A new way to flavour snus without essential oils

[tommybegley]

Damn that sounds interesting, I have tried growing tobacco but it ends up going wrong during the curing process, how do you cure it? Or so you just dry it out and put it through the snusing process?

[squeezyjohn]

I try and get hold of air cured whole leaf - but a small percentage of flue-cured makes a nice flavour too. Some of the leaf I grow myself too. Varieties vary vastly in flavours of the finished snus and I'm still on a learning curve - hoping I can find one single variety that I can eventually grow that will make delicious snus from that one type!

As for the TSNAs - it's not really possible for the home-maker to test for this ... I'm generally cautious about trying to use low TSNA leaf types and I tend to use my home-made snus quickly and keep it refrigerated.

My current batch on the go is 15% Home-grown Rustica, 50% Air cured Burley and 35% Flue Cured Virginia.

[tommybegley]

This is interesting, what sort of tobacco so you use for the snus? I always worry about the ole TSNA levels

[squeezyjohn]

I have had a long battle attempting to make my own flavoured snus using all manner of things in the past and I had been relying very heavily on essential oils to provide the lift that my snus needed.

The problem is that essential oils are so concentrated that they are a very blunt tool - with some oils like ginger one drop will be too much for an entire batch using 100g tobacco! Diluting the oils down in alcohol before applying them can help solve this - but it is still hard to manage the tiny amounts properly. On top of that essential oil flavours can be a bit one-dimensional and of course the oils themselves are expensive.

The alternative would be to use whole herbs and spices, citrus peels and flower petals etc. But the problem there is that if you add them to the snus mix before cooking (sweating) for up to 5 days - the most aromatic part of the flavours will have boiled away by the time the snus is finished - and the result is a dull, cooked taste with only the most basic part of the aroma remaining.

So my new approach is to take a neutral spirit like vodka (actually 95% ethanol sold in the US as Everclear or in the UK as Polish Spirit is more effective) - and steep whichever whole aromatic ingredients I wish the snus to taste of and add this only right at the end of the process once all the heating is finished. You certainly don't need a lot of the spirit if you make a very concentrated extraction - about a teaspoonful for a 100g tobacco batch. The massive bonus with this method is also that you can use literally anything to try and make this kind of flavour ... unusual herbs, flowers, dried fruits and berries etc will all give their flavours up readily ... I am thinking about making an extraction of certain pipe tobacco blends to add as a flavouring for snus that could benefit from a more natural tobacco taste ... the sky is the limit!