Fanning the coals
Clearing the stem.
18+Reference resource. Nicotine is addictive. Tobacco use harms your health.
Clearing the stem.
Tobacco is a plant of American origin, unknown in the Old World until the end of the fifteenth century. It was brought to the northwestern India of the Mughal Empire from Europe, presumably by the Portuguese, in the second half of the sixteenth century. Tobacco reached Persia by the same route and at roughly the same time — in the early sixteenth century, still under the first Safavids. From Persia, and through the Ottoman Empire, tobacco and the smoking culture associated with it spread into the Arab world, including Egypt, and from there further south, into Nubia and Sudan: archaeobotanical excavations at Old Dongola showed that tobacco reached the site from Ottoman Egypt after 1603, and the earliest pipe finds there were small and made of thin clay, which is interpreted as reflecting the rarity and high cost of tobacco in that period. It was from this strong, whole-leaf tobacco, brought along Persian and Ottoman trade routes, that the first hookahs were packed — long before the appearance of the moist, flavored mass familiar today.
Before the hookah began to be packed with a molasses-soaked blend, it was packed with whole or coarsely cut tobacco leaf, which was called tumbak or ajami in the Persian- and Arabic-speaking Middle East. The word "ajami" is of Arabic origin: it is an adjective from "ajam" — the term Arabic speakers used for Persians and non-Arabs generally, meaning "foreign, non-Arabic-speaking." In the seventeenth century this word came to denote the strong, dark-leaf tobacco that entered Persian hookah culture. A caveat is in order: the description of tumbak and ajami below relies on a body of trade and regional sources — no separate academic study devoted to these pre-moassel tobaccos could be found. Classic tumbak came in the form of large leaves, often from the Isfahan region, pressed into a brick. Before smoking, the leaf was soaked in water until softened, excess moisture was pressed out, and the tough central vein was removed. One of two packing methods was then used: the softened leaf was either broken into pieces and placed in the hookah bowl, with burning charcoal set directly on the tobacco — without foil and without a Kaloud — or rolled into something resembling a vertical cigar with the charcoal set on the top-cut end. Because of direct contact with the charcoal and the high nicotine content of the untreated leaf, tumbak produced a sharp, harsh taste and a strong nicotine effect; it was also harder to light than a modern molasses-based blend. This packing and smoking technique has not become a thing of the past: it is still sold today under the names "Isfahani tobacco" or tombac by hookah shops catering to a Middle Eastern audience, and the practice itself remains alive in Iran and in parts of the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia.
The word "moassel" (Arabic for "honeyed") denotes a tobacco blend soaked in molasses or honey, with the addition of vegetable glycerin and flavorings. It is precisely this soaking that distinguishes moassel from tumbak and ajami: molasses and honey make the mass moist and viscous, glycerin retains moisture and facilitates smoke production, and the flavorings add a taste that whole leaf did not have. Taken together, sources associate the shift from dry, strong leaf to a molasses-based blend with Egypt of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, but neither the exact date nor the exact inventor is documented — there is no single scholarly source with a dating, only trade lore that repeats across different materials. The Egyptian company Al Nakhla Tobacco Company states that it was founded in 1913 in the city of Shibin El Kom and released the "first ready-made hookah tobacco" — but this is the company's own self-description, not an independently confirmed fact. The same company states that in 1988 it was the first in the world to release flavored moassel lines (apple, apricot, strawberry), and in 1991 the "Two Apples" flavor; these dates are likewise known only from the industry's own trade and marketing sources and should be understood as a manufacturer's claim about itself rather than as an established fact. Sources consistently place the mass spread of flavored moassel as a phenomenon in the 1990s. The change in composition altered both the taste and the audience of smoking: the molasses blend burned more mildly and for longer, did not require direct contact between the charcoal and the leaf, and was less harsh in taste, which broadened the circle of hookah smokers beyond traditional connoisseurs of strong tobacco. Riding this wave, the first dedicated hookah lounges opened in the United States and Europe in the late 1990s and 2000s, and manufacturers emerged that were oriented no longer toward the Middle Eastern market but toward the Western one: Fumari (San Diego, opened in 1997), Al Fakher (UAE, since 1999), Social Smoke (Dallas, since 2002), Starbuzz Tobacco (Southern California, since 2005), and Tangiers, whose first sales sources place in the period between 2001 and 2005.
Besides the soaking, the taste and strength of moassel were also shaped by the variety of tobacco leaf it was made from — chiefly Virginia and Burley, both varieties of American origin. Virginia had been grown in the North American colonies since the early seventeenth century; its modern form — so-called flue-cured leaf — took shape later, around 1839, when enclosed "flue" kilns began to be used for drying tobacco. This curing method fixes the sugars in the leaf and produces a characteristic bright yellow or golden color, a mild, sweetish taste, and relatively low nicotine content. Burley, by contrast, is cured in the open air in ventilated barns over several weeks — a method called air-curing. This curing does not preserve the sugars, so the leaf comes out darker, ranging from brown to almost black, with a more pronounced capacity to retain nicotine and an earthy, dense taste. The main region of Burley production in the United States took shape in Kentucky: by the 1880s the state was supplying more than a third of the national volume of this type of tobacco, which is how it came to be called "burley." In hookah production, the choice between Virginia and Burley leaf as the base raw material sets the basic taste and nicotine characteristics of moassel even before molasses and flavorings are added.
Apart from the botanical leaf variety, the hookah industry has an accepted division by processing method into "light leaf" (blonde/light leaf) and "dark leaf." Light leaf is washed during production, which reduces the content of natural nicotine — according to trade sources, to a level of about 0.6% — resulting in a milder taste, and it is often flavored with honey. Dark leaf undergoes a longer and more complex aging process, retains more nicotine, and yields a denser, earthier, and more intense taste. In the 2010s a distinct wave of Russian tobacco brands took shape and spread, oriented specifically toward densely soaked dark leaf and elevated strength: Darkside, whose history, according to the company, began in 2012 with the Doobacco brand and continued in 2015 with the opening of a factory in Nizhny Novgorod under its own name, Dark Side Tobacco (according to a 2024 Fedotov Group trade study, the brand accounted for a sizeable share of the Russian hookah tobacco market); Must Have, unveiled at an exhibition in 2017 and going on sale in 2018, produced at a tobacco factory in the town of Pogar in Bryansk Oblast; Duft, whose exact first public presentation different sources place in either 2015 or 2016, produced at the same Bryansk factory; Element, which entered the market in the spring of 2018 from a production facility in Kazan; and Sebero of Omsk, whose exact founding chronology diverges in sources between 2016 and 2019. The dense soaking and elevated strength of these brands were informally compared within the trade to the American Tangiers, being called the "Russian Tangiers" — this is an established colloquial comparison within the industry itself, not an independent analytical assessment.
Alongside tobacco moassel, the industry developed and continues to maintain a separate class of blends that contain no tobacco leaf at all. Their base consists of plant materials soaked in molasses, honey, or syrup — tea leaf, sugarcane fibers, beet pulp, or dried fruit — with the addition of vegetable glycerin and flavorings; tobacco leaf, and as a rule nicotine, are absent from such a blend. One well-known producer of this kind of product is the company Soex, part of the Indian conglomerate Sopariwala Exports, which moved from producing ordinary molasses-based product to tobacco-free herbal blends. The appearance and spread of such blends was tied not only to demand from smokers avoiding nicotine but also to tobacco regulation. In Russia, Federal Law No. 15-FZ of February 23, 2013 banned tobacco smoking in food-service establishments; the provision took effect on June 1, 2014. Because in its original wording the ban was formulated specifically as a ban on smoking tobacco, tobacco-free and nicotine-free blends did not formally fall under it, and some hookah establishments switched their menus to such products after the ban took effect — this was noted, in particular, in a 2014 Bloomberg publication. The regulation was later extended to nicotine-containing products without tobacco leaf as well, narrowing this loophole. A similar-in-spirit, though differently structured, example of tightened regulation is European Union Directive 2014/40/EU, adopted on April 3, 2014 and mandatory for application in EU countries from May 20, 2016: it explicitly classified hookah tobacco as a product requiring the full set of combined health warnings covering 65% of the packaging — meaning that regulation in the European Union, contrary to the common perception of the hookah as a "less harmful" alternative to cigarettes, was applied to it to the same extent as to cigarettes. Both examples of regulation — the Russian and the European — describe the same movement: as control specifically over tobacco leaf tightened, the market for hookah blends expanded toward products formally lying outside the scope of tobacco regulation.
What is tumbak?
Whole or coarsely cut tobacco leaf smoked without molasses — softened in water, pressed dry, and either broken into pieces in the bowl under burning charcoal or rolled into a cigar-like shape.
How does moassel differ from tumbak?
Moassel is tobacco soaked in molasses or honey with added glycerin and flavorings; this soaking is what makes the mass moist and viscous and sets it apart from dry whole-leaf tumbak.
When did moassel appear?
Sources associate the shift to a molasses-based blend with Egypt of the late 19th to early 20th century, and place the mass spread of flavored moassel in the 1990s.
How does Virginia leaf differ from Burley?
Virginia is flue-cured, bright yellow, with a mild sweet taste and relatively low nicotine; Burley is air-cured, darker in color, retains more nicotine, and has an earthier taste.
Why did tobacco-free blends appear in the industry?
Besides demand from smokers avoiding nicotine, their spread was tied to tobacco regulation — for example, Russia's 2014 ban on smoking tobacco in food-service venues did not formally cover tobacco-free, nicotine-free blends.