Get Rid of your Crappy Tobacco Night
It is a time-honored tradition of pipe clubs to bring and share your favorite tobaccos with your fellow club members. But what about the tobaccos that you don’t like? If you are like me, they wind up drying out in the far corners of your house, never to be smoked again. “Why do I even hang on to this stuff?” I frequently ask myself.
Well, if you don’t like it, there is probably somebody in your club that is at least willing to try it out. With that in mind, the Seattle Pipe Club sponsored its first “Get Rid of your Tobacco Night” last August. It was a huge success. Every bit of old tobacco found a new home.
People brought boxes of tins that night, many of them unopened. There were old pouches, and canning jars of tobacco as well. Sure enough, people found their favorite tobaccos being given away by someone who hated it. It also meant that the tobacco that you took home may be pretty bad. So what? It’s free!
Our club has a lot of new members (more on that in a later post). That meant that us old timers could share not only our experience, but also all that tobacco that was just sitting around. One caveat, you couldn't just try a bowl, you had to take the whole tin!
Several people felt uncomfortable, at first, about the whole idea of taking home tobacco that they haven’t tried. Of course, that’s always the problem when buying tinned tobacco for the first time. That’s also how a lot of that tobacco wound up languishing in our tobacco cellars for years.
Here is a few tips on how to run a successful Crappy Tobacco night.
- Publicize the event. Email, Facebook, Website, whatever your club uses. (A screenshot of my Facebook post is shown above.)
- All tobacco is free. If you want to sell it, bring it some other night.
- Any tobacco that has not found a new home, goes in the trash. Don’t worry, Some people won’t take your free tobacco unless you threaten to toss it our right then and there.
- Don’t do this every month. Having this as a special event, one or twice a year, will have more impact.