How to make Dipping Tobacco / American Moist Snuff (Written and Video Guide)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPCcpWl7CmM

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Introduction

I'm not personally a dipper, but I do enjoy a pinch of Copenhagen or Grizz Green on very rare occasions, and I used to use it pretty regularly before nicotine pouches appeared on the market, as a substitute for the snus that I would occasionally run out of or leave forgotten at home. I know the flavor well, and have made dip before, many times. I like dip, and I like people who dip, and I think having a pinch snuff, whether it goes in the mouth, the nose, or wherever is still a universal sign of camaraderie and goodwill between people.

Why even make this guide? For starters, dip has become incredibly expensive in most regions. Unless you live in a state that is incredibly tolerant of tobacco use and has shaped its tax policy around that, numerous sin taxes and restrictions have popped up in the last decade that turn a pinch of snuff from the humble reprieve of the everyday American into an expensive decadence only to be had on special occasions. Paired with inflation, and companies capitalizing on the alibi of inflation in order to jack prices up out of lockstep with the actual pace of the economy, dip has gotten pricy. It's not uncommon at all to see cans of what used to be budget brands, like Husky, Cougar, and Longhorn, selling at the same price that premium products like Copenhagen, Skoal, and Kodiak used to go for a mere five years ago. Don't even get me started on Canada and Australia - it's simply too depressing. I won't state the price, but Canadian and Australian readers are likely nodding their heads in grim unison at this point.

I've made an incredibly popular guide on dip making before, one of the most popular on my channel and website, and while the recipe there is probably the most accurate out there to this day, the video itself is a rush job and needs redoing. I was very excited about my discovery, and couldn't wait to get it on camera - and so, the lighting sucks, the audio is crunchy, and the whole thing suffered because of my impatience. As so often happens, the work you're the least proud of becomes the most popular, and so remaking this guide has been a personal goal of mine for a long time. I want people to associate Snus at Home as the gold standard in free, accessible DIY tobacco content, and a deep fried iPhone video taken in my garage is a really bad first impression. This written guide is the script for that.

I say the work I'm the least proud of, not the recipe. Not to toot my own horn here, but nearly every single popular guide on how to make your own dip - and Swedish snus, and nasal snuff, for that matter - well, they were all really bad. I really insist on that word popular, because there are excellent guides and recipes written on the deep corners of the internet (the forum Snuffhouse has many, for example), but any accessible guide found on YouTube or social media committed such baffling mistakes and egregious sins that a better recipe wasn't just a necessity - it was an inevitability. I've seen people skip essentials, like alkalizer and salt. I've seen people add honey, molasses, and sugar, which is a huge no-no for anyone who has even the slightest worry about tooth decay. I've seen people crush up cigarettes and pour full cups of black coffee into it, and I've seen people cook the dip. As will soon become clear, to a person like me, these are horrors beyond human comprehension. Even the good recipes were still missing something, or were overthinking the process far too much - most of these people have backgrounds in snus making and nasal snuff blending, which in their highest expressions are far more involved processes than putting together an American moist snuff.

We're breaking this guide up into three parts. The first will be a recipe for a natural dip, both because it serves as a good proof of concept for anyone following along that making retail-quality dip at home is actually doable, and because it'll serve as a base for the latter two parts. We're going to be talking in some detail about the ingredients and tools, and the purposes thereof, as well as any possible substitutions - while there is what I would consider a good way to do this, so long as you understand what can and cannot be compromised, there is no absolute path you have to follow so long as the skeleton is in place.

The second part will go over some common flavorings. This was the most requested thing commenters on the last video wanted from an updated guide or a follow up, and I can't ignore it any longer. It's an easy thing to promise but a difficult thing to actually deliver for so many reasons: the companies that manufacture dip know that their lives depend on brand loyalty, and so Copenhagen Wintergreen is going to taste different in many subtle little ways from Grizzly Wintergreen, which are both going to taste wildly different from Skoal Wintergreen. Getting brand-specific flavor variations absolutely correct is simply outside the scope of this video. The goal, then, is to provide a quality general wintergreen, or straight, or berry, and make suggestions on how to tweak these to make them a little bit more like those brand specific interpretations.

Flavors themselves are tricky. The wintergreen flavor of dip is not just a squirt of wintergreen extract - there's a lot more to it, including some elements of mint, some sweetness, and sometimes this olive brine like quality. "Straight" is anything but - It's a dialed back wintergreen with heavy notes of vanilla, licorice, and sometimes aniseed and hickory smoke, and even that's probably an oversimplification. I hope you understand why it's taken me so long to get around to them. Luckily, unlike with snus and nasal snuff, the range of flavors of dip as a whole is actually pretty small, so we can tackle the most popular varieties and make inferences about the really weird ones, like berry and grape.

The third part will have suggestions for you, new dip maker, going forward in your adventure. The world of home tobacco blending is vast, and shouldn't be limited to just wintergreen. We'll go over some things you may want to experiment with, as well as some off-limits ingredients that for some reason or another will make your dip unusable or unpleasant.

What is Dip?

Dip, at its core, is made of fire-cured tobacco, salt, alkalizer, ethyl alcohol, and flavor. We're making a natural dip, so we can forget about the flavor for now.

Tobacco

Fire cured tobacco can be easily sourced from online stores that sell whole leaf tobacco. To give you some perspective, a pound of whole leaf dark fired goes for around $20, and once it's been stripped, meaning that the midrib - the thick spine of the leaf - has been removed, we end up with roughly 400g of usable tobacco.

Unlike some other forms of smokeless tobacco, like Swedish snus and nasal snuff, you absolutely cannot substitute whole leaf dark fired tobacco here for another kind of tobacco, like RYO or pipe tobacco. Not only will it be more difficult on account of the added flavoring and humectant present in these products, but the flavor and texture will always be wrong if you do this. Dark fired leaf's intense, complex fragrance make up the majority of the flavor in any dip, even budget dips, and while there are some brands that cut corners and pad their recipes with cheaper leaf, these are the bottom dollar brands, like kayak and seneca, that taste weird and are despised for their bad texture and off flavors - and even those are only cutting, and not replacing, the dark fired.

Alkalizer

Alkalizer is another component you can't mess with. Nicotine in isolation isn't really that bioavailable, much less so in low pH environments like the human mouth. Tobacco itself is also pretty acidic, and so we have to add something to bring the pH up. Those of you new to DIY tobacco have expressed some concern in the older guide that this is some bizarre, poisonous innovation and that you'd be better off leaving it out, but every single culture that uses smokeless tobacco, from the Swedes of Sweden to the Katakuni of the Amazon basin, have added some kind of alkali to tobacco to make it usable. Hell, this isn't limited to just tobacco - the areca nut chewers of Asia add slaked lime to their paan to make the arecoline bioavailable, and the Andeans of the South American highlands add alkali to coca leaf do it before they stick it in their mouths.

The preferred alkalizer on this channel is sodium carbonate, not just because of its affordability and ubiquity - you can find it sold as "washing soda" in every single supermarket on planet earth, and a lifetime supply is around $3 American - but because it's also easily made by baking regular baking soda in an oven for 30 minutes at 400f. Kept in an airtight jar, this sodium carbonate is the purest and most appropriate alkalizer for American dip. It's the alkalizer that big brands, like Copenhagen and Grizzly, use as well, probably on account of its neutral taste when compared to the slightly bitter, slightly soapy tastes found in other food grade pH adjusters, and its overall stability at room temperature.

Liquor

Scotch, preferably a peaty scotch, but scotch at least, serves us here as our preferred source of ethyl alcohol (in simpler terms, ethanol, or drinkable spirit) because it's usually affordable, and if you don't have a bottle kicking around your house or apartment then a small airplane bottle can be bought for usually a dollar or two, and will serve you for a couple batches of dip. The roles that alcohol serve in the dip are numerous - it acts as a mild preservative, as a mouthfeel enhancer, as an astringent agent, and the smokiness and sour, malty fragrance of the scotch will also serve to deepen the notes already found in dark fired tobacco. The ethanol itself carries volatiles easily, meaning that even if your scotch sucks, the fact that it's there in the first place will improve the dip.

If you really don't have scotch, or have something like a bottle of vodka or rum that you'd rather sacrifice instead, then it's fine - but remember, good comes out when good goes in, and the flavors of anything except scotch and vodka might clash with the dark fired. For those of you who still think this is weird, rest assured that a great deal of recipes for nasal snuff and snus pre-1900 included some kind of alcohol component, and very likely, the early sorts of snus brought by Scandinavian immigrants to America which would eventually become our dipping tobacco used spirits as part of their original recipe.

Now, some comments from my last video compel me to make a note of something. A few of you don't want to traffic with alcohol, at all, for a wide range of reasons; drinking problems, personal convictions, health issues, whatever. Leave the alcohol out. Yes, it does do a great deal for the dip. Yes, it's included in retail recipes for dip. It's also possible to make good dip without it, and while it won't be quite like retail dip, it'll still be perfectly usable.

Process

The ratios for our natural dip are:

• 100g Fire Cured Tobacco

• 20g Scotch

• 10g Table Salt

• 7g Sodium Carbonate

• Water on hand

  
  

The tools we need to process our dip are:

• A good electronic scale, preferably a regular kitchen scale for bulkier ingredients and a smaller milligram scale, like the ones dealers used to use before the invention of the pack and the pen.

• Some way to break down the tobacco. I'm using a blender, which will flake the tobacco nicely, but you can also use a tobacco shredder if you have one and like long cut, or just chop the tobacco by hand, chiffonade style, in a pinch.

• Some bowls and spoons for mixing.

  
  

We start by breaking down our tobacco. If you haven't removed the midrib, it's a good idea to do so while the leaf is still pliable; you can grab the stem at the top and yank down and backwards, like veining a shrimp. Set the stems to the side and store them for future use - you can use this to make nasal snuff, or help with making Swedish snus, or even throw them in the yard - they're a stick, for Pete's sake.

After veining, add the leaves to the blender and run it until they're the coarseness that you prefer. If you have a shredder or coffee grinder or knife, use those now. We want the grain size to be a little smaller than the final desired grain side - for example, if you like Copenhagen snuff, you'll want to go somewhat finer than that. Don't pulverize it, though.

Unlike other tobacco products, we don't have to worry so much about drying the leaf before working with it: the texture of dip is a big part of the appeal, and leaf that has been dried and rehydrated has its texture suffer somewhat. This isn't a huge problem for snus, where we're kneading the bejeezus out of it after cooking and expect the leaf to end up somewhat gummy and claylike, but for dip, where each grain or shred must be strong but pliable, this matters a lot. Don't worry - the recipe accounts for this.

Once we have our tobacco processed, mix all the other ingredients together into a slurry. You'll notice that the sodium carbonate hasn't dissolved completely in the scotch. Sodium carbonate is totally insoluble in ethanol, and that's okay. Pour the slurry into the raw dip, and start mixing hard.

Once you've mixed, it's time for spot adjustments. Put some water into the same cup that you used for mixing the slurry, and swish it to dissolve all those stubborn bits of carbonate that have clung to the glass. Slowly, and with much less water than you expect, and bit by bit, add water to the dip until it reaches just shy of the final moisture that you're after. The dip will continue to soften with time, and the salt in the slurry will draw moisture out of the leaf, and so it's important that we don't try to make the dip all juicy from the get. If your dip is fine with moisture right off the bat, leave it alone. If you plan on flavoring it, skip this final watering step altogether. Continue mixing until the dip looks nice and homogeneous.

That's it! Feel free to take a pinch now - but be warned, it'll be viciously strong. A day or two in the fridge and the dip will mild out to a retail level, and you're ready to freeze it for long term storage, or use it however you like.