Quote Originally Posted by NeverBend View Post
Evening Chico,

It was my business to quickly assess the level of a smoker by their words or small actions and this fellow seems to be a new arrival who is infatuated but has little foundation in fact. Fellows like this love the story and in the absence of detail they fill in the blanks.

Yes, there are a limited number of manufacturers and many brands (faces). These manufacturers usually make tobaccos under brand names that they own as well as brands that they're contracted to make. The Rattray's name, for example, was never owned by McConnell but he made the tobaccos for them under contract for the better part of a century. Unlike pipes, there are no seconds in tobacco. If there's a bad batch it's discarded. It comes down to how each manufacturer buys their leaf and processes it and there's a similarity across their brands and faces in quality and to some degree, content..

Tobacco Review is written by individual smokers who may or may not know the facts in any given situation. Until you can confirm what you read there (or elsewhere) put a question mark next to it .
Good to know about tobacco "seconds" - so assuming variation between the example above (Davidoff FM, Comoy's 7, and PS Bullseye), that would be due to differences in the quality of tobacco they started with, rather than anything that happens in processing. So if they're all made in the same factory, it may be something like the choicest cuts of what they purchased goes into DFM, the slightly less choice into PS, and the dregs into Comoy's.

Good to know about Tobacco Reviews, too - I'd assumed that the descriptive information on each blend was "official" and that it was just the reviews themselves that anyone could do. I guess that explains why some blends will list a particular kind of tobacco, and some reviews will swear it's not there and some swear it is.