HOOKAH TOBACCO MOLASSES - SHISHA FLAVOURS

The molasses are commonly used in hookah tobacco, which is manufactured out of a blend of different tobaccos which are then mixed with molasses extracted from sugarcane. When hookah spread to turkey from Persia the Turks used to smoke "Tombak" in the hookah pipe, which was a unrefined tobacco grown in Turkey and Iran at the time. The use of sweet additives to the smoking tobacco used in the hookah pipe is commonly credited to the Egyptians. The addition was one that came about as an attempt to work round the problem of the finer tobacco available in Egypt at the time that was unsuitable for use with the hookah pipe. Molasses were used to give the tobacco a thicker consistency resulting in the sweet sticky hookah blends we have today. More than just to hold the fine tobacco fibres together, the addition of molasses gave the smoke a distinctive and pleasant sweet taste.

This was the first step towards the flavored tobaccos we have today. By the mid eighties, one Egyptian based tobacco company started developing new tobacco mixtures, decreasing the nicotine and tar content and adding new flavors to the molasses such as apple, pear and other fruits. The tobacco mixtures they created are the ones that people all over the world now associate with the hookah pipe.