Well I am fairly new to your discussion board and first wanted to say hello from the old gold rush motherlode area of California to all the snuffers out there.

I hope I am not repeating a previous topic on your site but I would like to share it to anyone who might be interested. My topic is adding a little life to the dry snuff. This also works VERY well for taking some of the drying effect that some of you have noted with the American style snuffs. Do you have old snuff or snuff that dries you out? If so give this a try! This works overnight so is very quick. What you will need is fresh leaves from any type of mint plant (there are other things you can use instead that I will note later). You can buy the potted plants at nurseries or anywhere they sell potted plants for kitchen use such as basil, chives etc. I usually do smaller amounts at a time to have better control over the process. I use an average size snuff tin or box that is half full of snuff. You just take 2-4 (depending on leaf size) fresh picked leaves and crumple-crush them in hand to "open" the leaves up. This crumpling will help the leaves release the natural scent as well as the natural oil in the leaf. You place these leaves directly into the snuff tin and shake around for a few seconds and let sit overnight. During this time you can occasionally shake the tin. The next morning after a few shakes you open the tin and remove the leaves. The leaves should now be all dried up and all of the scent and oils from the leaf is now in the snuff. The oils help in reducing the drying effect. You can tap the rest of snuff off of leaves back into tin or sniff directly off the leaf! You can adjust or fine tune the amount of leaves you use to your liking. I generally keep this up until the snuff is just starting to slightly ball up. The snuff is now ready and better than ever.

Other items that have oils that work very well:
Fresh Lemon Balm Leaves
Fresh Flower Petals that have pleasant scent
Fresh Orange Peels
Fresh Lemon Peels
Fresh Grapefruit Peels are real good.

Have any of you tried this procedure before? Do you have any other ingredients used in this way you would like to share?
Hope this tip can help someone!

Your fellow snuffer,
Brian

Any way to get some wacky tobacky in there?

Snuffgrinder, thanks for some other suggestions. I've only tried a few spices/herbs including tarragon which gave a slight licorice scent and was pretty good, nutmeg which I did not like and apple mulling spice for making spiced cider. The mulling spice was pretty good as well, reminded me of Christmas. I have also used shredded coconut which was pretty interesting. I have tried about all the alcohol flavorings by placing a bowl of snuff in a bowl of alcohol with a sealed lid. I have 3 favorite alcohol flavors. My favorite alcohol flavor is from Anchor Junipero Gin I guess thats why Bespoke Gin & Tonic is one of my favorite snuffs. And the second favorite is Makers Mark Bourbon and the 3rd is Kahlua. I will have to give your 'current concoction' with black fired american twist with thyme a try. Thanks again for some other ideas to play with.

Thanks for the ideas. I should try these methods. Until now I only used Whisky to give some snuffs a nice scent, but the leaf / flower method sounds also nice.

Toasted ones are very good to try. Also plain ones are good to play around with. This also works well for some of the American style snuffs/ Scotch snuffs. Say you have a snuff of any flavor but the flavor isn't noticeable, well then you can add more of that certain flavor until you notice it or another flavor on the side to complement an existing flavor. But it does work well for any old stale snuff.

Why not old and exotics spices flavors ??

Pepper, clove, red dry peppers...etc...for example...

But we can not forget that snuff must to preserve firstly the tobacco flavour. Snuff is tobacco, the former manner to take tobacco. My line is dry and unscented snuffs, although I like sometimes some scented pinch of snuff,... but allways natural flavours.

The tobacco aroma, flavour and taste never can be hidden.

And this is my modest opinion.

Pedro Macias
Spain

As for wacky tobacky--it has to be heated to some 300 plus degress F to release the good stuff. How did they used to do that without losing it to vapor?
All suggestions very good and the history of tobacco use is most interesting. Ginger and snuff sounds interesting and I will try it.
Side note, I put some fresh peppermint springs in a dull can of snus and the result is BETTER than the original.

Where do you get your leaf tobacco and twist from? I used Fred Stoker's for years, but their prices have gotten outrageous. Also curious about your Indian leaf.

On impulse last night I tried re-invigorating my daily plain tobacco mix (consisting of stuff like Tom Buck, Sharrow Gold Label, Sharrow IDT, a bit of F&T HDT, a bit of S'nuff, JH Wilson's SP No 1... and other bits & bobs, as it's "evolved") by putting a little Calvados on a bit of kitchen roll and adding that directly to the tin.

It's quite nice today - pleasantly apple-y and decidedly more smooth, though heady. However, I think it could handle more Calvados, or maybe a bit of something else, yet to be decided. So I'm going to pursue this.

Would you folks say that the bowl within a bowl technique is distinctly better for adding alcoholic flavours to snuff than adding impregnated kitchen roll (or maybe something better suited to the job) directly to the tin?
And what sort of proportions of alcohol to snuff would you recommend, say taking whiskey and SP as a baseline?

Cheers

Adam

Thanks Roderick, great tip.
Of course these days I would actually need to make a point of buying blotting paper. But I'm sure my wallet can handle that!

Adam

This is a great topic, With some truly magnificent posts. I think everyone should read over this whole discussion at least once. Another very well informed discussion. I am continually impressed with the things I read here at snuffhouse.

Alex have you ever thought of compiling all of the relevant tips here on snuffhouse into a book? Like a Snuff Encyclopedia? I think I will start cataloguing posts into a topical reference atleast for my own personal use.

- Dapalma

Sounds like a great idea for Flavoring tobacco,

MM

ill be trying some of those, no doubt.

@ Juxtaposer lol I never said it was a simple process, just a tested tried and true effective one

Reviving an old thread here....

Just found some things that might be rather useful for keeping bulk quantities of snuff moist:

Humidifying Discs, Metal