Read this personal experience

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Written by John C. Loring
Contributed by Yang Forcióri


An old 1955 'knife lid' tin of Sweet Crop blended by the long past Cohen Weenen firm, one side of the tin was more then half rusted with an open 'rust through' hole the size of half a nickel.

I had gotten it with a bunch of other tins in much better condition a few years past and this one sat on an isolated basement shelf waiting to be tossed. After all as a tin it was hardly in collectable condition & if there was ever tobacco too dangerous to smoke this had to be it.

Last week, needing shelf space, I tossed into the 'throw out' bag but when I got upstairs I put caution to the wind, dug it out of the bag and when I found that the outer tin top had rusted to the tin, used a tin can opener to open it from the bottom.

Low & behold back in '55 Cohen Weenen had packed it with a wax paper liner and while the tobacco was bone dry and clotted solid together the wax paper had prevented the rust from leaching into the contents. 'What the hell' I thought, and proceeded to break up the now round brick of tobacco (no easy task) and transfer it to a new empty tobacco tin, tossed in a moist tissue (I certainly wasn't going to waste my time with any fancy efforts) & set it aside.

Well it's now three days later. Yesterday, I gingerly opened the 'rejuvenation tin' and gave it a cautious sniff - well it didn't smell offensive, in fact it had no smell to speak of at all, so I went through the drawers to find an old junk meerschaum I wouldn't miss, packed it with 'you know what' and then lit up, being very careful to draw just a tad of what might possibly be lethal smoke - not too bad, not bad at all as I finished the bowl.

I smoked another bowl last night, and today I started off with it in a 1928 Dunhill 126 Shell that married delightfully with the medium-light matured virginia blend. I don't know what the blend tasted like in 1955 but notwithstanding the packaging it's a wonderful smoke today.

And if you showed me the tin & told me the story, I would swear you were a g-d- liar...


Back to Loring's article here



Yang (talk) 10:29, 19 August 2019 (CDT)