Hearth & Home -- Egg Nog

Brand: Hearth & Home
Blend: Egg Nog
Style: Aromatic
Pipe Used: Savinelli Oscar Natural # 313
Price: $6.59/1.5oz.
Appearance: 8
Taste: 5
Room Note: 7
Value: 7
Overall: 6

Unlike many pipesters who look down their noses at aromatic tobaccos I've always enjoyed and appreciated the various flavors and aromas that can only be found in this type of blend.  Sometimes you just want to smoke and smell sweet cherries, butterscotch candy, and perhaps some holiday egg nog.

As much as I like aromatics I'm even more smitten by seasonal, AKA Christmas, blends and look forward to each year's new offerings as well as regular favorites.  While placing an order for Hearth & Home's Fusilier's Ration (run, don't walk, and order some tins right now...I'll wait) I decided to give their tasty-sounding Egg Nog blend a try.

The tobacco in the tin was a nice looking ribbon cut blend of black and brown tobaccos and had a pleasant, but not overpowering, aroma of cinnamon and other holiday spices.  I quickly loaded up my dedicated aromatic pipe, lit the bowl, and was off and smoking.

On the positive side the blend smoked cleanly and coolly all the way to the bottom of the bowl and never once bit or gurgled even with my usual overzealous pipe smoking.  The room aroma was also nice though a bit subdued for my taste.

As for the taste it was, in a word, forgetful.  Advertised as having rum, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg flavors all I got out of this blend was some very light tobacco topped with just a hint of vanilla and the barest dusting of cinnamon and nutmeg.  I was expecting a real "Ho-ho-ho here comes Santa!" over-the-top aromatic experience like that found in McClelland's superb Holiday Spirit.  Instead I found myself smoking bowl after bowl of well-behaved, yet ultimately bland, tobacco.

Hearth & Home's Egg Nog features great smoking characteristics and has a nice aroma but it just doesn't pack enough flavor to break into my aromatics rotation. I didn't dislike it but there are so many more enjoyable offerings out there that I can't see myself bothering with Egg Nog in the future.

Hearth & Home -- Fusilier's Ration

Brand: Hearth & Home
Blend: Fusilier's Ration
Style: English
Pipe Used: No Name Apple
Price: $10.50/2oz.

Appearance: 10
Taste: 10
Room Note: 8
Value: 8
Overall: 9

Russ Ouellette at the Habana Premium Cigar Shoppe (AKA PipesandCigars.com) has quietly been creating some of the most innovative new pipe blends over the past couple of years.  And as if that weren't enough he's also been introducing blends that pay tribute to some of the long lost tobacco favorites of pipe days gone by.

When I first heard about Fusilier's Ration through the Internet grapevine I was immediately hooked for a couple of reasons.  As a fan of Bernard Cornwell's Napoleonic-era Sharpe series the name of the blend and the excellent tin art certainly piqued my interest.  But what really had me salivating was the fact that this blend was a tribute to the long-gone Bengal Slices, a blend that I never had the chance to try but sounds like it would have been an instant favorite of mine.

Upon opening the tin the first thing I noticed was the aroma of the tobacco.  As a Latakia fiend I find few things as instantly reassuring as that sweet smell of campfire smoke and cedar.  The blend also has a top note of some kind that reminded me of citrus and fresh berries.  Mouthwatering to be sure.

The blend itself is packaged as a krumble, or broken, kake so you're likely to find whole chunks of pressed tobacco mixed in with bits of cross-cut leaf caused by, you guessed it, crumbling of the cake.  The blend is an attractive mix of various tobaccos ranging from jet black to light tan and the kake is very firmly packed so you know it was in a press for quite some time.

To load my pipe I just broke off a piece of the kake, rubbed it out between my palms, and gently filled the bowl to the brim.  Since the blend was very fresh I knew it would have some moisture so I wanted to give it space to expand in the pipe and still allow any steam to escape out the top rather than down the stem and into my mouth.  It took a while to get the pipe lit but once it got a nice smolder going it burned fairly well for such a young blend.

In the wide and varied world of pipe tobaccos there are blends that take a while to grow on you and those that immediately grab you by the lapels and proclaim themselves your new favorite.  Fusilier's Ration is very firmly positioned in the latter camp.

Until now my favorite blend has remained Count Pulaski, a relatively unknown light English blend from Altadis.  It's a blend that has everything I most like in a pipe tobacco.  The stalwart Fusilier is a very similar sort of blend except that it offers up just a bit more.

The flavor profile is well-balanced and the constituent tobaccos sing together in perfect harmony.  Savory, satisfying Latakia melds its leathery smokiness with the sweetly acidic Virginias while the Oriental leaf lends a bit of spicy incense to cut the richness of the Black Cavendish.  And the topping adds just the slightest taste of fresh fruit that really mellows the blend.  This tobacco is meant to be sipped, savored, and pondered over as the smoke slowly curls about your head.

The room aroma is just as delectable as the taste and reminds me of mesquite or cherrywood smoke mixed with sweet BBQ sauce.

Explaining why you like a certain pipe tobacco is as hard as explaining why you prefer redheads over, well, everybody else.  For me, Fusilier's Ration just hits all the high points that make for the perfect smoke -- the ritual of preparing the kake tobacco, the slow smoldering burn, the richly complex yet satisfying taste, and even the sweetly scented wisps of smoke.  When I picture pipe smoking in my mind's eye this is exactly the type of blend that I imagine myself smoking.  No higher compliment can be paid.

I may never get a chance to try the Celebrated Bengal Slices but at this point I can't say I much care.  As long as my cellar is stocked with Fusilier's Ration and Russ continues churning out one excellent blend after another then I will happily enjoy the bounty available today rather than pining after those long-lost classics.  As the tin states; "Fusilier's Ration -- Pipe Tobacco"  full-stop.