What is Green Snuff?

"Green snuff" is a phrase that hides a few different meanings, but at its heart it is a real category with a real definition. A green snuff is one made from tobacco cured to keep the leaf's natural green colour, rather than put through the long, dark fermentation that turns most leaf brown, sweet and earthy. The leaf is dried and milled while still close to its living state, often from candela leaf, which is flash-cured to lock in the chlorophyll of the living plant. The resulting powder keeps a grassy, herbal character and a colour that ranges from a strong grass green to a soft olive.

Around that core meaning, the word "green" also gets used in two looser ways on modern labels: as a brand colour code in a Red / Blue / Green / Yellow range, and as a flag for a menthol or cool blend. Those tins are worth knowing in their own right, but they are not green snuffs in the sense above.

A short history

The roots of the green tradition sit in the old lands of Prussia, Poland-Lithuania and Russia. Cottagers in the fens of eastern Germany would gather the tobacco leaves that survived the first sudden frosts and turn them into a dark green powder. In Russia and across eastern Europe a famous version was known as Augentabak, "eye tobacco". Polish snuff houses produced a related style called Kownoer, after the city of Kowno (today Kaunas in Lithuania), and that style was popular across central Europe through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specialist makers like Rosinski in Frankfurt an der Oder still produce green snuffs in this old way, fermenting only very lightly so the leaf stays fresh and the powder stays gentle to take. Bernard's Feinster Kownoer, made to a recipe close to a century old, is the most widely known modern European example.

What a green snuff is like

The first note in a green is freshness. There is hay, a touch of fresh-cut grass, sometimes a quiet herb-garden tone, and behind that whatever scenting the maker has chosen to layer on top. Because the leaf has not been mellowed by years in a fermentation cellar, light scents are easy to read on a green base. A floral note keeps its lift, a citrus note keeps its sparkle, a sweet bakery note like cocoa or bread stays clear.

How to take it

The handling is the same as any other snuff. Take a small pinch, rub it lightly between thumb and forefinger, bring it to the front of one nostril and gently inhale through the nose, no harder than smelling a flower or a fine whisky. Green snuffs are usually fine in grind and lightly scented, so a small pinch will pick up the full scent profile.

Going further

If you are new to snuff in general, the Beginner's Guide to Snuff covers the basics of taking a pinch, looking after a tin and finding your first style. If you would like to taste the classical Eastern European green tradition, the names to look for on continental shelves are Kownoer and Augentabak.