In today's special episode, we have a once-in-a-lifetime experience to share with you: Steve Norse of Vermont Freehand joined us in our roundtable and opened an over 100-year-old tin of Cope's Bond of Union for us to smoke. Join us as we dive into this ultra-aged tobacco and share our thoughts on the oldest tin of tobacco any of us have ever smoked. We're happy we got it on camera because the shared experience was unforgettable, and the tobacco was unlike anything we've ever tried.

[Shane Ireland]: We're here with our special guest Steve Norse of Vermont Freehand. Thanks for joining us, man. It's good to see you here.

[Steve Norse]: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[SI]: I've been up to see you in Vermont, we've done a million pipe shows together, and it's the first time you've been able to stop by our neck of the woods, see the operation, and hang out. It's been great so far. Today we have something, I would say, arguably among the most interesting things to discuss we've ever discussed, and that is vintage tobaccos in general. Collecting and enjoying vintage tobaccos. Steve has graced us with an incredible example of that: a 100-year-old tin.

Cope's Bond of Union: Over 100 Years Old

[SN]: This is Cope's Bond of Union. A lot of us know Cope's from the old original Escudo. This is one that had very little mention on the internet about anything with the blend. It was really hard to find what kind of blend it even was. Someone had sent me an old advertisement that said it was a Virginia, so I'm hoping that is the case. The artwork on the tin is top-notch.

[Andy Wike]: It's super cool.

[SN]: It's the neatest painting they did. The only thing I could find about it was they stopped making it in the early 1920s, so it's over 100 years old.

[SI]: For those of you out there that may not be aware, a lot of us have talked about cellaring tobacco over the last many years, and the practice of cellaring tobacco is relatively new. This is something that kind of came up in the last 20, 25 years, maybe, like the idea of aging tobacco like wine and enjoying it later. A lot of us have experienced stuff that's 10 years old or whatever, but there's another layer to collecting and enjoying vintage tobaccos, and this goes beyond vintage. It's a century old.

[AW]: It belongs in a museum.

[SI]: This is antiquity, at this point.

Vintage Tins

Steve, can you tell us a tiny bit before we get into this specific tin about your journey with vintage tins, not just with pipe tobacco, but also cigarettes, which is another really fun and interesting rabbit hole to go down too. How did you get into it, when did it start for you, and what have been some of the most memorable moments?

[SN]: So Mike McNeil of McClelland's got me into vintage tobacco, particularly the old cigarettes. He had some old Chesterfield he once opened, and when I tried a 80, 90-year-old aged Virginia, the experience was just surreal. As I got into the vintage cigarettes, I started collecting those. In my personal collection at home, I only smoke my doubles.

But the neat thing about these cutter top tins is as long as they're bulging with pressure, they're not compromised and you know it's gonna be fresh inside.

[Steve Mawby]: Yeah, the manufacturing on those old tins is absolutely insane.

[SN]: They made cutter top tins from the '20s up to like late '50s, early '60s. At the time, they didn't know anything about aging tobacco. They didn't know that it would ferment.

[SI]: So this was intended for consumption immediately.

[SN]: Yeah. Before the '20s to '50s, say 80 years before that, they didn't have packaging to know what 80-year-old tobacco would be like, so you have that window of packaging that was made without that knowledge. And here we are 80-100 years later getting to enjoy what they didn't even know they had.

[SI]: For those of you that have gone to any of the pipe shows — Muletown, Chicago, Vegas — in the last several years, Steve has a bit of a reputation, at this point, for spoiling a bunch of us by opening these old cigarette tins and some pipe tobaccos too.

[AW]: Yeah, that's the main reason I go.

[SM]: Yeah. It's legitimately one of the main things I look forward to at a show.

[SN]: There's so few left in the world that I feel guilty smoking them alone.

[AW]: Aw, that's nice.

[SN]: So I'm always looking for the opportunity to share the experience.

[SM]: One of my favorite memories is just this past year at the Vegas show, I was sitting at the table and I was doing something on my laptop, working in the background. I looked up and there were 30 people gathered that must have gotten there within a 30-second period. I'm like, what is going on? And I just see you standing at the center of it. And I knew you were about to crack something.

[SN]: Yeah, we opened those Old Golds.

[SI]: That's right.

[SN]: Which are to date some of my favorites. They were so good.

[SI]: There've been so many memorable vintage-tobacco experiences in the last couple years alone. You mentioned already, Steve, that if the tin is bulging, it hasn't been compromised by rust and other signs, like hearing the tobacco shake a bit if it's dried out.

When something like this is perfectly preserved and you're opening it, there is something about enjoying it immediately upon opening it. Once oxygen hits that tobacco after a hundred years, you have a relatively limited period of time where you're gonna get that time-capsule experience of what the flavor and aroma is. What has your experience been like? How long do you have before it starts to actually change?

[SN]: The flavors and aromas evolve once it's opened. They can further evolve for a couple of months. Once you open it, you've got a few hours of that unique characteristic. The next day, it mellows just the tiniest bit. When it comes to cigarettes, we can wrap 'em in aluminum foil and then put 'em back in the tin. Put it in plastic with a little moisture pack. A month later, you can still tell it's mellowed out a lot but it's still pungent. All the flavors are there, it's just not as intense.

[SI]: Right away, right after you crack it, is the sweet spot.

Opening the 100-Year-Old Tin

So shall we open this one?

[SM]: I love the opening of these too.

[SN]: The sound is always satisfying. It's a ritual, sacred experience getting to open it. It's just amazing that over a hundred years of fermentation, it is still absolutely fresh.

[AW]: That's insane.

[SN]: The aroma that comes out of there is surreal.

[AW]: It's figgy.

[SI]: There's little thin-cut, broken flakes. And it's so sweet.

[SN]: I'm really glad it held up. It would've been a bummer if it hadn't.

[SM]: The artwork and the vintage nature of the tin is gorgeous, and just like you said, there's those beautiful thin-cut little flakes. This is just an amazing experience, on top of the smell and all that.

[AW]: It's a very satisfying experience opening it, it's not just cracking it, like you have to put in a little bit of work to enjoy this super special thing. Load it up, Steve.

[SI]: Oh my God, this is crazy.

[AW]: Yeah, this is insane.

[SM]: It's about to be a good day.

The Oldest Tin We've Smoked On Camera

[AW]: This might be a Smokingpipes' video first.

[SI]: Yeah, I think it is.

[AW]: This is the oldest tin we've ever smoked on camera.

[SI]: It's one of the oldest tins I've ever smoked, period.

[AW]: It is the oldest tin I've ever smoked.

[SI]: Cope Bros, Liverpool in London.

[SN]: Yeah, pass it around. Pack one up.

[AW]: The moisture's perfect.

[SI]: I know. It's perfect. If you're into wine, this is almost the equivalent digging up an old clay bottle of wine from the Roman era in the Adriatic Sea, or a Shackleton's whiskey that they found out. It's really difficult to compare this experience to almost anything else out there.

[SN]: Very rarely have I opened up a lot of 80, 90-year-old tins, but I think this might be one of the first ones over 100 years old. It's hard to compare it to anything because we don't get to open 100-year-old preserved tobacco.

[SI]: It's as rare as it gets. It makes me think what the next Sun Bear will be like in a hundred years. At least we know that they hold up that long. Tobaccos in general, but especially a decent Virginia.

[SN]: It's hard to know so many things about how this tobacco originally was. The tobacco strains have evolved over the years. A lot of the older cigarette tins, for example, have a higher sugar content, which gives it that good fermentation.

[SI]: Farming and processing practices have changed.

[SM]: Even the soil has changed. Everything about it, and tinning methods.

[SN]: There was no machine harvesting a hundred years ago.

How To Pack Vintage Tobacco

[AW]: I probably should have asked this before I packed my bowl here, but when you're smoking tobaccos of this age, is there anything that people should keep in mind on how to prepare it for the pipe? Do you want to rub it out a little bit or are you worried about the oils from hands potentially mellowing those flavors?

[SN]: I'm not really sure. The piece I took off the top there was that one flake-looking piece, so I rubbed it out a little bit to separate it. But it looks like the rest of this is somewhat separated.

[SI]: In my somewhat limited experience with crazy old tobacco, I don't even give it any drying time. Just straight into the pipe.

On the colors of the flakes, I can almost guarantee you that about five, six hours from now, the colors will go from different shades to uniformly dark in color. When the oxygen hits those aged tobaccos, they darken super quickly. I've had that experience before where I opened something that was really old and it's still pretty bright in the tin. I put it in a mason jar and a couple days later it's uniformly chestnut. Oxygen does its work so quickly after many years. They weren't vacuum sealing tins either, so there was oxygen in that when it was closed, and that's what caused a lot of the fermentation to jumpstart.

That is a nice pipe, Steve. What are you smoking?

[SN]: A little J.T. Cooke pipe. J.T. is a good friend back in Vermont and he usually makes thicker, bigger pipes. They have to be thicker for the depth of his sandblast. By the time you go to the bottom of your blast, you're an 1/8th inch into the pipe. And I always wanted a small little Billiard and he refused to make it because he doesn't make small pipes. I had hounded him enough and I would bring him up sacks of briar to pick through a few times a year. One time, I brought a batch up, let him pick through it, and then before he paid me, I said, look, Jim, it's time you make me a pipe. You're not getting any of these blocks until you make a pipe.

[SM]: Yeah, as the briar supplier, you have some pretty good levers to pull there.

[SN]: Yeah, I agreed. He said, I'll do it for you, but you have to promise me you'll be buried with the pipe. It can't get into circulation. And it's not that thin, but by his standards, it is. It is my number-one, go-to pipe.

[SI]: Perfect size, amazing blast. I love it. I remember the first time I saw you smoke it, I was like, oh my God. I've seen J.T. make some amazing stuff, but we have similar taste in terms of smaller, lighter weight pipes, and it's almost got that old sport vibe that some of the old BBBs had and the old Peterson Sportsman models.

[AW]: Yeah, I can see that.

Impressions of 100-Year-Old Cope's Bond of Union

[SI]: Okay, so can we talk about how good this is?

[AW]: Yeah, it's insane. We haven't been saying anything.

[SI]: It's perfect.

[SM]: Unreal.

[SN]: It's nice and mellow too.

[SI]: Yeah, there's something going on, though. I get a little bit of pepperiness on the retrohale. I don't know if that's just because of the age and richness of it. I think this probably was a pretty mild-to-medium Virginia, initially. I find that some of those lighter Virginias have longer legs in terms of aging anyway. A really strong or spicy blend will mellow out over many years, and some of those unassuming, more mild Virginias end up great after all that time.

[SM]: Yeah, this does market itself as medium strength, cool and lasting on the tin. It is definitely lasting.

[SN]: Little did they know that it would last over 100 years.

[SI]: I would love to know what the master blender at Cope's in the early 20th century would've thought if we would've told him right now, like first of all, that cell phones exist and what the internet is and how much has changed.

[SN]: If he only knew what tobacco fermentation could actually do for that long in time.

[SM]: We're literally sitting here, smoking history.

[SI]: It's so smooth. It has that stewed plum sweetness and fruitiness.

[AW]: It's almost like a fig jam kind of thing.

[SM]: That's hitting the front of my tongue so strongly when I pull on this.

[AW]: There's no bite.

[SI]: Any time you get to enjoy something like this, it's a treat, but maybe we are just spoiled. There's been tins of cigarettes that I've seen you, Steve, be like, this one's okay. I've smoked some old tobaccos, like even some stuff that was made by Rattray's in Scotland and before they moved production to England. Some of 'em are great and some of 'em are okay and it's fun but not impressive or amazing or complex or whatever. Losing the intrigue and losing the complexity is definitely something that can happen when you've aged something that long. I'm shocked how not 100 years old this tastes, if that makes sense.

[SN]: We are spoiled around the vintage stuff, for sure. It seems that vintage tobacco wasn't the hype for the longest time. It really just became popular over the past 10, 15 years.

[SM]: Which is why it's so crazy that stuff like this even exists. It was made in a way that it could last this long, even though it was not a conscious decision to make something that would last.

[AW]: Or that someone didn't smoke it for 100 years.

[SN]: That a consumable product has not been consumed, it's kind of nice.

Vintage Tin Collecting

[SI]: You were saying at one point too, Steve, that there's a market even for the empty tins. People collect tobacciana tins or old tins in general. I believe you told me that some of the first tins that you got your hands on were from people who had been collecting them with no intention of smoking them.

[SN]: The tin-collecting industry is massive, whether collecting coffee tins or different ones. They like the old tin art. A lot of those people don't care about the contents. It's more eclectic if it's still full, whatever the tin may be.

There's times I've seen ones in people's collections and you can see it's got a bulging top on it, and I would contact them and ask them about it and get chatting about collections and tins and all that, and then eventually propose to them an amount of money. I told them I would return it empty in a month. The amount of money I'm offering is a substantial amount, they almost think it's a scam, but that's some of the best deals I've ever had where I can get the tin, enjoy it for what I want to enjoy it for, and give it back so they can keep it in their collection.

[AW]: That's cool.

[SM]: Yeah, I'm happy to help you empty out any of those tins anytime.

Layers of Sweetness & Spiciness

[SI]: Are you guys tasting anything but Virginia here? There's a lot of dark tobacco.

[SN]: It's so hard to tell because once you get that much age on a strain, it morphs the flavor so much.

[AW]: It's hard to even say. My knowledge of how tobaccos were produced falls away after anything earlier than the '60s. I have no idea.

[SI]: I know. The flavors meld to a degree so you can't even really separate them. I'm curious if there's anything else in here mostly because of the feeling, not the taste. The retrohale is a little spicy and tingly, and also the composition of this tobacco. It's nuts that there's so much distinction between the color variations here. You've got some pieces like this that are almost Bright and medium brown, and then there's some very jet black with a lot more of what looks like crystallization on it. I'm wondering what that could be. It's an excellent blend.

[SN]: I don't know why they stopped making it.

[SI]: I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say, in the last five years, I've tasted some Cope's Escudo from the '50s, which was definitely good and a memorable experience. I found myself being like that's interesting, but it didn't really hold up complexity wise. It was very mellow and uniform in flavor, and maybe it's just because I've smoked so much Escudo from modern production over the last 20 years that I don't know what my expectations were, I think this Cope's blend is better.

[SN]: Yeah, this has held its complexity.

[SI]: It really has.

[SM]: This is pretty incredible.

[AW]: Yeah, some of the oldest tins that I've smoked are not that old, but a 30-year-old tin of Escudo or Orlik or something, there's this molasses-like sweetness that is just dominant from the charring light all the way through the bowl. This does not. There is that level of sweetness throughout, but there's also these little bright citrusy notes and then the more stewed fruit. There's so many different layers of that sweetness.

[SI]: If I was smoking this blindly, I would struggle to guess that it was this old, I think. I just wouldn't have expected it to have this much vibrancy and flavor. And yeah, the retrohale's insane. There's a lot going on.

[AW]: I wonder if some of that, too, is because we are smoking it right after we popped that tin versus an hour later.

[SI]: That's probably part of it, yes.

[SI]: Even in the case of the Cope's Escudo, I'm pretty sure it was like 48 hours or whatever. By the time I got a bowl of that particular example, the coins were uniformly black and somewhat muddled flavor wise. But again, I've had that happen with tins that were far younger than this, too, and I was smoking them immediately after opening them. I've had some tins from the '60s and '70s that had that uniform lack of complexity. Still a pleasant flavor and a fun experience, but not anything close to what we're smoking here. And they were half as old.

[SM]: New idea for a Mystery Review: Steve sends us an old tin and the mystery is just how old is it? We have to guess the decade.

[AW]: It also smells great.

[SN]: Yeah, the inside of the tin has held up perfectly. The piece of paper that was in there is colored just in a particular way.

[SI]: What was that, like the little guarantee or something? Some of them have those marketing pieces in there.

[SN]: Some of them will have a little paper disc with wording on it. This didn't have words. It just had the inner lid and the little piece of paper on top.

[SI]: I wonder what the purpose of that paper was if there was nothing printed on it.

[SN]: Yeah, I wonder. I bet you it has something to do with the air in the tin that is gonna be mostly on the top. There's a tiny bit of space. It could have been a thing to retain and regulate moisture, maybe. That's the only thing I could guess.

[SI]: God, this is an incredible experience. It's so good.

[AW]: It's unlike anything else I've ever smoked.

[SI]: No. I think there had to have been some condimental tobacco in here of some kind.

[SM]: I would not be surprised if there were Orientals in here.

[AW]: That's the hard part about identifying Orientals after 100 years.

[SM]: There's just something about the body. I think Shane said the feel more than like any specific flavor that I'm able to pick out, and I agree.

[AW]: Yeah, it's very dense and silky, feel wise.

[SI]: Part of me is questioning whether or not there may have been Perique.

[SM]: Especially on that retro.

[SI]: Yeah, the retro is spicy and to be spicy like that after 100 years, I don't know, man. I feel like there's gotta be something else in there, but whatever it is, I'm at the point, too, where analyzing this is like, who cares? This is just good.

[SM]: I'm just enjoying it..

Why Wait to Smoke Vintage Tins?

[SI]: One of the other things I want to say about the whole vintage tin game, and I think you would agree, Steve, is that, at a certain point, why wait and save these tins? What are you waiting for?

[SN]: There are some tobaccos that will peak at a certain age, and you see that a lot more in cigarettes. The vintage cigarettes are already cut down to a certain size when they're produced, therefore they are gonna age more than a tobacco like this.

[SI]: More surface area, yeah.

[SN]: They can vary tin to tin. When you're talking about a tin from the 1930s to the 1940s, not only the 10 years of age, but the tobacco production itself varies, so some are beyond pungent, while an identical one is less so.

[SM]: Have you gotten to the point with your collecting where you can predict that, to an extent? Or are you as surprised as anyone when you pop it?

[SN]: It's harder with the cigarettes hearing some rattle and whatnot, but you can tell when you open the tins and first feel it, seeing how it's stained the paper. The ones that have really stained paper are gonna be the most pungent ones.

[SI]: And that's because of the chemical makeup of the tobacco, right? More sugar, more oil, or whatever. Possibly flavoring of some kind if they included any of that.

I have a story and it's not even close to what we're smoking here, but it's pretty well documented that McConnell's Scottish Flake is my favorite tobacco and it's really hard to find older tins. I have a lot of Scottish Cake from the '70s and '80s, pre-move to German production.

One year in Chicago, maybe 2017, 2018, I saw a single tin on a table from somebody that was otherwise just selling pipes and it was an old painted top Scottish Flake tin from the '80s. I was like, how much? I don't even remember what he quoted me, it was like $150 and I was like, yes. Easy. Done. No problem, which was a relatively high price at that time for that particular tin. I didn't care. Never saw another example that old. So I bought this tin, took it home, and the seal was good. And I was like, I'm gonna save this for a special occasion. Huge mistake.

A couple years later, on Christmas or my birthday or something like that, I went to open it. The seal had failed. It had probably failed a couple months before that. There was no bringing it back. I tried to put it in a jar and rehydrate it as one does, but it's not the same, even if you can get it to a point where you're like, this is enjoyable.

[SM]: It's not what it would've been.

[SI]: I should have just opened that tin that day at the show and shared it and gotten to taste what it was like before it was past its prime.

If you find something like this and it's in good condition, don't kid yourself. It's already a miracle, so find somebody to enjoy it with, bring it to a pipe show, whatever, because the clock is ticking and at a certain point, once that seal has failed or there's a rust spot, or literally whatever it is, then it's over. You can't ever get it back in that perfectly preserved state.

[SN]: That's what I like about cutter top tins; you can feel the bulging pressure, and then sometimes, you'll see it more with Capstans and ones that have more writing on the bottom of the tin. The pressed, indented writing creates flex in the metal. So when that metal flexes, that's your weak point, so if you ever do get a little rough spot, it's usually always going to be right there in that corner of the letter.

[AW]: Oh, wow.

[SN]: I've gotten tins before where you can see there's not much pressure or there's negative pressure, and you look on the bottom and you can see right where the rust is on the corner of the letter.

[SI]: Yeah. But the point is, there is no time like the present. If you intend to enjoy something like this, just do it. Make it happen.

[AW]: Every day is a special occasion.

[SM]: The vintage tobacco will make it a special occasion.

[SI]: Absolutely, and especially if you've got some good company. I would never open something like this in my room alone. I would never do that.

[SN]: That's the way I consume my cigarettes — only in good company. I don't smoke them alone. I always share 'em. If there's only x amount of experiences left, they better be shared.

[SI]: Thank you for sharing this one with us.

[SM]: Yeah, absolutely.

[SI]: This is incredible, even if we didn't get to document it, I would never forget opening this, what it smelled like, and what it tasted like outta the tin. There are some things that are beyond memorable.

[SN]: I've spent decades wanting to come down here to South Carolina and check everything out, and finally getting to make the pilgrimage down here, it was the perfect tin for the time.

[SM]: Yeah, you're welcome anytime. You and your tobacco are very welcome.

[SI]: With as many good old hundred-year-old tins as you can muster.

Steve, thank you so much for not only joining us, coming down, making the trip, but for bringing something that's basically a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We could probably count on both hands the number of people in the world who get to experience a 100-year-old tin of tobacco perfectly preserved and this delicious, and I will never forget this, for sure. Very special.

[AW]: Thank you, Steve.