Mac Baren tobacco

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…