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Of course you’ve heard that Scandinavian Tobacco Group (STG) bought Mac Baren last summer and is dismantling the Mac Baren factory.*  It’s been everywhere in the hobby news, on vlogs, forums, and passed by word-of-mouth. Anytime something like this happens to a community as small as ours, it causes some seismic tremors. I remember running out of my classroom almost hysterical in 2018 when I heard (and I was apparently the last) that McClelland had shut its door). “Kids, having an emotional breakdown,” I said, “be right back!”  It was too late, of course, as all the McC tins had long vanished off the shelves. That very same year, STG bought Peterson tobaccos.  No one shed many tears, because most of the Pete blends were already made by STG.  Still.

Still, it was difficult for me as a Pete Geek, because I hadn’t expected Tom Palmer, CEO and owner of K&P, to allow them to be sold off from Kapp & Peterson, becaue it was Tom that had brought back tobacco to Peterson after an almost 30 year hiatus, as he was for many years determined to bring Peterson back to its glory days.  It’s true the blends weren’t blended from components in the factory, as was the practice on Cuffe Lane (the Stephen’s Green factory in Dublin). But they did supervise and market them, even applying the flake and pancake tin labels in the Sallynoggin factory.  As it turned out, when STG bought the Peterson portfolio, they dropped the well-received, recent Founder’s blends, the new packaged ones, and the annual Christmas and Summertime tins.  Still, for those who love them, STG continued to manufacture most of the thirteen blends they’d taken over from Murray’s of Belfast in 2005.  Neither Mac Baren nor Sutliff has been so fortunate:

This letter from Sutliff—I kept thinking I was misreading it.  It’s great St. Bruno’s, Capstan and Three Nuns will still be around. STG can blend a great tobacco, but so often when a blend passes from one house to another the recipes change.  That happened when Mac Baren took on Capstan, if you remember. Even though Navy Flake, Mixture, and Virginia Flake will be retained—if the recipes don’t change—that’s just a fraction of what so many of us enjoyed over the decades. Just as important, even though it will still be made in Denmark, it won’t be made by the Halberg family.

A lot of sampling of various jars of MacB blends has been going on here. Even though they’re not smoked every week or sometimes even every month, the question was there: is there a warrant to place one final order of these original Halberg creations before they’re gone forever? The verdict was an overwhelming yes. Slow off the mark, I found most of them already gone from the shelves of one big internet retailer.  But God bless the small businesses of America! A patchwork of orders was placed which should keep the cellar stocked.  All this kerfuffle would have been unthinkable when I set out on my pipe smoker’s pilgrimage in the 1970s.

1. Pilgrim Quest

Pipe smoking was mostly a habit for my father’s generation. Not a pernicious habit (like say, mainlining heroin), just something that was part of life, like having a beer after work, mowing the yard on Saturdays or going to the barber shop. It was a pleasant and good thing to do, giving zest to the day. I can’t ever remember seeing my Uncle Jim without his pipe and pouch of Sail in his front pocket, and whether he was by nature the most genial of men or whether his pipe and tobacco helped him to that end, I couldn’t say.  They were obviously good for each other.

My uncle Jim would’ve liked this ad, although he was of the previous generation, having been a tail gunner in a B-17. But he drove a big BMW motorcycle and a 1950s Porsche and always “hip” without ever trying to be. The “yellow” pouch was his go-to.

Uncle Jim’s generation had all but passed away when the World Pipeocalypse hit in the mid-1980s. Not overnight, but certainly within a few years pipe smoking became something of a collector’s hobby.  Not that there weren’t pipemen with hundreds of pipes before then or that many even then looked on their pipes as a hobby. But with the Pipeocalypse far fewer pipes were being made, artisan pipe-making came into its own, and the “collectible” pipe as we know it today was born.

Here’s a Holy Grail Pete for you: a 4s Centenary from the collection of Chris Lauer CPG with the only shamrock stamp I’ve ever seen on the Centenary pipes. BTW, that “3 Burlington Gardens” was Peterson’s only London shop, in a very upscale district of London in the early 1970s. For more info, see The Big Pete Book.

For Peterson, strangely enough, the sea change occurred before the Pipeocalypse, with their Centenary releases in 1975, followed by the Mark Twain in 1984, the Sherlock Holmes Original in 1987 and the SH Original set, which began in 1989. They were—as in so many areas of our art—the pioneers.

In any event, pipes and tobaccos eventually came to be thought of as a hobby (see Post #122)—and I’ve even found myself speaking of it this way. Certainly, I know several people who collect and smoke pipes as a hobby.  Sometimes they stay the course, sometimes they move on.

As The X Pipe argues, though, pipe smoking is neither a hobby nor a habit but something with altogether more joyous and meaningful: it’s an art and a spiritual discipline. It’s a discipline that takes mindfulness and intention.  It’s an art that requires skill and imagination (see Post #224).  If and when you go to your first pipe show, you’ll meet a number of people who intuitively understand both. In fact, pipe smoking can be described as “heaven in ordinary,” to borrow a phrase from one of George Herbert poems.** As such, it can be formularized like this:

“Heaven in Ordinary” = (Pipe) + (Tobacco) + (Smoaker).”

There’s a lot to unpack here both philosophically and theologically, but given the demise of Mac Baren tobacco, a brief memoir of the importance of Peterson and Mac Baren’s to my pilgrimage seems more apposite.

I created this shadowbox several years ago as a visual reminder of my pilgrimage.

2. 309 / Virginia No. 1 & Plumcake

Mac Baren is to Danish pipe tobacco as Peterson to Irish pipes: it’s impossible for me to think of one without the other.  So it was fitting that my best friend Ron, who drove me to Oklahoma City to buy my first Peterson 1978 or 1979, would also initiate me into the glory of Mac Baren’s.

I had no idea my 309 would take me down so many roads

I’d been struggling unsuccessfully with the house blends from Ted’s pipe shop in Tulsa, but none had clicked.  Relating this to Ron, one Saturday morning after the usual day-old doughnuts, French Roast, and scrambled eggs, we got into “the Deathcar,” Ron’s Pinto, and headed out to Oertle’s House of Name Brands Discount Department Store.  This enormous mid-century shopper’s paradise sold everything—which for us meant tobacco, typewriters, LPs, stereo equipment and all the things that fascinated us.  (Nothing smells quite as nice, I remember, as driving down the road with two pipes going in the interior of a car that’s well and truly “censed” with virginia pipe tobacco. How did we ever forget that?)

The tobacco was behind a long counter running alongside the down elevator. I wish I could remember all the brands they carried but I only had eyes for the Mac Baren tins. Of those they carried what must have been the full US line of Mac Baren’s tins, but what we first packed our Petes with were Scottish Mixture (his 307) and Virginia No. 1 (my 309).  The sweetness of Virginia No. 1 gob-smacked me, and if it hadn’t been for the scorching my tongue received, I’d have smoked it all day every day.  It soon became apparent that if I wanted to smoke more than once or twice a week, I’d need to find some other Mac Baren’s blends.

My Dad’s 301 and his favorite Mac Baren’s, Mixture

That’s when my Dad tried to interest me in Scottish Mixture—which would come to be known simply as Mixture—as it was his favorite after I recruited him into the Pipe Smoker’s Fold.  When Dad would drive me out to Oertles to replenish our supply in his TR4, MGB, or whatever British breakdown-de jour he was driving, he’d routinely opt for the enormous tins of Mixture smoke through them as fast as I did my puny 3.5 oz. tin of Virginia No. 1.

Yes, it came in enormous Dad-sized tins—7, 8, 12 oz.!

It’s curious how little of my life I can remember from those days.  There is something in what John Cussack says in High Fidelity (2000): “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like … Books, records, films – these things matter.”  At some point I went with my parents and bratty sisters to an out-of-town wedding. The only thing I remember is sitting on the steps of the hotel for a smoke.

I had just packed my 309 with Plumcake and was applying a match-light when my uncle came out of his room and stopped, gawking down at me in disbelief.  This was not my Uncle Jim—he would’ve stopped and smoked with me or at least filled his pipe from my tin. This was another, less enlightened uncle. “What are you doing, there, son?” he asked with the kind of laugh that meant he suspected I was smoking crack cocaine.  “Just smoking my pipe, Uncle –,” I replied (not with a snarky go-to-hell voice, but with respect; he was, after all, family).  “Do your parents know you do this?” he asked. “Yes, sir, they do,” I replied. “Well,” he said, and with with another insinuating laugh, went on down the stairs.  I knew he was going straight to my mother.

3. 11s De Luxe / Navy Flake

My first DeLuxe System: a hallmark 1979 “N” 11s,
a Christmas gift from my still-new bride Gigi.

Finishing my undergrad degree and with a 309 and a DeLuxe 11s in hand, I headed out for seminary in Louisville, where we were so poor we lived on macaroni and cheese with a “tube steak” (which we called hot dogs as were into W. C. Fields at the time).  To make ends meet, I got my first church job.  As a Sunday morning and weekday-afternoon janitor, that is.

I did listen to the sermon some mornings from the balcony, but most of my spiritual nourishment came from The Vogue, an art deco movie palace built in 1939. By 1980 it was a revival house—that is, one of those older theaters that screened classic Hollywood as well as foreign and independent movies.

It’s important to tell the youngsters who are reading this that back in the Good Old Days I’m writing about, pipe smoking was permitted in theaters.  It was that after seeing a matinee of Wise Blood (1979)—the John Huston adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel—that we went into Taylor Drugs next story where I was hoping to find a tin of Mac Baren’s Virginia No. 1.

The counter ran across the the store behind the front window and the cashier was a nice older lady (everybody in Louisville was nice).  She was sorry, but they didn’t have any Mac Baren’s at the moment except two tins of Navy Flake, which she placed on the counter. They’d be getting more in the following week.  I hadn’t tried Navy Flake and was a little skeptical, but I liked the $2.35 cent price tag and went away a happy seminarian.

Relighting my pipe in the parking lot, we talked in the parking lot to a nun who’d been at the same showing of Wise Blood (Louisville at that time was half Catholic, half Episcopalian and half Southern Baptist).  From the deep South, she liked Flannery O’Connor and liked the movie, chuckling over Hazel Motes (played by Brad Dourif) and his “Church Without Christ.”

4. Mark Twain / Dark Twist

1980 was a record year in my pipe-smoking novitiate. It had begun with the Christmas System 11s from Gigi, continued with straight A’s for my final semester as an undergrad, and really started smokin’ with my start-up of Pipeman’s Quarterly: For Pipe & Coffee Connoisseurs, a tiny pipes & tobaccos zine with a splash of coffee and a circulation of eight.  Maybe twelve (don’t laugh).  In flipping through it to see what I could find about Mac Baren’s, I found I’d awarded Best Tobacco of 1979 to Mac Baren Plumcake, with McClelland No. 8 a close second (you’re laughing).  I didn’t buy McClelland nearly as often as Mac Baren simply because it cost half-again as much and I was a married man.

Leaving seminary, Gigi and I went off to graduate school where I met, for the first time, a number of pipe smokers my own age—a philosophy undergrad, an art student, two poets, several in the religious studies program I was in.  Harnessing their creativity, Pipeman’s Quarterly flourished and our subscriptions soared to . . . 23?  (You’re laughing again.)

My interest in Mac Baren deepened right along with my passion for Peterson System pipes, and at some point I wrote not only Mac Baren’s US wholesaler, B. A. Pargh (see below), but Mac Baren’s in Denmark, which was still called Hal Halberg in those days. I wanted information about the company for Pipeman’s Quarterly and wondered why some of their blends weren’t sold in the US.

I spent an hour digging through my old files for the letter from Halberg but couldn’t find it.  The cordiality of their response when it came just floored me. They not only sent a very kind letter, but also a large box with a tin of everything they made, plus a wire tobacco rack to hold it all in. Whew.  The rack I gave to Ron (the foolish things we do); the tobacco I smoked.

In 1984, Ron bought half of a standard-issue Mark Twain for me for my birthday—and $30 (the half) was a big wad of cash for us in those days.  He’d already bought an MT—just about the first day it arrived at Ted’s and was anxious for me to have one as well.  It was one of the high points of my life as a pipe smoker, and the Mark Twain commemorative remains one of my all-time favorite Petes.

With all the recent tapered or B-stemmed Systems which Laudisi-era K&P has so richly blessed us with, it may be difficult for you to imagine an era when no one had seen one in over 30 years.  The 1980s were also an era of renewed interest in Twain, and in addition to C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, we both read the massive two-volume complete Twain, comparing notes along the way.  As I hadn’t lived in Tulsa since 1980, having the same Pete System was another bond between us that meant a great deal.

This ad from a 1970s German magazine shows the classic 16 Mac Baren blends

5. Tins on the Wall

By the time I began a Ph.D. in the mid-1990s, the novitiate of my pipe-smoking was over.  Pipeman’s Quarterly lasted two more issues, my best friend and I, separated by so many miles, found it more difficult to keep up. I was still poor as Job (well, at least I had three Petes). Accumulating Mac Baren tins and Peterson ephemera has never stopped—at least, until now, when STG has rung the death knell. After more geographical dislocations I began to grow tired of stacks of pancake tins.

Like my pipes, though, I dearly love the tobacco ephemera of my pilgrimage, and not long ago put up some of my favorite tins, with just a small nail through the bottom of each tacked into the wall.

As fun as labels on McClellands and other tins are, they’re still just paper labels, not painted labels and certainly not the stickers they apply to pancake tins these days.  Neill Archer Roan, that polymath genius and pipe smoker who wrote the Passion for Pipes blog (2008 – 2016), once did a piece called “The Sad Decline of Tobacco Art Merchandizing,” which lamented the amazing work done in the19^th century and on into the 20^th and how it slowly devolved.  In fact, I referred this article to Elke Ullmann at Peterson when she was designing the beautiful tin art for the three Peterson Founder’s Collection blends in 2015.

At some point Mac Baren’s painted tins disappeared, and with them, the printed inlay cards.   When you popped a tin of Mac Baren’s back in the day, you’d see something like this:

The inlay was placed directly on the tobacco bed and under the accordion paper wrap.  I asked two old-time Tinder Box employees, Doug Owens CPG (see Post #222) and Linwood Hines CPG what purpose these inlays served.  Doug wrote,

I fondly remember the decorative tin papers.  But more importantly, the painted tins were beautifully done, especially the Mac Baren, Dunhill and Balkan Sobranie. I think we all took that artistic approach to tin packaging for granted, assuming it would never go away.

Being a fan of the Mac Baren line of tobacco you must be both shocked and disappointed at the collapse of one of the most iconic and high-quality producers in the industry. Their HH series was a stroke of genius. Many of us (me included) found the classic Mac Baren blends to be a bit “bitey” on the tongue, but their HH Pure Virginia for a Capstan fan like me was a welcome addition.  Sadly, that is all gone.

Back on the tin paper lays, it has gotten to the point where if there is a paper insert at all it is almost always blank. I remember the old Dunhill tins had a paper inlay in the tins which had a portrait of Alfred Dunhill on the paper. Brilliant!  As some wag once said, “times always change, but not always for the better.”

Linwood Hines also spent many hours behind the counter at Tinder Box, in addition to his day job at Philip Morris.  He says,

I would think that it originated to help keep the tobacco in the tin whilst compacting and vacuumizing it.  Part of the packaging operation.  Then some astute marketer said, “why not put our advertising on it?”

And that got me to thinking about tobacco “papers” from the earliest days of Kapp & Peterson and previously—to Frederick Kapp’s Dublin shop, and back beyond that to the early decades of the 19^th century. In The X Pipe I make a few references to Joseph Fume (pseudonym)’s A Paper:–Of Tobacco (1839).  If you’ve read Charles Dicken’s Little Dorrit (1857) or some of his other novels, you’ll find that in his day that while tobacco was sold as plug, it was also sold rubbed out, and in either case it would be wrapped in a tobacco paper (which is what gave me the idea for my paper Peterson tobacco mats).  The wrapper was often printed with an appropriate verse, limerick, or advertising.

Here’s my collection of Mac Baren inlay papers. I especially like the older ones with the fancy scrollwork “Mac Baren Tobaccos” edges:

I’m not one for seeing the past in roseate hues and I’m sure we’ll weather this sea change like we have so many before. Our beloved Peterson is celebrating its 160^th anniversary this year, and I’ve heard we’ve got lots to look forward to: a new POY, the annual St. Patrick’s Day quite soon, the Carroll of Carrollton, Halloween, and Christmas pipes, and I’ll bet something amazing for the 160^th.   Pipe + Tobacco + Smoker still equals Heaven in Ordinary.  So take heart, light your favorite Pete and raise a bowl to the world’s longest continually operational briar-pipe maker!

* But just in case you somehow missed it, at SPC’s Daily Blog  Sykes Wilford recently wrote: “Mac Baren was sold to Scandinavian Tobacco Group in June of this year. With that, the second largest global manufacturer of pipe tobacco became part of the largest global pipe tobacco manufacturer. While there has been steady industry consolidation over the decades, the scale of this event, relative to their share of the global industry, makes it quite different.

“Following the passing of Henrik Halberg, a devoted steward of Mac Baren and an old tobacco hand, the last tie between the Halberg family and Mac Baren was severed. Henrik, a man I greatly admired as I got to know him during the 2010s, spent his career not as CEO of Mac Baren nor in the typical fashion of a scion of a wealthy family, but as the tobacco buyer for the company, traveling the world sourcing great leaf.

“Henrik passed away in January of 2021 at 70, still active in the business — I’d seen him just a few months prior for a set of meetings between Laudisi and Mac Baren — and with him, the Halberg family’s connection to the tobacco company. Mac Baren had become, like so many great family firms over the years, part of a portfolio of professionally managed investments that it had made possible.

“By 2024, the family had decided to divest itself of all of its tobacco holdings. In June, STG acquired Mac Baren.

“From local news in Svendborg, home to Mac Baren, it is now clear that the plan is to close Mac Baren’s factory there, as well as its U.S. subsidiary, Sutliff Tobacco Co. Indeed, Laudisi Distribution Group, sister company to Smokingpipes, is now the U.S. importer and distributor for a handful of pipe and pipe tobacco brands that Sutliff, until recently, imported.

“This is not the venue and it is not my role to discuss or speculate upon STG’s plans. If it wishes, it will communicate those. But I will say that for much of my 25-year career in pipes and pipe tobacco, I greatly admired Mac Baren and formed enduring friendships with management and staff there across perhaps 15 visits to Svendborg over the years, and enjoyed time together at trade shows and at our offices in South Carolina.

“Mac Baren was, to my mind, the “right” sort of company: dedicated to the quality of its products, serious about what it did, and filled with happy employees. There was a sense of egalitarian togetherness about the place I greatly admired, the sort of place where the CEO and shipping clerk ate the same lunch in the same cafeteria at one of a dozen identical big round tables. It was the sort of place where the owner eschewed a corporate leadership role so that he could pursue his calling, traveling in pursuit of the finest tobaccos.

“I recall a chance discussion with some leaf broker folks in the very early 2000s — long before I knew that world through Cornell & Diehl — about how Mac Baren bought only the best. And the folks at Mac Baren tolerated me, even when I was just some kid with an enthusiasm for pipes and pipe tobacco and this website in the U.S., when I first asked to visit in 2005 or 2006. I knew then what my later experiences would confirm: that these were people I admired who led an institution I admired, an institution that respected its customers and loved its products.

“Mac Baren’s passing saddens me. There are not very many true pipe tobacco manufacturers left in the world.”

** Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.