Well, as you may recall, I got my hands on a case of Square snuff from the 1980’s. Rusty tins, but none rusted through, containing super-dry, terribly musty snuff. Opened the contents of 5 tins and into a glass jar they went. Broke up some clumps, and used the evaporation method to rehydrate it to about the moisture content of American dipping snuff. I’ve been letting it air-dry in a cool, very dry place, and the first batch subjected to this treatment has lost that musty, fusty, stink it had. It’s very smooth in the nostrils, a bit of a slight burn, but without much in the way of any scent at all. Throat-drip is about what you’d expect from a Scotch snuff, but not so pronounced. I’m considering taking a portion out and lightly toasting it, to see whether I can do anything with this otherwise bland but nice snuff. Any suggestions?
Yes, 3 suggestions. Dry tonka bean into your hydrated snuff. A tonka bean saturated with brandy into your dry snuff. A moist carrot into your dry snuff.
Never heard the carrot idea. What does it do?
it hydrates the plant material. I’ve done that with other dried plant material with great success. You can also use a citrus rind, lettuce, cellery or any other high-water content thing. It works the same as the thing inside a humidor.
Given the age and condition of the snuff you now have, in effect, a neutral base snuff to play with - most companies (check out Toque) use a similar or identical base and its only the flavourings that change. If I had this I would experimenting with cocktails, things like: base with Toque raspberry menthol and vanilla, I’d also take a slug of good liquor to flavour some either by placing an open dish (cognac and Tia Maria would go well) and using the evaporation method to infuse, or simply adding a few drops, mixing and letting it infuse. Dry is not neccessarily bad when making cocktails, you can leven out a moist snuff with it. Ive had dried out SP in the past that I have simply added a small amount of medicated 99 to - the camphor really brought out the flavour. I have found that menthol in general. use in very small ratios, can be an excellent flavouring and it also seems to rejuvenate as mentholated snuffs get the sinuses moving. My choice if I had this would be to take dram of cognac mixed with some very finely ground coffee and simply mix it in to the point where it was at the moisture level that I use. I would then put it in an airtight container for few days (even weeks if you can wait) and see what happens Cheers buddy, hope it works out.
The coffee and brandy idea is intriguing. I’ve got a small batch (about an ounce) of the de-mustified snuff mixed with a bit of powdered instant coffee. I noticed that the coffee scent is stronger from the instant than from the fresh coffee grounds, on a per-particle-size basis, and am experimenting to see whether this might be carried over into the snuff. We shall see.