The following contribution was written a long while ago by Rusty and I. This subject came about as a result of my wanting to know how much of a particular blend I should be sticking away in my cellar to enjoy for a long time. What follows is our combined contribution from all those years ago.

---

I thought I’d start a discussion surrounding cellars. One of the questions we pipe smokers (and I suppose this could translate for cigar smokers as well) is the question of “how much of a favourite blend do I need in the cellar?”

I know many of us which we had the prescient knowledge of McClelland going away; as an example. Had we known beforehand, I’m sure there would be some of us who would have purchased just a little more McClelland blends to stick away to enjoy later on. Can I get an ‘amen’?

Yes, but how much?

So what is too little and what is too much? How do we know when we’ve found that ‘sweet spot’ of perfect amount? Single blend favourites are easy to figure out – buy deep in the particular blend. But, how much is enough?

You think it would be as easy as starting with a total yearly consumption and multiplying it out to as many years as you may want to have that particular blend available to you….but then? It doesn’t really answer how much of a single blend you need. The problem is that one can divide the total by the number of blends but we don’t smoke them uniformly. There are favourites and there are minor diversions that are as fun but not something we’d reach for every day if we had it.

The first thing to do is to sit down and figure out how much you smoke in a day. Your actual daily pipe smoking. One bowl? Two bowls? Three bowls? None? More? Some days two bowls are completed and other days perhaps four. I should think that if you’re like me, you don’t smoke the same tobacco bowl after bowl. You might smoke something aromatic and then something with latakia or Turkish. Or a straight Virginia. We might have a jar of tobacco we love to smoke more frequently augmented by a smidgeon of something-something from the side jars we always mean to get to. It’s not consistent; there’s variety and frequency. This makes it tricky to figure out how much we might really want to stick away in our cellar.

Bear with me. The unit of measurement we’re going to adopt is a ‘Slot’. For these purposes. A Slot is defined as thus: “One Slot is 40 bowls.” That’s equivalent to the number of bowls from a 4oz tin of tobacco, so a 2oz tin of tobacco of G.L. Pease (for example) is 1/2 of a Slot, or 20 bowls.

Are you with me?

10 lb (eg your cellar) is 40 Slots – that’s 1,600 bowls. It’s direct and useful at a glance. It’s a useful capacity measure that relates more directly to smokes. It’s very easy to to take any pound measurement and divide it by ten and then multiply the result by 40. If someone says that he has a 50 lb cellar then we can immediately conclude that he has 200 Slots (50/10 = 5, and 5*40=200) or 8,000 bowls in the cellar. Even if he has an odd amount it’s fairly easy – eg: 111 lb cellar is (111/10=11.1, and 11.1*40= 444 Slots).

Why is a Slot so useful? If one smokes about one bowl per day then there are 9 Slots to a year (9 * 40 = 360). If you smoke two bowls per day then 18 Slots make up your year. In fact it’s convenient to see a year as a table 9 Slots wide by the number bowls per day in height.

A year for a 3 bowl per day man can be represented as:

Bowl 1: Slot 1, Slot 2, Slot 3,….., Slot 9
Bowl 2: Slot 1, Slot 2, Slot 3,….., Slot 9
Bowl 3: Slot 1, Slot 2, Slot 3,….., Slot 9

That’s 3 times 9 Slots/year = 27 Slots. Don’t always smoke 3 bowls per day? Fine, back it off some. Someone may smoke about 24 Slots per year. Let’s say they usually smoke two bowls per day and almost 50% of the time they will have a third.

If one has variety in the cellar, then one can loosely interpret a single Slot as a 40 bowl ‘visit’ with a specific blend during the year. In that case the capacity of a cellared blend measured in Slots corresponds directly to the number of years that the owner can enjoy that cellared blend. 

So if they have 20 Slots of a particular blend then they know that it’ll also last them about 20 years. Yes, 20 Slots is 5 lbs but seeing it as twenty visits (the number of years that they could smoke 40 bowls each year) is a more direct measure of the cellar capacity for that single blend.

In someone else’s case who smokes less frequently, their cellar may indicate that they’ve gone from someone who smokes one Slot per month (40 bowls per month, so a max of 12 Slots per year) down to one Slot every hundred days or so (12 bowls per month). That’s roughly 3 to 3.5 Slots per year. Are they making the cellar last for their needs?

I think the Slot is a useful measure.

So, having said all this, where do we begin? Let me help.

I think that a very useful first target for a modest cellar is to acquire 10 Slots of each of your top ten favourite blends. Ten Slots is 2.5 lbs times 10 blends is 25 lb. That’s five 8 oz tins, or twenty 2 oz tins, or ten to twelve 100g tins, or 20-23 50g tins per favourite. Anything less and you haven’t got enough and you’re not done. 

It’s easy to gather tinned blends in one-sies and two-sies. It’s easy to believe that tinned blends in quantities of ones and twos is part the cellar when they’re really incidental to the cellar. They’re just one time treats, samples, things on the waiting list to try etc. Worthwhile to have but don’t mistake them for the cellar. The cellar consists of the blends that you’re trying to enjoy for a decade or more. This is actually harder than you might think. It’s very easy to get distracted and never do it.

After that first target is met either build the same ten blends up beyond ten slots or identify another ten and do it again. I’ve found that it’s very easy to identify ten to thirty blends – harder to fill them out though. You also want variety so be sure to pick blends or combinations of blends that represent a style that you want to preserve. For example, if you enjoy burley blends, burley slices are a good example, so you would ensure you have Wessex, Solani, and Edgeworth so that, together, they are a cellared blend of more than 10 slots, with the variety you may want to have.

Notice some of the bends mentioned are now Unicorns wandering around? This is one of the reasons why we might want to start cellaring deep.

Personally, I’m more prone to purchase tobacco right now than pipes – pipes I’ll always find around in the future. But tobacco? I see storm clouds gathering in the distance and I’ll be damned if I leave this earth without a shitload of tobacco to see me through my golden years.

Who’s with me!? Lol.