Fermentation while curing /drying

[Patriotguy]

Ive been reading a lot of free kindle and ebooks from the 1800s on tobacco, one thing I read that was shocking to me is that if you gave your tobacco proper manure / soil that the leaf will ferment while it cures and that a fermentation on its own is only needed for poor quality tobaccos that you didn't raise right basically. ill try to find the book and post the citation later.
A few other shocking things I read was that the longer you "ferment" that it will actually increase the ammonia content in the leaf.

A lot of this sounds contrary to almost everything ive been reading here and other places oddly.

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

Welcome to the forum. Feel free to start a thread in introduce yourself to make an introduction.

I humbly hope to attempt to address these apparent discrepancies. Let me know if my reasoning makes sense. First, the term quality is a fluctuating term. We don't necessarily know what standards there were in the 19th century. Moreover, with tobacco being a multi billion dollar industry, with both enormous private and government support, I think we are safe to say that farmers are using, quote, proper fertilization . So what is likely the case is that what we consider quality is not the same as what they considered quality.

Ammonia is released when amino acids and proteins are broken down. It's presence is an indicator that compounds containing nitrogen are being eliminated. Therefore, ammonia correlates with improvement of tobacco. After a prolonged period of nitrogen removal, ammonia production will decrease.

So, you see, ammonia means both that the tobacco is getting better and that it could be better.

 

[Moth]

Maybe its the natural association of ammonia (urine smell) being unhealthy / a waste product / sign of spoilage / "bad"?

If the tobacco is good without fermentation, why introduce / taint it with something "bad"?

And if the tobacco is bad, well, doesn't matter what you do it it, as long as it gets "good enough" for market?

 

[deluxestogie]

Welcome to the forum.

I've read nearly every tobacco book from the 19th century (there weren't very many) available on archive.org, and most from the 1st half of the 20th.. The most useful content is with regard to non-mechanized cultivation practices. The chemistry was poorly understood, and genetics was unheard of until about WW1.

One common practice in the "North Carolina Tobacco Belt" was to clear-cut a new field, plant tobacco there for two or three years, then--when production fell due to soil depletion--clear-cut another patch, and abandon the first. Fertilizer/manure was too much bother.

Fermentation creates ammonia from the amino groups broken off proteins, as CV stated. It must then waft away in the air. Tobacco will ferment again and again, given sufficient humidity and warmth. It continues to do this for a decade or more. An aggressive, formal fermentation process dramatically accelerates this "aging" process.

So...those old books are fun and interesting, but don't bet the farm on their scientific veracity. But great ideas on hand-harvesting, hand-hanging tobacco is invaluable.

Bob