Adopted Acres Gentlemen of the Cabin with a Sheffield Silver Steel Wedge
What’s up everybody, welcome back to CMW. It’s Sunday, and you already know what Sundays are for.
Now look, I know it’s July. I know everybody else is loading up their menthol soaps right now. I don’t care. I’ve been holding myself back from this one for too long and I can’t do it anymore. Today we’re going with Gentlemen of the Cabin from Adopted Acres. My man Doug knocked this one out of the park. I’ve shaved with it before off camera. I love it enough to pull it out in the middle of summer anyway. Don’t judge me.
Gentlemen of the Cabin
It reads late-fall, early-winter to me. Tobacco, leather, vanilla, warm woods. Cozy fireside, not poolside. I get that. But I don’t want to be like everybody else. I want to be like Chad.
Adopted Acres is a family operation out of Ashville, Ohio, making their soap on a 1,000-acre Angus cattle farm. Doug built the Grand Champion 2.0 base and I’ll say it flat out: it’s one of the best on the market. Not something I throw around easy. I’ve run a lot of bases through a lot of shaves. Alongside Cajun Blade, Subtle Art, Heritage Hill, Doug’s base belongs in that tier where you just trust it.
The soap has a nice brownish tint. My guess is that’s the vanilla, maybe the bourbon in the scent profile. I don’t know enough about soap chemistry to say for certain, but it looks cool. Scent-wise, I’m getting a clear hit of vanilla on load and something warm, a little boozy underneath it. Relaxing and calming, best way I can put it. Perfect for a slow Sunday morning even if the thermometer outside disagrees.
My shrimp Shucky got into it before I could lather up. Shucky only eats soap he really likes. If Shucky says it’s good, it’s good. Most people don’t care what an inanimate shrimp thinks, but in this house we do.
The Razor: Robert’s Silver Steel Wedge
A few weeks back I shaved with my Waiting Butcher wedge on here and said I didn’t really love it. Well, Robert reached out. He couldn’t believe I didn’t like wedges. He offered to send me one of his to try, and he actually sent two. This one today and another with a different edge on it. We’ll get to that one another time.
Robert does fantastic restoration work. This Silver Steel warranted 6/8 wedge has had serious work done to it. You can see the grinding, the geometry corrections. A lot of older wedges came out with rough grinds from the factory. Robert gets them right. He put a Zulu gray edge on this one, and that’s what we’re testing today.
One swing of coffee first. That’s the fuel. That’s the whole Sunday morning thing.
Lathering Up
The brush today is the Watermelon Crawl from Abominable Creations, 26mm, 70/30 boar and badger. I keep calling it my Yeti brush. Still breaking in, still doesn’t release quite as much lather as I want yet, but the feel on my face is excellent and I cannot stop using it. I did almost get it in my ear at one point. It’s fine. First time for everything.
The Grand Champion 2.0 takes a ton of water. Keep loading, keep adding water, and the base keeps opening up. Thick, beautiful, rich. I loaded longer than most people would, and I don’t apologize for that. Doug put serious work into building this base and you don’t sell it short by rushing the load. He didn’t half-ass making it. I’m not going to half-ass showing it off.
I got lather on my shirt, on my chest, everywhere. Messy about it, apparently. And I’m about 100% certain Siraj fast-forwarded through all of it. Siraj, I see you. I was going to do that dance you’ve been asking for, and I did, briefly, but I’m not doing it again, so you’re going to have to watch the video for that one.
The Shave
Robert’s edge is very nice. Keen and comfortable. I wouldn’t have expected anything different from him and I didn’t get anything different.
Here’s my honest take on wedges: they’re solid blades. No give at all. You feel every bit of it against your face and there’s nowhere for that to go. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, it’s just different from a full hollow. A full hollow fits against my face in a way that feels more natural to me. I can’t fully explain why. It just does. This wedge worked. It worked well. But at the end of the pass I still feel like a full hollow is where I live. Not a big wedge guy, apparently.
That’s not a knock on Robert. His edge is excellent. If you’re more open to wedges than I am, or you’ve been on the fence about them, go get a good restoration on a quality old blade and try it properly. Don’t judge the geometry off a rough factory grind.
Gentlemen of the Cabin is going back on the shelf until November. I’ll be pulling it out again when the weather actually matches it, and it’s going to be perfect then. This morning it was great too. I just know there’s a version of this shave that hits even harder at 6am with a cold snap outside and frost on the ground.
Thanks for hanging out on a Sunday morning, everybody. Happy shaving.