Pipe Tobacco: Meat Pie by Drew Estate

• $11.99, 50g tin
• Sample gifted by a friend

Background

Several years back when Drew Estate went into the pipe tobacco business, I honestly expected them to just go with “flavored” or “infused” offerings…after all, they had made their name with ACID, then Ambrosia, Kahlua, Tabak Especial, Isla del Sol and other “infused” cigars before moving on to Liga Privada and other traditional smokes.

I was wrong, though…while most of the Drew Estate Classics pipe tobaccos are indeed aromatics, they did include some non-flavored blends, as well. Meat Pie is one of those.

The marketing-speak on the DE website is this:

We made a blend and called it “Meat Pie”! Daring to be just a little different, imagine we just re-wrote some classic turn-of-the-century novel. A Pungent, Smoky, Medium bodied smoke that is the epitome of the word Classic.

Meat Pie is an English blend, combining some Virginias, with Orientals and Cyprian Latakia. It also makes me think of the end of “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” when the school teacher yells, “If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?!” So where’s the pudding?

A friend gave me enough Meat Pie to fill a bowl and I saved it for this review.

Notes

I poured the Meat Pie out of the bag I had stored it in onto a sheet of laser printer paper and let it sit while I did the above research. The room was soon filled with the smoky, pungent aroma of the Latakia. I must admit, though, that this had more of a hickory note to it than most other English blends, so I found myself wondering if there was some hickory smoking going on either the Latakia or some of the other leaf in the blend.

Though the tobacco seemed a bit dry to the touch, it took some steady flame to get lit completely. Even then, it took fairly steady puffing to keep it going.

Meat Pie started out with the familiar Latakia notes of an English blend, but punctuated with some extra baking spice, hickory smoke, and touches of tobacco sweetness. It seemed cooler and mellower than something like Dunhill’s Nightcap…more in line in some ways with the regular Frog Morton blend.

Toward the end of the bowl, I also started picking up on some citrusy sweetness that was a nice counterpoint to the more savory notes. In all, I think Drew Estate ended up putting out a nice, well-balanced English blend to go in their initial line-up of pipe tobaccos. It’s definitely richer than a bulk blend while perhaps not quite as appealing to me as Frog Morton…but that comes down to individual tastes as much as anything else.