La Brumeuse Semois Smoking Tobacco

 

(Firecured) Most people don’t like alcohol, coffee, or tobacco, not really. If they did, we wouldn’t have daiquiris, Frappuccinos, and menthol. This presents a problem for those of us who like our poison straight, especially when it comes to pipe tobacco. After all that pressing, steaming, smoking, casing, fermenting, and topping, it’s hardly tobacco at all.
So where does a lover of basic tobacco go to find the real thing? Oddly enough, to the most regulated region of the planet: Western Europe, Belgium to be exact. It’s there where a little mom and pop operation produces Semois tobacco. They grow it, they dry it, they package it, and they sell it – it being La Brumeuse Semois from Vincent Manil.
Semois is a variety of burley grown in Belgium and was once very popular, though today it’s all but forgotten.
The tobacco comes in 3 varieties, I’m smoking the thick cut version, in 3.5 ounce packages. The tobacco is so dry that it crunches when stuffed in a pipe, and makes for an easy light and burn. (Compulsive tampers should stay away.) The taste is loamy, like napping on the banks of the Susquehanna, the room note like burning leaves on an autumn evening.
Comparing it to Five Brothers, another basic tobacco, it’s not as strong nor as sharp. Some have compared it to cigars, which isn’t far off the mark as premium cigars are also a basic, unflavored product. Semois, like cigars, produces no tongue bite, furthering my contention that pipes don’t cause tongue bite, pipe tobacco manufacturers do.
It’s a great smoke, if you like tobacco, but, like I said, most don’t. La Brumeuse Semois is available from the usual suspects.