Drucquer's

[Anonymous]

July 6, 2013
As promised, I will now post the last part
of the letter that was written by Robert
Rex, who owned Drucquer's tobacco shop
in Berkeley, CA from 1964-1982 and
employed his background as a chemist
and a researcher to develop some of the
best, and still most sought after, blends in
the U.S.  

Just to catch you up a little, or to help
with a smoother transition, I am re-
posting the last paragraph of the first part
of Robert's letter.  

"By the end of the 70’s the traditional
processing by the tobacco by most
suppliers was almost a thing of the past,
with the exception of very few small
tobacco factories and tobacconists
around the world. With the advent of
highly flavored pipe tobacco the necessity
of a pipe made from properly aged briar
also became less important because the
high sugar in the tobacco covered the
harshness of green wood. That’s a whole
other story as I also started having pipes
made for us because the pipes being sold
were going down hill in quality.

At about the same time, 1972 to be exact,
I started to make wine.  My wife of 31
years next week, PJ, then a casual friend,
got me started making wine. I was already
a wine geek (before the term geek
existed) and knowing that I was a chemist
and very good cook she figured I’d be a
natural at making wine. At the time I was
also a back yard mechanic and put myself
through a year at Cal by fixing Italian
cars. PJ drove an Alfa Romeo Spider. I
became her mechanic. As a thank you gift
for fixing her car she went down to Wine
and the People, at the foot of University
Avenue and bought me a wine making kit.
That started what has now been a 40 year
passion for making wine.

In 1980 the Berkeley public schools
started to teach anti-smoking to the
children and that was handwriting on the
wall for me. Block Bros. had been sold to
US Tobacco and our recipes were
becoming bastardized before the tobacco
got to us. Highly flavored tobacco was
becoming the most popular. Glycol was
taking the place of proper processing and
the industry was rapidly changing. We
had begun in the mid 70’s to wholesale
our blends and on my visits to the best
tobacco shops around the country it
became obvious that the real
tobacconists were retiring and the new
owners were pipe hobbyists who knew
nothing about the traditional techniques
of making pipe or pipes. PJ and I decided
to turn what had been a hobby,
winemaking, into our profession and
moved from Berkeley to Kenwood,
Sonoma Valley, in 1982. We sold
Drucquers in 1983. It went through two
owners I think and went out of business
around 1990. I could be corrected on the
years. We still live in the same house,
Deerfield Ranch, in Kenwood, and as they
say the rest is history. We are very happy
in the wine business and we make as
good wine as we did tobacco. We have
refined winemaking processes to
constantly make better wine and in
particular wines that do not cause
headaches or allergic reactions. I am still
a chemist and still a cook. If you do a
search on YouTube for my name I will
come up first with several cooking videos
and wine videos. They are also available
from our website at www.deerfieldranch.
com. If you come to the wine county come
and visit us. We make some of the best
wine in the world.

I am no longer involved in the pipe
community although once in a while I hear
from someone like yourself. Once in
awhile a friend or customer from those
old days will look me up and we’ll tell
stories over a bowl of tobacco.  I have a
conversation with Greg Pease once in
awhile. He is a great guy and knows good
tobacco and good pipes. "
Robert Rex

http://www.pulversbriar.com/

:face: 

 

[loneredtree]

If you posted the first part, I did not see it here. His comments on the transition of the business are spot on. Good history lesson I guess.

:no: 

 

[Anonymous]

I apparently missed the first part.

Maybe he did too ? :scratch: 

:face: 

 

[GJ]

I was a sometime customer there from 1965 or so.  An excellent shop, well stocked and very welcoming, with a real old-world atmosphere and a fine range of house blends-- my favourite was their Red Lion. I still use a Savinelli Capri I bought there in '68 or so. I seem to remember the business was started in 1841. (But probably not in Berkeley.)

 

[loneredtree]

OK Yak now you have..............!@#$%

Marty Pulvers wrote Part 1

Robert Rex began working at Drucquer's 
tobacco shop in Berkeley, CA in 1962 and 
by 1964 he was ready to buy the shop 
from the Drucquer bros., who owned the 
store that was brought over from London, 
by their father, in 1928.
Robert was originally Pre-Med at 
Berkeley but switched to chemistry, so 
despite a penchant for retail and 
entrepreunship, he brought a chemist's 
detail and test oriented sensibility to the 
study of tobacco and tobacco blending.
From 1964 until 1982, Robert steered 
Drucquer's into becoming the number one 
tobacco shop in the U.S., and elsewhere, 
for my taste.  As good as their Trafalgar 
blend was, and it was great, Robert's 
development of Cook's #5 created one of 
the all-time best latakia blends, ever.  You 
can look it up.
Robert now makes superb wine (he is a 
great cook, too.  I still remember his 
marvelous sandwiches from a tiny kitchen 
of a long R.V. as about 8 of us drove from 
S.F. to L.A. for a pipe show in the 80's) 
from his Deerfield Ranch, in Sonoma, CA.
Below are recent thoughts he shared 
with a customer of mine, Kyle Black, via e-
mail.  Kyle and Robert generously agreed 
to let me post them for your appreciation.  
If I can't get all of it to fit, I'll post this in 
two parts, one this week and one next.  I 
might advise you to savor and save it as I 
do not archive things.  Here is a 
preliminary statement by Robert:


His memory jogged, Robert then wrote 
again and provided more detail.  This is 
rich:
"Tobacco processing and blending, and 
wine making, are a combination of 
cooking and chemistry. It was chemistry 
that lead me to investigate how tobacco 
changed as it aged. This led to the 
development of the processes of 
enhancing the starch to sugar 
conversions by enzymatic and bacterial 
action and mellowing of the tobacco by 
spore and yeast (fermentation) 
conversions. The methods we began 
using as a result of these studies led to 
the development of our best blends. I 
worked closely with the suppliers of our 
base tobaccos, which were mostly from 
Block Brothers in Wheeling, West 
Virginia, to make the base tobaccos better 
in many ways. I traveled there often to 
work with them. Here I learned about 
various methods of sweating the leaf, 
which with heat and moisture started the 
fermentation and conversions. I got them 
to pay more attention to selection of the 
various leaves that they blended 
according to recipes that were given them 
by the original John Drucquer who started 
the tobacco shop in Berkeley in 1928.

This was in the early 70’s. Over the 50 
years of relationship between Block Bros. 
and Drucquers the recipes and processes 
had been degraded in quality. The use of 
molasses, sugar, glycol and flavorings 
was just beginning to dominate pipe 
tobacco processing and the old and 
better methods of processing the tobacco 
were beginning to get lost. We finished 
the blends in the factory in the back of 
the store on University Avenue, now a 
seamstress shop (the interior still has 
elements of the tobacco shop). We 
revived an old technique of “panning” the 
tobacco, which was heating the tobacco 
in the tin to accelerate the starch to sugar 
conversion and the mellowing by 
continued enzymatic action. My buddies 
in the labs at Cal helped me isolate the 
bacteria, enzymes and yeasts that were 
mostly responsible for this action and we 
developed a mother tobacco that was 
laced with these substances. We would 
inoculate each blend before canning. We 
would punch a hole in the bottom of the 
can to let the pressure escape during the 
heating and solder the hole up while the 
can was still hot. This created a vacuum 
in the can to help preserve the tobacco. 
The conversion process is mostly 
anaerobic. Naturally the vacuum was not 
complete, which allowed the survival of 
some of the oxygen dependant reactions.
The first blend we introduced using this 
method was called Cook’s blend, not for 
the cooking process but for a friend of 
mine at the time whose name was John 
Cook. He had spent a lot of time in Japan, 
was a member of some elite Japanese 
pipe smoking clubs, one of which 
included the prime minister. He told me 
how the Japanese would spend four of 
five times as much for an aged can of 
pipe tobacco because of the changes in 
the tobacco with the age. He encouraged 
me, as a scientist, to investigate what was 
going on to cause this, which finally 
resulted in the blending, inoculation and 
panning processes and Cook’s Blend. 
Cook’s Blend was a great success and 
before long we used the same process on 
all of our upper end “natural” blends. The 
Virginia you have (XX Press...edit.) was 
panned but not inoculated as the cake 
Virginia tobacco was already high in the 
precursor substances. We made a dozen 
or so “gourmet” blends by this method 
and canned them in small 4 ounce cans, 
which in the store sold for around $4.75 I 
think. We exported a pallet load to Japan, 
thanks to John Cook, charging them 
almost full retail. The cans sold in Japan 
for about four times the price. We also 
wholesaled the blends to some other 
shops around the country, mostly to 
tobacconist who I knew personally. The 
line of these special tobaccos had a name 
but I don’t recall it now. Within six months 
were were doing most of the higher end 
Drucquer tobacco by this method. Cook's 
blend was a slightly richer version of 805, 
which was our most popular tobacco. 805 
was named for recipe 805 developed for 
one of our customers and recorded on a 
3x5 card. There were about 1,200 private 
blends. Every year we would come out 
with a new one, such as St. James, based 
on a blend of Perique and cake Virginia, 
or Arcadia Mixture, a light English blend 
with lots of Turkish leaf, inspired by the 
book by the same name by Lewis Carroll. 
It was great fun and Drucquers became 
known as the best maker of pipe tobacco 
in the country. Guys like McClelland 
copied us and were much more 
successful at building a brand than were 
we. It was the golden age of the second 
half of the 20th century for pipes and pipe 
tobacco and there were several 
tobacconists around the country, mostly 
young guys like me, who started making 
some fine tobaccos using traditional 
methods. This countered the onslaught of 
low quality heavily flavored, sticky, Glycol 
laden tobaccos from the big supplies, like 
U.S. Tobacco. Unfortunately these low 
end products won the day by the 80s and 
I think hastened the demise of properly 
made pipes, not that any of it would have 
survived, in any meaningful way, the 
public’s shift away from smoking.
By the end of the 70’s the traditional 
processing by the tobacco by most 
suppliers was almost a thing of the past, 
with the exception of very few small 
tobacco factories and tobacconists 
around the world. With the advent of 
highly flavored pipe tobacco the necessity 
of a pipe made from properly aged briar 
also became less important because the 
high sugar in the tobacco covered the 
harshness of green wood. That’s a whole 
other story as I also started having pipes 
made for us because the pipes being sold 
were going down hill in quality."

 

[Anonymous]

Another rude reality check re. memory  

Lonerdtree with the save !! :cheers:  :cheers:  :cheers: 

:hattip:

:face:

 

[loneredtree]

Not really a reality check. I thought that that article by Marty on his site was so interesting that I saved it. He does not have an archive but I looked on my computer and there was Part 1.

I was in the shop once or twice when a poor student. They had some huge "arm chair" Charatan pipes for $100 when a group 3 shell Dunhill was going for $25. To bad I did not know about their tobaccos. :shock: 

I will have to stop bye the winery since I go that way once or twice a year. :drunken: 

 

[Carlos]

Great story. Nice history lesson.

 

[Tim_Haggerty]

I bought my first decent pipe and great English tobacco at Druquer's on University Ave. while I was at Cal in 1980-6. The other shop on Salano Ave. in Piedmont was good, but the older place had all that history and a fair amount of nicotine build up on the walls.

I didn't know enough to realize what a great shop it was: I thought that all tobacconists were that good, and of course time has proven me wrong but I think most older college towns had a pretty good shop at one point or another. I occasionally search on the web for some of their tins, but haven't had any luck, so they're just memories at this point. But there was this guy who worked there who became GL Pease, so I suppose I have some bragging rights about knowing him before he got famous, if not necessarily rich.

 

[CharlG]

Interesting read! Thanks for sharing!