Thanks for the link, johni. It's hard to tell if all of their cured tobaccos are uncased and if all of their single leaf offerings are cured--I'll have to give them a call. Maybe mute anyway.
All the reports I've read on ECF from people who've tried extracting uncased tobacco, either raw or cured, have stated without exception that the resulting extracts and liquids made from them tasted less-than wonderful---varying from sort-of lousy to just plain dreadful.
That seems completely predictable to me with regard to raw, unprocessed (meaning uncured) tobacco, but does come as a bit of a surprise concerning cured-but-uncased tobacco. The fact that apparently no one has been able to produce an extract or juice from cured-but-uncased tobacco is telling, however.
Spraying sugar-water onto tobacco leaves (either onto the whole leaves during growing of the plants in the fields or more commonly onto chopped leaves during processing into blends, usually after curing) and letting the water evaporate slowly so that the sugar seeped into the leaf came to be called "casing" and has been done to almost all smoking tobacco literally for centuries. Why? Because tobacco smokers discovered that casing with sugar resulted in a cooler smoke and more even burn, which made such a big difference in the enjoyment that doing so became standard and universal practice. As to why casing is such a necessary process for tobacco that we extract for flavoring eliquid, I don't know, but apparently it is.
I agree. It is no surprise that uncured leaf might taste like lawn clippings and I wouldn't be interested in doing my own curing.
It doesn't surprise me that cured, uncased tobacco isn't particularly tasty given the long history of efforts to make tobacco more, shall we say, "user friendly." What does surprise me is the satisfying results DIYers are getting from pipe blends. As they are blended for taste and balance for consumption by smoking, I would have expected the balance between their tobaccos and flavors to get skewed during extraction the way Latakia overwhelms some blends. Even if the balance doesn't survive, it appears an enjoyable extract occurs more often than not. Thanks for your insights.
You can get blending varietals and cured leaves. I wouldn't recommend the leaves as the ones I purchased were vile. I have most of the blending tobaccos from P&T and find them very neutral with just the flavor of the specific tobacco and nothing else.
Did you source your leaf from the same vendor as the one johni cited and did you buy by the single samplers or the volumn offering? Leaf Only does seem to indicate that some of their offering are graded and some not and I get the impression some may not be processed. Did you attempt to do any of your own casing/topping with the leaf extract? I have a number of blending tobaccos from Pipes and Cigars (who is P&T btw?) I'm not sure what any of them may be cased with, but I'm impressed with the quality of the tobaccos. Some of the ones I've purchased locally have been rather stemy. Thanks for your input.
Maybe you can find tobacco cased with alcohol and gasoline instead of sugar!
Maybe you could re-read the analogy while standing on a ladder?
Even if you didn't intend it, you are spot on. Well, except for gasoline.
It seems prior to 1980, under the Purity Act, English tobacco could not contain more than 1% of any additives. There were strict rules as to what casings were allowed and how they were to be applied. The only carriers allowed were water and even more often, Isopropyl alcohol (Mmmmmm). So, you are correct, what I'm looking for is tobacco cased using alcohol, specifically a source of English tobacco still processed using the old purity law standards. So far, I've only found Pipes and Cigar and Pipes and Tobaccos (is that P&T) tobacconist recommendations for pipe blends and they are expensive imports. So far no source for English blending tobaccos.
As I said this may be mute and all for naught. After spending yesterday reading the report and posts by KFarsalinos, it appears that the trade-off in pursuing less sugar induced gunking and doing my own casings/toppings are not worth the risks.
Thanks for the idea anyway.
As for the gunking debate, anyone who has ever made caramel from scratch would expect sugar to contribute to coil gunking. However, whether due to particulates or not, even sugarless tobacco would be a major gunker. Burley has very low sugar content unless cased. Fermentation reduces sugar content. Perique is uncased Burley that is fermented for an inordinate amount of time, so it would be expected to have very little (if any) sugar content. Although perique isn't exactly representative of the tobacco "family", it is a major coil gunker. It's an EDV for me and I'm having a good day if I can do 3ml before the coil is shot.
