If you could somehow imagine capturing the essence of pure… raw… ‘roid raging, manliness and then smashing it into a tobacco that looks like a cat turd you might understand a fraction of what Black XX is all about. This is the tobacco equivalent of every 80’s action movie ever made distilled into a smokable substance that isn’t easy to define. To aid in my efforts to explain this tobacco I will quote my friend Ryan upon seeing this tobacco in the tin…

“That is some intimidating looking shit bro…”

Yes… yes… It is some intimidating looking shit bro. Black XX looks like something a lumberjack should be smoking while he punches trees out of the ground with his bare hands or maybe the salty captain of a whaling ship who kills mutant sperm whales by…

Honestly I think the Devil gets kind of a bad wrap sometimes. Sure there is the whole “pure evil” thing but lets be honest… The Devil has contributed some pretty cool stuff to society, heavy metal music being a great example of this. So even if he is the embodiment of all that is unholy Satan sure knows how to make some kick ass tunes. Ironically in addition to shredding guitar solos and barely intelligible lyrics he apparently also has hellish good taste in pipe tobacco. A few weeks ago a friend of mine suggested Devil’s Holiday to me and being the gullible sort I thought I would give it a try. Ironically when I started to plan for this review Devil’s Holiday wasn’t at the top of my list of tobaccos so…

I’m gonna do something a little different for this review. Typically I would dedicate a lot of time to one tobacco blend and then tell you a bunch of bullshit about it that we both know won’t effect your opinion in any way, shape or form… But I’m feeling a little wily this week so I thought I would shake things up a bit.

A few weeks ago I picked up a giant bag of Smokers Pride Vanilla Cavendish pipe tobacco at Cheap Tobacco. While I was there I also grabbed a bag of Prince Albert’s Soft Vanilla… Apparently I’m going through a vanilla phase or something and wasn’t even aware of it. Anyway, I had seen the massive bags of Smokers Pride before but never picked one up because I just assumed it was tobacco flavored mulch. The Prince Albert I picked up because I actually hadn’t see it there before and…

I’m still alive… I’ve just been so damn busy the last few weeks I just haven’t had time to really sit down and write anything let alone muster the incredible mental focus *pfft* required to come up with a quality review. But today I decided to bite the bullet; sit down, focus and write a freaking review even if it killed me. To make it easy on myself I have decided to review Peterson’s Wild Atlantic but don’t be fooled, I’m not reviewing this because it’s a weak product or an uninteresting blend. I’m reviewing Wild Atlantic because it’s absolutely-freaking-awesome so it’s pretty easy to write about.

Years ago, when I started getting serious about pipe smoking I did what a lot of people do, bought a cheap basket pipe and some bulk tobaccos…

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that most of the people reading this review have probably tried Middleton’s Cherry Blend at least once in their lives. Typically the opinion of Middleton’s Cherry Blend is that you either love it or hate it… Personally I’m not a fan but if you enjoy it, more power to you. So why the hell did I bring that up? Because as soon as I lit my first bowl of Bootlegged all I could think was, “Oh no… this is going to be like Cherry Blend.” Thankfully I was wrong but we will get to that in a few minutes.

First things first, to be fair Bootlegged isn’t considered a “cherry” blend. It’s classified as…