Are you sure you love your aged pipe tobacco?

"I've been aging this since Fort Sumpter."
"Yeah, and it tastes like a moldy Confederate C-note!"

 

(Firecured) A couple of years ago, I was visiting a pipe club when an older member generously opened up a rare tobacco blend that he’d aged, unopened in the tin, for a number of years. It tasted about how I expected: O.K., but not to my liking. What surprised me was the looks on the faces of some of our younger members who were newish to pipe smoking, but around long enough to have stockpiled a lot of tins for aging. They didn’t like it, and it had them worrying about all those tins in the basement.
Simply put: Different blends and different brands age differently under different conditions. The two big differences being aerobic and anaerobic aging: with or without air. For example: The last two 250 gram packages of Golden Glow I bought had two very different tastes. One I opened immediately and placed loosely in Ball Jars, the other I left in the vacuum sealed packaging. I liked it in the jars, hated it aged in the package. My rule of thumb is to store it with a little air. Some tobaccos are fairly impervious to aging: latakia, Kentucky fire-cured, and cavendish are already well preserved by smoke or sugar.
Now many of us are aging our tobacco because we like that aged taste, but many more of us, I suspect, are storing tobacco as a hedge against whatever draconian measures the FDA has up its sleeve and may not want the taste of our favorite tobaccos to change over the months and years to come. If the latter's the case, I’d strongly advise you to periodically crack open an old tin and see what’s what, that way you won’t spend your golden years smoking something you don’t like anymore.