After a week at 125’ it’s doing well. I reground with a little baking soda and another dash of bourbon. Instead of drying in a hot crock I put it in an unglazed clay jar for slow drying. Should be a ship voyage or so till it’s done. That won’t stop me from snuffing it. But it does stop me from doing a review on it.
I’ve just now discovered that some of the Rustica which I have in a sealed glass jar is going somewhere. I took some freshly ground Roderick’s Rustica and added my own “Spanish brandy”. Spanish brandy is made by maturing good brandy in oak casks which was formerly used to mature sherry. As I do not have Spanish brandy I made my own. I added 25% of pale dry sherry to 75% of 15 years old brandy. This mixture I used to moisten the rustica. It’s been sitting now for about 10 days and I’m sure this is going to be something special. I’m not saying it’s gonna be SJ but it’s moving in that direction. I’ve filled a large glass cigar tube and will leave it for at least 2 months. The rest I will try from time to time.
I just received mine today and after opening the envelope,set it on the counter to tear into a bag of SP extra to help kickstart my coffee. I started smelling a wonderful aroma! What a great smell working its way thru the plastic bag. I could smell it clear across the room and that was all the motivation I needed to get the Krups grinder out. Separated the stems out and started reducing to snuff,and then ran it thru my tea strainer. I like it just the way it is but… I’ve been thinking of trying a “Southern Jewel” snuff by fermenting with Southern Comfort liqueur. Its got vanilla bean,cinnamon,various fruits and citrus all topped off with honey. Hopefully I can find a couple airline bottles tomorrow as I don’t want a whole 5th or pint.
Actually I really like the natural flavor of Roderick’s Rustica. If Roderick made a straight rustica natural snuff, the stronger the better, I’d buy it in volume. 
ermtony got some leaves from Roderick and gave my some plain snuff he had ground and I’m with springalong it’s good just as it is, in fact it has a kind of licorice taste to it.
OMG the drip is going into my ear canals! Yowza! At this point I don’t think I care what these lovely smells are reminiscent of. They will hereafter be associated with pure pleasure. I would advise anyone on MAOI’s to use caution with N. Rustica.
I took a little time to make a grinder lid harvest. Sort of a “cabinet” snuff if you will. That was the last aspect that really needed to be worked out. I want to reiterate that this Rustica from Roderick is the shiznit. I could explain that using a coffee grinder I spun, collected the cover dust, and repeated till I had a box full, but you all should know that trick. What you may not have known is that steaming up the lid with a warm breath expedites the process a few fold. I’m so frickin’ elated right now. I’d like to thank every one for contributing comments here at snuffhouse. Without which I would have never achieved this success however trivial. (the comments and the success). Cheers!
I’d say that is Cabinet snuff & you’ve worked out a contemporary method to make it. Congratulations.
The Inquisition now in a Heartwood Creations box with a sliced vanilla bean. Already having been refilled once. I don’t think the ten gram clay pot will get to age for a year. My snuff buddies all say “I want some of that”. I need to figure out what to do with the “heavier” particles. Maybe a schmalzler or a toast. Maybe snus.
About 6 weeks later now… My Rustica is still Rustica…
A model of Paddington station.
I finally got some of this in a gift box from a friend. I think it’s an almost perfect snuff with only it’s natural flavor, but just to do something I dropped 3 whole dark roasted coffee beans in the smashbox with about 5 grams of Rustica. Let it sit for 4 days, now I have a lightly scented coffee snuff. Just enough coffee scent to notice, more of a background scent keeping the tobacco in the forefront.
I have used a part of the sample Roderick sent me to make some snuff. First i beat the living daylights out of it in a wooden mortar & pestle , and added a bit of green tea , a dash of salt , a tiny bit of rustica ash to offset the ph and a few lemon tree leaves for scent. I then heated the snuff up with the leaves still in the bag just to get all the volatile oils out and floating about. Left it for a few days , then removed the leaves and it’s now been sitting in a sealed bag , inside an old snus can for quite some time (A month or two , can’t remember exactly). What i got is one STRONG and fairly tasty snuff. The drip is kind of nasty on the throat , but otherwise it’s pretty good for my first try. I have smoked an equal amount of the rustica and estimate i have about half of the initial bag left. //later: Scratch that , don’t try it at home.Took another pinch and I’ve been sneezing like crazy , and that drip is just annoying.
I’ve sieved some of my ground Rustica through pantyhose. I added some brandy and a wee bit of bicarbs and then dried out the snuff again. This has been sitting in a snuff box for about two months and I’ve tried some today. The result is a plain tobacco taste with quite a good nic hit and a bit of nose burn which I like. It seems to me as if this snuff should be left alone to mature for quite a while. I’m going to order some more Rustica from Roderick and treat it with some brandy and honey once more. But this time I’m going to go slow. I’ve learned my lesson well; to make snuff needs a lot of patience. In the mean time my Rustica plants are growing beautifully and I will soon have some more tobacco to experiment with.
when I started trying to grind I first took and used everything my fingers picked up to go into my little couple dollar electric coffee bean grinder – until I came across a literal stick (this is no vine or stem – this is a tobacco stick) which there was no way I was going to grind up, but its big enough to set aside for other experiments (one day I may try the old southern method I’ve read about of using snuff orally that normally requires a hickory but with this tobacco stick instead). It was at this point, third grinding round I started trying to take only leaves and putting the more stemmy stuff back in the bag. These first grinds were done in three sets (my little grinder doesn’t hold much at all and on the third grind I used some I had tried to make into a cigarette and had tried to use in a pipe (neither would stay lit). I did my best to collect only the tobacco and no other remnants (not the little ashy parts from the smoking attempts). Each grounding set got sifted through a Lipton Pyramid Teabag (I had been emptying and saving these for e-cigarette cartridge material). I don’t know about all this pantyhose business but the Lipton pyramid teabags (not to be confused with regular teabags which are completely different) make really nice ready made sifting baggies if you just carefully pull apart the top and extract the tea, there you go. Takes a while if you have a lot of tobacco to sift, but a small measuring spoon and three bowls (one you start from, one to sift over and one to dump the too-large won’t-sift remains into), then folding a lip over the open edge of the teabag for shaking feeling and working the fine posder out over the larger bowl works well for me (you will get powder all over your fingers too but oh well, sniff as you go every once in a while). I can’t compare this method to a nylon sifted event (though I have looked at a nylon I have and this pyramid seems teabag method seems to make more sense, may even be giving me more finely sifted than you guys with your nylons, I don’t know. I took the stuff that didn’t sift through and ground it again then sifted it again. This whole effort took me most of the night and a bit of today to end up with a total of about 10g finely ground/sifted snuff (approx half a square 1oz tea tin) This last of the three grinding sets (that I got from the pipe and tore open cigarette) was noticeably different, better, had an ashy flavor to it (must have gotten a bit of ash in it anyway) and I mixed them all together and that seemed to be the trick. This makes sense to me since other plants in other countries are mixed with lime or (wood?) ash apparently a little ‘hair of the dog’ accidental (this time) method works well… a little pinch (or less) of ash of the very same tobacco you are grinding in about 10g seems might make the batch stronger in nicotine plus give what I’d call slightly toasty flavor to it. Don’t use too much or it will be too much and give a slight ashtray flavor (what it was a bit more like when it was just in its original cigarette/small pipe about 1/3rd of my completed product but still wasn’t too bad) until that bunch was sifted and mixed in with the other (which was more the right amount). All of this barely made a dent in the contents of the N Rustica bag (I can barely even tell I got into it and took anything out). EDIT – I take that back about the teabag being a finer sieving… I finally decided to take the tin and slide it down to the foot of a set of nylons (the thickest set of them I could find), once there, slipped the lid off and started thwacking on the back of the tin into a bowl, once done I could see not everything went through and sure enough there are less finely ground bits left in the tin when I extracted it. Not all nylons are created the same and I’m thinking on top of this that some would sift more finely than others.
I just ordered some Rustica and am wondering if anyone has just tried mixing a little of it with their favorite snuffs? I really am not trying to create a snuff just seeing if I can get a good nicotine booster.
I just tried putting one single layer medium-sized complete leaf piece placed along my upper gum and lip on the right side (sorta like I’ve read other people do with other leaves in other countries, but located ‘upstairs’). That worked pretty well actually (until about maybe 15 minutes to a half an hour later when my chest started hurting and I figured I’d better take it out). Didn’t make a bunch of juice, didn’t make me spit and it didn’t fall apart or anything (no crumbs to go anywhere and it stayed as one piece) and wasn’t too strong of a flavor, was pretty nice that way too (just maybe a little too strong on nicotine according to my chest a bit later), was really quite nice actually and I might try that again another time, but with a smaller piece.
8-12 times stronger in nicotine! Wow. Where did you find this information, Roderick? I just made some snuff this weekend out of this. I have a fairly nice Cuisinart coffee grinder at home ($60) that does a great job on beans. I cleaned it thoroughly and ran it through the dishwasher as I did not intend to make a coffee flavored snuff. I cleaned the leaves of most woody stems and put about 12-15g of leaf material in the grinder. The grinding process went very quickly, reducing most of the leaf material into a very finely milled powder in a few minutes. As others have mentioned, I noticed a very fine snuff building up on the lid of the grinder. Upon closer examination I estimated this snuff to be toast or scotch-like in grind. I collected this about half-way through the grinding process (maybe 1g or so) and then again after I was finished (another gram or so) and put it in a smash-box. With the bulk of the ground material, I used the pantyhose method to sieve out the coarser grains. In the end, I had about 2g of extremely fine, 7-8g of medium-fine snuff, and about 3 g of Berwick Brown-like course snuff. I added a pinch of sodium bicarbonate to the medium-fine batch. I tried the toast grind immediately and it promptly slaughtered the back of my throat and sent me into a sneezing/coughing fit. User beware! The drip on this is inexplainable - horrid taste, almost acidic like burn. The meduim-fine snuff was easier to take and had less throat contact. The aroma from the rustica is very different than anything else I’ve snuffed - very barnyardish at this point with notes of hay (but nothing like NTSU). I did not notice 8-12 times the nicotine with this, but my palms did get slightly sweaty. I think I will let this mature for several weeks before coming back to it. The moisture level at this point is bone-dry. Some experimentation with hydrating this snuff could yield good results. I want to test mixing it with some of my favorite snuffs and then maybe make a foray into flavoring this myself with perhaps orange or lemon peel. For now, I will probably just sprinkle some of the course grind into my occasional pipe bowl to see if I can perceive the higher nicotine that way.
@Roderick I think you’re right. I wont do that leaf-in-cheek thing again, even though my blood pressure and all are remarkably good and low since stopping smoking (I talked about this in another post) and for all I know it might’ve just been indigestion/heartburn that felt but I can’t tell one type of chest pain from another, there’s still no reason to ‘push the envelope’ on things. its hard enough work just to get it ground up and sieved anyway so I after all that I don’t suppoe I want the extra work of trying to add other ‘make it more potent’ stuff to it. I might just mix it as is with other things as you suggested (maybe taxi or NTSU once I get some etc, never know) I put some in a bullet, seems just fine as long as I sniff it solo (if I sniff it after one of the properly produced ones like one of your toques or other proper production snuffs then it doesn’t seem as good) but thanks for remind me that its really mean to be a good mixer, and I think it will be. I wish I knew the best way to store it with what I still have on hand (I have no big glass jars around and its bugging me that most of it is just laying there in its original double bagged state you send it in, but I’m not satisfied thats going to be anywhere near good enough for long term storage).
Well I ground mine up with a coffee grinder and tried a little of it in this dry state. It does produce a lot of drip, not something I would want to snuff out and about. I put some in a small jar and threw some fresh orange peel in it, that snuff is now much moister and I tried some of this today. Still got a awful drip to it, no real scent although you can smell the orange in the jar, just not the nose. I am going to try mixing some of it with some other snuff and see what happens.