Embarcadero - A Point of Departure

2nd July, 2007: Posted by glpease in Tobacco, Stories

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As the release of Embarcadero, the newest entry in the Fog City Select approaches - begin looking for it in mid July - I’ve been asked a few questions about it. What was the inspiration for this blend? What did you have in mind? What’s it like? Why Embarcadero?

They’re fair questions, and I had to do quite a bit of probing into some of the dusty bric-a-brac shelves of my mind to come up with something that would pass for reasonable answers; after all, it’s been a few months since I started working on it, and a whole host of synapses have fired since then, or so I’d like to think. Read more…»

The Road to Westminster

5th January, 2007: Posted by glpease in Tobacco, Stories

The passage of time can be a strange thing. The engagement we experience with the things of life can dilate time in ways that almost seem drug induced, confounding our sense of rhythmic transit in ways that are inexplicable, producing a sort of temporal dissonance. So it is for me with the history of Westminster’s development, and while it feels like well over a year since I first found myself submerged in this project, it was really only in March of 2006 that I was going at it it full tilt. The background to the project, however, extends much farther in history, in some sense, back to my earliest days of pipe smoking, when a particular tobacco caught my fancy, and hasn’t really let it go. Read more…»

Not in Chicago Blues

12th May, 2005: Posted by glpease in Stories

So, here it is, Thursday evening, the first night I SHOULD be in Chicago for the amazing extraveganza. I love that show. I haven’t missed on in years. Yet, here I am, home, staring at a screen in the hope of pacifying myself somehow. I’m not where I should be. Oh, it’s not that I didn’t TRY to go. I’ve had my tickets for weeks, my room booked since last year. I had grand plans of flying out of Oakland early in the morning, to arrive in the windy city early enough to get some lunch, do a little tourist stuff, and head on to the show. The fates, Motorola and United Airlines were apparently quite busy conspiring against me this day. Read more…»

An Evening With Charles Rattray

18th February, 2005: Posted by glpease in Tobacco, Stories

Okay, the title is a little misleading, but I know no one is silly enough to believe that old Chas is still with us, or that I’m old enough to have actually spent an evening with him (though, frighteningly, that’s actually possible), or that I’ve been experimenting with my OUIJA board again. You’re not that silly, are you? Actually, this is about an evening spent with a good friend, an acceptable, if somewhat nondescript meal, and an amazing smoke on a crisp evening. Mr. Rattray was present only in spirit. Read more…»