Goodbye Gawith and B. S. Flake

Since Samuel Gawith re-entered the Danish market 6-7 years ago through one of our local tobacco importers, we were the first to support this initiative.

We even had a representative at our shop out for an event. Three of the pictures here are from that event and as you can see it was at the old location. That representative was Bob Gregory and among pipesmokers he is a legend.
Sadly, he does not work at Samuel Gawith anymore but that does not change the point of this story.

The event was great, and I had a blast with Bob. After the event we went out and we ended up discussing an idea I had for a tobacco. I believe I already had the name ready: Brown Sugar Flake.

After Bob’s visit I sent him some samples of another iconic tobacco that unfortunately was taken out of production – the Orlik Brown Sliced (if you find it today in tins as Vintage tobacco expect to pay around 100 USD for 50 grams). In the fall of 2014 and winter 2014-2015 we had samples going back and forth. We had many.
If you ask me, we ended up doing a genius thing: We added a tiny, tiny bit of Oriental and Burley.

And there you go: Brown Sugar Flake was born.

Goodbye Gawith and B. S. Flake - The Danish Pipe Shop

This is the e-mail from March 2015:

Dear Nik.
Brown Sugar is ready and packed, and it is even better than before. We took your advice and added some Oriental and a little Burley, and it is fantastic. I will let you judge.
This will leave Kendal tomorrow and should be with you next week.

Also, please take a look at the attached. This we sent to our distributors earlier this week and I was sure that you would wish to read it.

Any questions, then I am here.

My very best wishes
Bob

The tobacco arrived and sales exploded. I recall we were sold out pretty fast.

At that time, we were still exporting tobacco so Brown Sugar Flake soon became successful and we were all very proud.

Over the years sales went well and since then we have carried most of the selection from Samuel Gawith. But being in the tobacco business one run into obstacles now and then.

One obstacle was that we in May 2017 had to change the name from Brown Sugar Flake to B. S. Flake simply because the EU regulations prohibited the use of superlative or descriptive words like 'sugar'.
Being a company for adult people we thought this was ridiculous hence the new name B. S. Flake.

If this wasn’t enough, we unfortunately encountered a new obstacle:
Now it gets a little complicated. The EU has a regulation toward tobacco including pipe tobacco where 70 % tax is added to products made outside the EU. This is on top of the normal tobacco tax (that has just increased in Denmark), VAT, etc.

Since England decided to exit the EU, a company like Samuel Gawith will be considered an 'outside EU tobacco product supplier' and must comply with different taxation. In short this means a tin from Samuel Gawith in 2021 will cost around 300-350 DKK or approx. 60 USD/50 EUR. Simply because it is now an 'outside EU pipe tobacco'. This is also why we don't carry any of the many American made brands here in Denmark.

For this reason, the agent here in Denmark has decided to stop importing the Samuel Gawith tobaccos and we concur with this decision.
The prices in 2021 will be so high that we don't believe we can commit to the volumes needed by Samuel Gawith in order to place orders. This means the current stock is the last you will see of the Samuel Gawith tobaccos in Denmark.

What will happen to B. S. Flake? Honestly, we don’t know yet. Since we have the right to sell it but no market, we hope to find some kind of solution in order to make the many worldwide fans of the tobacco happy.

Regarding our second house blend from Samuel Gawith, Beginner’s Luck, this one will be discontinued in general.

Palace Gate from Samuel Gawith would be a good alternative and from our selection I would point at Seaweed from Erik Nørding.

To our many customers here in Denmark I can only recommend buying now and remember the sealed tins from Samuel Gawith age well so no worries about them getting old.

So with this I'm sad to say goodbye to Samuel Gawith. I will miss you!

Disclaimer:

As we speak EU and England are negotiating the Brexit and I cant rule out some kind of solution is found. However I doubt England will focus on their tobacco export.

This article is written in October 2020.