A snuff collection of any depth is a sourcing problem as much as a taste problem. British, German, Indian, South African — the major production traditions diverge sharply on moisture, fermentation, and grind philosophy, and a collection that spans all of them without systematic records is indistinguishable from random accumulation.
What You Lose When You're Working From Memory
The tins stack up. Thirty entries is still manageable. Sixty is where it breaks. You open a Schmalzler you bought eight months ago and can't recall whether the earthy, slightly fermented character is what you remember, or whether this tin has dried down since it was opened. Date Opened tells you it's been sitting uncovered for fourteen weeks. That explains everything — and without the record, you'd have marked it as "not for me" and moved on from a style you actually enjoy.
Moisture and Grind are the two fields most collectors skip, and they're the two that matter most for rotation and storage decisions. A fine-ground, high-moisture Scotch snuff like a Wilson's No. 1 needs different storage conditions from a coarse, dry German Schmalzler, and both behave differently from a medium-moist Indian-style snuff. Tracking these properties per tin means your storage adjustments are data-driven, not intuitive.
The Three-Currency Structure Is Not an Accident
British snuff remains the dominant production tradition for the premium end of the market — Toque, Wilsons of Sharrow, Samuel Gawith. Most serious orders go through UK vendors, which means the sticker price is in sterling. The calculated Price (£) and Price (€) fields convert from USD automatically at fixed rates. This is a convenience, not a financial tool, but it removes the mental arithmetic from the moment you're comparing a UK purchase against a domestic alternative.
Amount in grams and Number of Tins together define your actual inventory position. A single 25g tin and five 10g tins of the same snuff are different stocking situations with different implications for reorder timing. Date Purchased and Date Opened together tell you how quickly you're working through stock — the interval between the two is your aging buffer, intentional or not.
Mentholated and Flavored as separate boolean fields matter because they're independent variables. A mentholated unflavored snuff and a flavored non-mentholated snuff are completely different experiences, and both differ from something that's both or neither. Collapsing them into a single "type" field loses the distinction.