I begin pipe smoking in late 2015. I used to be a cigarette smoker. But one day my friend at the time introduced me to a blending house in Semarang called Mukti Café. There, my mind was blown by all the types of tobacco that I do not know before. How can I know? For 3 years I smoke only Marlboro and the tobacco stores is not that very common at the time. There, I also got introduced to pipe tobacco. From that moment, my curiosity grew bigger towards tobacco.
In late 2017, I decide to stop smoking cigarettes to pursue pipe and cigar smoking only. There’s no specific reason why I stop. But I am glad that I did. About one year I smoke some aromatics mainly created by Mac Baren, and then some bulk from pipesandcigar: Savinelli red & blue, Ashton Artisan blend, Reiner Golden Flake, Memories of Tuscany, and many more. At the time I don’t know that there’s a lot of pipe tobacco, since pipe smoking in Indonesia is not that very common. So I only buy tobacco that is available mainly in bulk.
By early 2018 I begin buying direct import tobacco from the US to know more about pipe tobacco to fulfill my curiosity and also by that time I already bought a lot of “single-origin” tobacco from local farmers in Indonesia to do some experiments on making “the Indonesian way of pipe tobacco”.
I don’t know if this is beginner’s luck, but I make about 150gram of a blend consisting of cigar leaves and Lombok virginia, cased with a whisky and a bit of something here and there. The outcome of this is a super sweet smoke with a hint of leather and grass/hay-like notes. About 6 months I keep it inside a mason jar, and something white-ish comes out from the tobacco it’s like a plume but it’s not. I don’t know. But at the end, I opened the mason jar and holy moly, a sweet like fermented aroma welcome me. It is amazing how it developed into something like this, the taste is also increased in quality. I try to give it to my friend, and my friend gives it to his other friends and they also like it. They say it has the potential. Right at that moment, my brain start to think that maybe there’s some local artisans blender that created something like this.
My friends gave me some of the local tobacco blends, and I also buy some in the community. But, there’s a big underlined issue with Indonesian tobacco, and I will try to point out some of them.
First, I may still be a beginner in this topic. But I know for goddamn sure that Indonesian tobacco is grown differently than other places. Hell every place created different tobacco in terms of notes and taste. That is why blending tobacco is not a very simple thing to do. Many master blenders that I admire are learning about tobacco all of their life to create their masterpiece. Because of these “different” characteristic some says that it is hard to recreate one’s harvest to the others.
For example, virginia tobacco from the US and Indonesia sure as hell will taste different, since the soil, weather, treatment, curing process and other factors is different. Thus, the outcome is different even though they are the same virginia, and this also affects my second point.
Second, they are not honest with what component they are using. I know that there are some unique tobaccos out there like latakia from Syria/Cyprus. Latakia is indeed fire-cured tobacco, but that doesn’t mean every dark-fired is Latakia, it is called dark-fired tobacco. Latakia uses oriental tobacco cured by fire from a local Syria/Cyprus wood. The key is the whole process: the leaf, the soil, the wood, the aromatic smoke from the wood, all it is created the Latakia that we know (lot of us). It is the same with Indonesian tobacco for example garangan. You cannot recreate garangan with the same taste as the Wonosobo garangan. It is a unique process that creates that specific tobacco.
Here in Indonesia a lot of artisan blenders use the term “with Latakia and black cavendish tobacco”, “an English blend”, “with -Indonesian- (redacted) Latakia”. It hurts me when they used that kind of sentence in their blend to sell more and fool beginners or maybe some people that don’t know what they are smoking. It wouldn’t be a problem if their “latakia blend” uses the real Latakia from Cyprus, but it is just an Indonesian virginia/burley that has been fire-cured till it’s blackened, some of them are not even black tho, but they are saying they used Latakia. FFS.
I know that if only Indonesian pipe tobacco can make a “true” English blend, Balkan blend, American blend that would be amazing. But they must use the right formula or guideline, and not buy fooling people that they will not notice it.
So, in conclusion. I think that Indonesian tobacco has a very big potential since the geographic factor is a big support. Indonesian tobaccos also have unique tastes and notes of their own, and I think that would be great if we can make the “true” Indonesian blend. It is hard to get some leaves outside from Indonesia, so don’t fool yourself by making a poser blend like that.
A lot of artisans create their blend using Indonesian leaf to imitate the “outside” blend. It is not wrong to use a well-known blend as an encouragement to make something great like that, but that doesn’t mean Indonesian leaves got forced into other leaves that it is not.
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