of the flakes as a result. Enter the cheapest meat slicer on Amazon! What is nice is you get two blades. You can adjust the thickness of the cut. What you need to do is extend the holding tray right up the the blade. I used two box tops from cigar boxes. ...

Recently, for unknown reasons, I had a batch of Red Queen plugs that were very wet. Not sure the exact reason for it but humidity while pressing might have hand in it. The plugs were full of juice running and the flakes, when sliced, were very flexible. Since I don’t soak tobacco like the commercial guys with PG for mold control the only real solution is either stove it for a couple of hours at 200F or slice and air dry before bagging. I like to stove under pressure so in this case I just sliced up and let it dry for a few hours before moving to jars/Mylar. ...

Blending/Processing Whole Leaf Ernie Q on casing, pressing, and blending Blend Your Own Pipe Tobacco book Spirit Infusion Making “Cavendish” at home Press: Noodle Press (Cheap and simple, good for 50g pucks) PVC and Hockey Pucks (Cheap and little effort, good for 100g pucks) Shop Press (Saves time pressing 1 minute vs 10 days with a C-Clamp) 2’ Stainless Steel Tube T43311 (Expensive but you can do 4 - 5 200g whole leaf plugs at a time) 3/4" Richlite high temperature cutting board (custom order and cut to size for stainless steel tube) Whole Leaf Vendors and Casing supplies ...

Well, hurricane Ian knocked out the power last night so nothing to do but make a Latakia blend whole leaf plug. Worked on destemming the red Virginia and cased it with the plum casing I used for the Virginia/burley Thumbed through Goff’s book since it was full of English/Balken blends and settled on this recipe called Cajun Muse: Latakia 37.5% (6 of 16 parts) Oriental 12.5% (2 of 16 parts) Virginia Bright 12.5% (2 of 16 parts) Virginia Red 25% (4 of 16 parts) Perique 12.5% (2 of 16 parts) Dropped it in the frame press two weeks ago and then moved it to a C-Clamp the next morning. I have to say I am impressed on how this plug looks. With the summer plugs I would keep them clamped and stored in the hot truck as a poor man’s stoving. The plug was slightly sticky, likely from the perique and sliced up nice but almost like a broken flake. ...

Experimenting with Making a whole leaf Virginia tobacco plug. Tobacco was purchased Bright Virginia Flue Cured and Lemon Virginia Flue Cured from WholeLeafTobacco.com along with their commercial casing. Whole Leaf Tobacco commercial casing for flue-cured tobacco is just an inverted sugar water flavored with lemon peel. Next, was deciding on the blend. The blend recipe was 2 parts Bright Virginia and 1 part Lemon Virginia tobacco. I got that rough ratio from an interview on YouTube with Mike McNeil of McClelland’s. That was the Aston blend they use to do long ago. An no, this is not even going to be close to that blend. If you know what or how McNeil’s did their magic with their Virginia’s The blend recipe was 2 parts Bright Virginia and 1 part Lemon Virginia tobacco. I got that rough ratio from an interview on YouTube with Mike McNeil of McClelland’s. That was the Aston blend they use to do long ago. An no, this is not even going to be close to that blend. If you know what or how McNeil’s did their magic with their Virginia ...

Whole leaf Virginia/dark fired Kentucky plug is the next experiment to perform. This is made with equal parts bright Virginia flue cured, red Virginia flue cured and dark fired Kentucky. All of these leaves were purchased from Whole Leaf Tobacco. First step is prepping the leaves. Prepping the leaves, by unfolding, de-stemming and hand ripping the leaves and placing in a plastic bags. Use one bag for bright Virginia and one back for the dark fired Kentucky. De-stemming is easy my grabbing the tip of the stem at the top of the leaf and pulling down. After you may what to hand rip big leaves into smaller pieces and put in a shopping bag. Next we need to case the bright Virginia. ...

There are several ways to pressing pipe tobacco and as elaborate as your budget will allow. Why press? It melds the flavors better of the tobacco no matter if you are doing raw leaf or using an existing blend. Many folks like make tobacco cakes and plugs. Blend pressed without prior drying Moisture content will affect how the plug compacts. One experiment was pressed right our of the bag and another press where the tobacco was microwaved for 20 seconds and tossed it like a salad to get the excess moisture out. The straight out of the bag pressed for 3 weeks quickly expanded like a crumble cake after 3 weeks. Not a lot of color change. The microwaved tobacco came out as a black plug as dense as Salty Dogs. The dense plug was cut into flakes and was a sweet mellow smoke that went for an hour and 45 minutes with no relighting. ...

Making whole leaf Virginia plug with blackberry casing is the same procedure as whole leaf Virginia plug blend. The difference is we are making our own casing. The casing is made by using 1 to 1 ratio by weight of water to sugar, add a cap-full of white vinegar. Next, crush up a handful of blackberries and filtered the juice through a coffee filter. Bring the whole mixture to a boil and then let it cool down. ...