Review - Samuel Gawith Cob Plug
I love the SG 1872 Flake and when I saw that this was the plug version I was keen to try it out. Out of the bag it has an incredibly strong smell of alcohol, it really does punch the nostrils with a full fist, so I was looking forward to this coming through in the taste. I cut some into cubes, allowed them to dry for three hours and then filled a bowl in my Country Gentleman Corn Cob Pipe from Missouri Meerschaum.
It lit without a problem and kept alight well, only requiring me to break out the Zippo once mid smoke. Sadly there was no flavour of alcohol at all in the smoke, there was not a lot of flavour at all. The strong, rich, full bodied tobacco taste that was so prevalent in the 1872 Flake was toned down. There was quite a strong peppery flavour in the aftertaste, I'll assume its perique, this was something that I did not experience with the 1872 Flake and the slightly sweet note of vanilla that was in the back end of the Flake was also missing.
It wasn't flat out awful, it simply made for a rather boring smoke. There was no tongue bite at all with this and it was certainly a very slow burning tobacco, I only sampled a small amount, due to the cold weather I opted for less than half of the bowl, and this burned for 30 minutes.
Given I sampled an explosion of flavours with the SG Cannon Plug the previous day, this one sadly left me extremely disappointed. This is not one that I will be ordering more of and I'm glad that I opted for the sampler size.
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