Building Your Tobacco Cellar before the Tobaccopocalypse

With the recent FDA ruling on tobacco (if you hadn’t known its been impending for a couple years) many people are considering  how to stock up on tobacco before the tobacopocalypse occurs.

It’s been said that for as long as I can remember “now is the time to buy to deepen your cellar because pipe tobacco prices will never be as cheap.”  That is almost always the case though, the exception now is that soon any blends that came out after 2007 are in danger of disappearing completely with the over-bearing-nanny-state regulations by non-elected officials at the FDA.

For some good background I’ve sourced a great post by blind samples on reddit here.

FDA has said that they expect pipe tobacco manufacturers to use what is called the Substantial Equivalence pathway to gain marketing approval for products introduced after February 15, 2007. The industry has complained that the FDA massively underestimated both how many of these applications must be made and how much it costs to make them. FDA estimated that between cigars, pipes, waterpipes, and e-cigarette liquid there would be 7,869 SE applications, out of an estimated 13,745 products. The cigar industry estimates that it has up to 20,000 SKUs all by itself. You can see the disconnect.

Further down:

FDA has offered the pipe tobacco industry a closed, locked, and barred door and said that they should somehow walk through it. Substantial Equivalence is not a realistic way to get a post-2007 product approved. It will be burdensome enough to file and maintain SE applications for minor changes to pre-2007 products, as is clearly seen in the FDA’s documentation of those. There is no current path for post-2007 pipe tobacco products to market, unless FDA changes the way that they handle these applications.

In 3 years, FDA has successfully managed 8 SE applications involving tobacco or nicotine for post-2007 brands, 3 of which were only packaging changes. Now they want to take on 8,000 of them, most from small companies who have never dealt with FDA before. This is simply not realistic.

With this crazy regulation should you be worried? Yes.  Basically they are trying to regulate the industry’s out of business, and will essentially cause only a few larger companies with deeper pockets to absorb the rest of the pipe tobacco market.  All of the small boutique companies, will be out of business, and we may see local retailers close as well with rising costs.

Where to start?

Consider if you were no longer able to get your favorite blend tomorrow. Do you have any of it?

Do the math.  On average a pipe bowl is 3 grams of tobacco.  That’s about 10 bowls of tobacco per ounce.  How many bowls of pipe tobacco do you smoke a day? A Week?

If you smoked a bowl a day 7 days a week that’s around 2.4 pounds a year.

If you plan on smoking for 30 more years you need 72 lbs of tobacco.

HOLY CRAP!?! How am I ever going to buy that much?

Now after you’ve calmed down from the freak out, consider that you start the same place you would anywhere, set a budget, and look for opportunities to expand.  Keep an eye out for good opportunities from your favorite retailers that offer discounts and coupons throughout the year.

If you have an option to buy in bulk take it.  The quality is the same, and storing it in mason jars will allow you to cellar forever.  Check out this article about storing tobacco in mason jars as far as how much you can get in what size jar. It’s about as technical as you can get to make sure you are starting off on the right foot for deepening that cellar.

The Big List

I’ve got my own favorites list of online retailers that I patronize and I’d thought I’d share so you can price, compare and set a game plan.  Disclaimer: Sure, there are other sites out there and I may not have listed yours, sorry about that.  I’m listing US retailers because currently that’s the cheapest place to get tobacco in the world… except straight from the field that I know of. 

www.smokingpipes.com	Hands down, one of the best shipping and customer service teams (US based). Frequent discounts.
www.pipesandcigars.com	Big volume, frequent deals, owned by Cigars International
www.tobaccopipes.com	Great service, also lots of good video interviews and knowledge.
www.cupojoes.com	Been around over 20 years, does international.
www.4noggins.com	Similarly frequent discounts on specific tobaccos. Really.. really good on shipping internationally.
www.pipeandleaf.com	Carries select blends, occasional deals.
www.thepipeguys.com	Distributers of Semois tobacco in the US, known for their bacpacks.
www.vtpipes.com	Known really as Pipeworks & Wilke, custom blends, boutique
www.pipetobacco.com	Texas vendor, good selection

In Summary and final nuggets of goodness:

• Determine how much you will need before the end of the world…
• Budget X amount of dollars per month or pay period, always order enough to get free shipping.
• Continue to watch all the sites for discounts on specific brands and blends, there is almost  always a deal.
• Buy bulk where available or applicable.
• Sell plasma or your blood for money to buy tobacco, but be careful of smoking those nicotine bombs when you do…
• Lastly, keep track of your tobacco hording here on thepipetool.com