I made plain snuff last year from two maduro cigars given to me by a friend, roughly following this video:
Snus At Home – How to Make a Cured/Aged/Dark Nasal Snuff in One Week!
The video gives a simple recipe based on 100g flour making it easy to scale down to the 34g dry flour I used, but I did a couple of things differently. First I used a more precise scale because kitchen scales like that used in the video aren’t accurate enough for small batches like mine. I used a smaller scale accurate to 0.1g to get the correct amounts of ingredients. Second I didn’t use a mixing bowl. I mixed the snuff in the same jar used to store it. I weighed everything separately, then added the alkalizer and salt to the water and dissolved most of it before adding that solution to the tobacco flour.
I’d never tried making snuff before and it turned out much better than I expected. The grind was a little uneven and a bit coarse for my taste but it was dark, rich and plenty strong. I don’t know what kinds of tobacco were in those cigars, but it was almost too strong and I had to be careful using it. It put out a huge amount of ammonia which I suspect, while sealed in the jar, may have further alkalized the tobacco. I stirred it every other day to make sure it matured evenly, but after a week I quit messing with it and left it alone for another week. At this point, I considered it ready but it was still a bit harsh and needed to air out a little before use. It continued to improve in the jar over the several months it took me to finish it.
I would definitely do this again with a cigar. The snuff lasted forever compared to smoking it and I got much more enjoyment out of it this way. The only thing I would change is trying to get a finer and more consistent grind.
