Pipe Tobacco

For most of the first 300 years after Europe’s discovery of tobacco (already agronomically well developed and widely cultivated by the native peoples of the western hemisphere for thousands of years) Europeans and their colonists consumed tobacco by smoking it in a pipe. [“Snuffing” powdered tobacco into the nose was considered a medicinal use, even though more popular among ladies and in the royal courts of Europe.]

Centuries-old methods of packing, preserving, and transporting tobacco from the New World to Europe by sailing ship resulted in chemical and physical changes in the tobacco that have come to be associated with characteristic classes of pipe tobacco. This is certainly true of Perique and of Cavendish tobacco (the Cavendish process, not “Cavendish cut”.)