HEB stores serve as a kind of Texas landmark like Buc-ees, Whataburger, and those old Eckerd pharmacies. Get lost in Texas, look up at a light, and there it will be, offering roughly the same experience anywhere. HEB also stocks pipe tobacco and has recently added “Tin Star.”

I do not advocate going to HEB if you can avoid it. The meat is suspicious and the experience is like wandering through a hipster version of Singapore where everyone is such a narcissist that they cannot even figure out how to push a cart without endangering others.

However, any product in a box, bag, bottle, or can is probably cheaper there, so you may end up there. You may even go over to the locked-up tobacco area and see a pouch of Tin Star. It comes in 0.7oz pouches, half the size of the reduced-size Stokkebye pouches.

Tin Star fits in that legal exception for dual-use tobacco that you can smoke in a pipe or roll in a cigarette. Wisely they do not include rolling papers, but you can get those at the counter. It is there for hipsters who want to spend four bucks to get ten sloppy handrolls on a night of drinking IPAs.

Open it up, and savor the smell. There — you spotted it — that faintly fermented but grassy smell of pile Burley. Same stuff they put in Prince Albert, but without the aging and pressing that breaks it down and makes it smoke smoothly.

It feels like a straight dark Burley mix with a fair amount of white Burley, which to my tastebuds mimics that flavor of broadleaf, so you get a nutty cigar flavor with some inherent sweetness. It is a little bit bitey because this Burley has not spent long in the aging room.

Strength is a notch past medium, the flavor is mild, and it leaves a room note like a quality cigarette because the leaf appears to be mostly unmolested, just harvested, air-dried quickly, and then run through a woodchipper before they dump some water, mycoban, and anisette on it.

In a pipe, it delivers a reasonable smoke, sort of like a low-rent Semois, if you pack it really densely, which is easy because it is fairly dry. It lights almost instantly and if you breath-smoke it slowly, the bite is minimized and you get an uneventful and uncomplicated if somewhat uninspiring smoke.

What would possess someone to smoke this? I suppose if you were heading out for an afternoon of fishing, lunting, or fence repair, this is a handy low-cost option. It is of the genre of the big bags of “pipe tobacco” that people mostly use for roll-your-own (RYO) cigarettes, but it is not bad.

Probably a stage lower in the ratings than top of that line Ohm Natural in the bag tobacco genre, Tin Star is a great stopgap for the regular smoker or a pleasantly low-impact choice for the casual smoker.

Tags: pipe, pipe smoking, pipe tobacco, pipe tobacco smoking, tobacco