A FINE WOODSY SORT OF SMELL

Over on an internet forum I fondly visit, the lamentation about a certain product's disappearance has started again. Someone plaintively asked why Dunhill's Nightcap Mixture (a smoking tobacco for the pipe) was no longer being made. Surely it was an all-time classic? Much beloved? Well, yes.
But it was something only a minute fraction of an insignificant customer demographic ever smoked.

Anyone who has walked into a tobacconist in the last decade must have realized that cigars pay the rent, pipe tobacco does not signify.


DUNHILL NIGHTCAP MIXTURE

Dunhill's Nightcap was, and I'm just educatedly guessing here, slightly over fifty percent Latakia, between six and ten percent or slightly more black Virginia, and maybe three percent Perique. No Turkish leaf.
The rest was a medium Virginia base.
And bear in mind that that was just in its latest version, produced by Orlik for Kohlhase & Kopp on behalf of the trademark owners.
It had changed over the years.

Full Latakia blends are numerous, but the top three aromatics sell more than all of the Lat blends combined. Aficionados of good quality pipe tobacco are hugely outnumbered by consumers of garbage, there are vastly more cigar smokers, and over ninety percent of tobacco worldwide is turned into cigarettes. And smokers are, ab initio, a minority.

I myself know of only one man who regularly bought a tin of Nightcap.
Which he did once every three or four months.
That's one or two bowls a week.
A veritable addict.
Forsooth.

I cannot remember where the last tin I bought is; I never finished it.


A sentence I hear a several times every week is "you never see pipe smokers anymore, why is that?"

The short answer is that I am shy.

The longer answer would detail lack of numbers, social exile down at the bottom of the yard or in the utility alley between apartment buildings next to the recyclable garbage and the compost, sheer absence of pipe stores in the Bay Area, a lack of standards in the modern age, and your bitch mom or wife who disapproved of the product.


"You never see pipe smokers anymore, why is that?"


It's because we hate you, you Starbucks-swilling parasite. Plus we've lost the ability to breed. Pipe smokers are from a different planet.
Mars lacks women.


A pipe takes time, and one cannot smoke in social environments or public places anymore. The idea of happily lighting a bowl after tea and pastries, for instance, means that I shall disappear for while to brave the elements.
A drink and a smoke? Seriatim, not coinciding with. Plus your bitch mom or wife probably saw me once, and started fanning with her hands in front of her face, coughing theatrically, and screeching that I was killing the little children or puppies...... an incentive to be discreet, honestly, and only lurk around the periphery of your vision. That's why you never see me.


"Oh I love the smell of a pipe, it reminds me of my grandpa."


But you were perfectly okay with the nursing home putting a pillow over his head, weren't you? It saved so much money and left more in the trustfund.


Essentially, the reason Dunhill's Nightcap is no longer made is that that marketing demographic snuffed it in the Great War.

TOBACCO INDEX


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