Types of tobacco
Muʽassel (Arabic: معسل, meaning "honeyed"), or maassel, is a syrupy tobacco mix containing molasses, vegetable glycerol, and various flavorings that is smoked in a hookah, a type of waterpipe.
Captain Abisha Slade, of Caswell County, North Carolina, had considerable infertile, sandy soil, and planted the new "gold-leaf" varieties on it.
Slade owned an enslaved man, called Stephen, who around 1839 accidentally produced the first true bright tobacco.
Using that discovery, Slade developed a system for producing bright tobacco, without credit to Stephen, cultivated on poorer soils and using charcoal for heat-curing.
The infertile sandy soil of the Appalachian piedmont was suddenly profitable, and people rapidly developed flue-curing techniques, a more efficient way of smoke-free curing.
Broadleaf is a dark tobacco varietal family popular for producing enormous, resilient, and thick wrapper leaves.
[4] The origin of white burley tobacco was credited to Mr. George Webb in 1864, who grew it near Higginsport, Ohio, from seed from Bracken County, Kentucky.
In the U.S., burley tobacco plants are started from pelletized seeds placed in polystyrene trays floated on a bed of fertilized water in March or April.
Corojo is a type of tobacco used primarily in the making of cigars, originally grown in the Vuelta Abajo region of Cuba.
It was used as a wrapper extensively for many years on Cuban cigars, but its susceptibility to various diseases, blue mold in particular, caused Cuban genetic engineers to develop various hybrid forms that would not only be disease-resistant, but also display excellent wrapper qualities such as: Honduran 'Corojo', 'Habano 2000', Mexican 'San Andrés Corojo', and other hybrids.
Jose Aray Marin, the founder of the Don Cervantes factory, developed the world-famous Ecuadorian 'Sumatra' breed in 1967.
Habano tobacco wrapper is darker in color, has a much spicier flavor and a richer aroma, and has been grown in Nicaragua's Jalapa Valley and Estelí since the 1990s.
Oriental tobacco is a sun-cured, highly aromatic, small-leafed variety (Nicotiana tabacum) that is grown in Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Lebanon, and North Macedonia.
When the Acadians made their way into this region in 1755, the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes were cultivating a variety of tobacco with a distinctive flavor.
A farmer called Pierre Chenet is credited with first turning this local tobacco into the Perique in 1824 through the technique of pressure fermentation.
Long before Europeans arrived in the area, Native Americans cultivated tobacco along the banks of the Connecticut River.
Prized for its subtle sweetness and elegant, refined flavor, it is used as outer wrappers for some of the world's finest cigars.
[8] Early Connecticut colonists acquired from the Native Americans the habit of smoking tobacco in pipes and began cultivating the plant commercially, though the Puritans referred to it as the "evil weed".
The plant was outlawed in Connecticut in 1650, but in the 19th century, as cigar smoking began to be popular, tobacco farming became a major industry, employing farmers, laborers, local youths, southern African Americans, and migrant workers.
Each tobacco plant yields only 18 leaves useful as cigar wrappers, and each leaf requires a great deal of individual manual attention during harvesting.
The industry has weathered some major catastrophes, including a devastating hailstorm in 1929, and an epidemic of brown spot fungus in 2000, but is now in danger of disappearing altogether, given the value of the land to real estate speculators.
The older and much less labor-intensive broadleaf plant, which produces an excellent Maduro wrapper, as well as binder and filler for cigars, is increasing in the area in the Connecticut Valley.
In 1865, George Webb of Brown County, Ohio planted red burley seeds he had purchased and found that a few of the seedlings had a whitish, sickly look.
The white part of the name is seldom used today, since red burley, a dark air-cured variety of the mid-19th century, no longer exists.
It became controversial in the 1990s when the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used it as evidence that tobacco companies were intentionally manipulating the nicotine content of cigarettes.
[13] Chaplin, a director of the USDA Research Laboratory at Oxford, North Carolina,[14] had described the need for a higher nicotine tobacco plant in the trade publication World Tobacco in 1977,[11] and had bred a number of high-nicotine strains based on a hybrid of Nicotiana tabacum and Nicotiana rustica,[14] but they were weak and would blow over in a strong wind.
[15] Y1 has a higher nicotine content than conventional flue-cured tobacco (6.5% versus 3.2—3.5%),[16] but a comparable amount of tar, and does not affect taste or aroma.
