Original Rum & Maple Blend No. 53 – Large 14 oz Vintage Tin (Larus Era, 1970s)

Before “aromatic” was a category, Rum & Maple was already a standard.

This blend began in the late 1930s, when American tobacco companies were still experimenting with how far flavor could go without losing the soul of the leaf. The early advertisements promised a secret — perfect pipe smoking — and for a long time, Rum & Maple quietly lived up to it. It was mild, fragrant, and unlike anything else on the shelf, which is why it stayed in production for nearly seventy years while most blends came and went.

The early ads tell the story clearly. Rum & Maple wasn’t sold as a novelty. It was sold as an answer. A blend for men who wanted something smoother, warmer, and easier to live with. Period copy spoke of carefully aged tobaccos, imported Syrian Latakia, Jamaican rum, and pure Vermont maple, combined through a process meant to make flavor part of the tobacco rather than something sprayed on top of it. It was advertised as clean, gentle, and even pleasant to be around — a pipe tobacco meant to be smoked, not announced. One 1940s advertisement promised simply “thrills,” showing Rum & Maple as both pipe mixture and cigarette — a reminder of a time when a good blend crossed formats without losing its identity.

As the decades passed, the blend evolved the way all long-running American mixtures did. By the 1960s the Latakia had faded from the recipe, leaving a Virginia- and burley-forward base, and by the 1970s Rum & Maple had become what most smokers remember: a soft, faintly sweet, quietly aromatic tobacco that burned cool and never demanded attention. It was the kind of blend you could smoke all evening and forget you were smoking — which was exactly the point.

This tin comes from that later, settled period of the blend’s life, when Rum & Maple was still made with restraint but packaged for regular use. The large 14 oz format was favored by long-term smokers and shop counters, not collectors, and most were opened, used, and discarded without a second thought. Very few were put away and forgotten.

The packaging tells the story if you know what to look for. This is the friction-lid era, after the old key-wind tins were retired and before modern warnings and barcodes changed everything. The tin carries both the Rum & Maple Tobacco Co. name and the Larus & Brother Company, Inc. imprint, as issued. Inside, the tobacco was packaged for freshness rather than soldered shut — a small but important shift that places this squarely in the mid-1970s, when the blend still had its old character but the world around it was changing.

This one has waited.

The tin remains full and undisturbed, with the original contents intact. The lever opener is no longer present. Everything else is clean, original, and exactly as you’d expect from a well-kept large-format tin of this era.

Rum & Maple in this era was never sticky, never loud, and never candy-sweet. The maple note was warm and woody, the rum subtle and dark, sitting behind a creamy burley base with just enough Virginia brightness to keep things alive. The room note was always part of the appeal — gentle, familiar, and unmistakably old-fashioned. The tin said it best: Good by itself. Good as a mixer. Many smokers used it to soften harsher blends, or to add warmth to straight burley or Virginia mixtures.

By the early 2000s, Rum & Maple disappeared quietly, like many American classics did. Not because it failed, but because the era that made it necessary had ended. In the advertisements, they promised “thrills.” In the end, what it offered was something better: a blend people stayed with.


Details:
- Original Rum & Maple Pipe Mixture
-Blend No. 53
-Large 14 oz tin
-Circa mid-1970s production
-Full and undisturbed; lever opener not present
-Bright, clean graphics
-Friction-lid canister
-Excellent display condition
-Discontinued blend
-Made in the USA

This auction contains tobacco.  If you live in certain states, you will be unable to purchase this product.