What tobacco company dominates your cellar?

They did change from a course cut to a uniform ribbon cut last year or so. It really changed the way the blend burns and not for the better. Much more care is needed to keep it burning cool (can get very harsh if smoked hot).

I'm sure several of you have seen me comment and of course complain about the change in the cut of some of C&D's tobacco. I had noticed it recently in the pound of OJK that I purchased.



OJK was always a mix of chunky and rough cut tobacco with some small ribbon and a little cube cut. It is now a more homogenized ribbon cut without the visual appeal in my mind that the old OJK had.



Either way, I emailed Jeremy Reeves over at C&D to find out if I was right or just loosing my mind. Below is his response, which came back pretty quick and is very detailed. I very much appreciate him taking the time to explain and thought I would share it.





Justin,



Thanks for writing to me about this. You do observe correctly that the cut has changed on the Red Virginia and Dark Burley. However, the blend components have not changed and it does still contain Cube Cut Burley and Granulated Perique, so it is not all ribbon. The change in cut was made some time ago and the real reason for it had to do with some equipment changes that we went through. The very old, turn of the century guillotine style cutter that we were using to produce our chunky cuts of Dark Burley Ribbon and White Burley Ribbon was increasingly in need of constant repair and becoming less reliable, and we found ourselves in a situation where we could not find a suitable replacement, because, as with so many things, no one manufactures a guillotine style cutter anymore and the used ones are rare indeed. We were able to find a third-party company who was able to cut our tobaccos for us, thus freeing up a lot of labor previously associated with operating that cutter (stripping leaf by hand, wetting it, loading the cutter by hand, etc...) and allowing more time for simply producing our blends. The ribbon cut that we are getting is certainly different, however, it is only a couple of cuts per inch finer that what we had been producing since I came on with C&D 2014. This ribbon cut is the widest that is possible with the equipment that our third-party cutting operation uses.



I hope that this helps to explain the change.



Kind Regards,



Jeremy