The Blend You'll Never Identify Again Without a Record
You had a session six weeks ago. You were in the garden, evening light, something with a Virginia/Perique base — room note was exceptional, retrohale was clean, the finish had that subtle plum quality that high-Perique blends get when they're properly aged. You bought it at a show, decanted it into an unlabelled tin, and now you have no idea what it was. The session lives in your memory as one of the best of the year and you cannot reproduce it.
That's the problem this log solves.
Pipe and Tobacco as Linked Entries
The Pipe and Tobacco fields link to separate libraries — your pipe collection and your tobacco inventory. This matters because the pipe changes the smoke. A long-shank billiard in briar gives a cooler, drier draw than a meerschaum of the same capacity; the same Virginia Flake that burns hot and slightly sour in a short churchwarden smokes perfectly in a tall Dublin with a slow cadence. When your session log links to the specific pipe entry, you can filter by pipe and see how the same blend performs across different shapes and materials over time.
The tobacco entry carries its own record — cut, blend type, tin date, moisture content on opening. When you cross-reference a session's rating with the tobacco's tin date, you start to see the ageing curve of specific blends: how many months before that Penzance stopped being harsh, when the Squadron Leader hit its sweet spot, when the Three Nuns that was almost unsmokeable fresh started delivering what the tins always promised.
Beverage and Food: The Pairing Variables Nobody Else Tracks
Beverage and Food are the fields that seem optional until you've had a great session and a terrible one on the same blend and realized the only difference was that one was with black coffee and one was with a glass of Rioja. High-tannin wine and high-Latakia blends fight each other — the smoke goes metallic and the wine goes flat. A mild Virginia with a good Earl Grey works in a way that feels obvious once you've documented it and completely invisible until then.
The Location and Address fields place the session geographically. After a year of records, you know that you smoke better in the garden than in the workshop — the airflow matters, the ambient temperature matters, the fact that you're not distracted matters. Location becomes another variable in understanding why a session rates 4 out of 5 rather than 3.
The Note field is where the sensory vocabulary builds. Write the room note, the retrohale, the draw resistance, the progression from first third to heel. After fifty sessions, you can compare notes across blends and find the flavour compounds that you return to consistently — which is how you stop buying randomly and start building a cellar with intention.