Today's Pipe Tobacco Market

Today's pipe tobacco market presents a picture that is both far more varied and far more fragile than that of the mid-twentieth century. A smoker can now reach a blend from the other side of the world without leaving home; yet the production behind that blend is increasingly concentrated in an ever-shrinking number of factories. The story of the last thirty years in pipe tobacco is largely the tension between these two trends.

The Expansion of Access

The online discussion groups and mail-order sites that spread in the second half of the 1990s opened the way for blends previously known only in their home country to cross borders. As access widened, writing about individual blends also became the community's shared body of knowledge. Small-scale blending, however, is not a discovery of this period: in Kendal, in northwestern England, workshops more than two hundred years old, such as Samuel Gawith, had kept a narrow production tradition running without interruption. A mid-2000s assessment published on Pipedia and signed by Jon Tillman treats the period as a revival for blending; later years, however, showed that the market did not move in one direction only.