HH Rustica

Why not try to create a blend using the tobacco which started the pipe smoking in the western world? And perhaps even add some other historical tobaccos as well?

Leaving our comfort zone, we started a long-term development of a new pipe tobacco. A Journey full of defeat and constant adjustments, but eventually also a very successful one. The tobaccos we used were the Nicotiana Rustica and a Dark Virginia. The bigger part of the making of this new tobacco was to find the right ratio of the two tobaccos to obtain the best interrelationship. The only way forward was to start mixing the tobaccos and then smoke the blend to find out whether we were on the right track. This is where the defeats came into play. Countless times we had to change the recipe, and we ended up mixing some Burley tobacco into the blend to get a more rounded taste.

The final tool we used was the hot press which makes the tobacco mellow and blends the nuances allowing the different tastes to marry and become much more than 1 + 1 = 2. The calculation for HH Rustica is 1 +1 = 3.

Coming to this result took a lot of time. A lot of samples had to be smoked and afterwards changes have been made, smoked again until we arrived at this final edition of the HH Rustica. The flake is a very special pipe tobacco, not to be compared with other pipe tobaccos, but quite unique.

Available as tin only