Monkey King Rolling Papers and Tips: Hemp, King Size

The tip is more than ten times the weight of the paper

Here is the number, and it took reading five sibling listings to find it.

Three combipacks in this same King Size format, sold under different cover designs, publish a specification the rest of the range leaves out. They give the tips as 160 gram cardboard filters with pre-punching. That figure appears identically on all three, which is what a real manufacturing specification looks like rather than a marketing line.

The paper those tips are bound next to is 14gsm.

So the piece of card at the mouth end weighs, per square metre, more than eleven times what the leaf wrapped around your smoke weighs. They are barely the same class of material. One is engineered to be as close to absent as paper gets, the other is engineered to hold a shape under pressure and not go soft.

That is not a flaw. It is the job. A tip has to stay rigid while being held, chewed slightly and drawn through, and a 14gsm sheet would collapse instantly. But it does explain something people notice and rarely articulate, which is that the tip is the part of a roll that feels manufactured while the paper feels like nothing at all.

We should be straight about the limits of this figure. That 160 gram specification is published on sibling combipacks in the same format and size rather than on this exact listing, which gives its tips no material at all. We report it as what the brand states for this style of tip, not as a verified measurement of the card in this particular booklet.

What the pre-punching is actually for

Every listing in this family calls the tips pre-punched, pre-punctured or perforated. Not one explains what that means, which is a shame because the answer is simple and useful.

A card tip is not used flat. You fold it into a concertina, a short zigzag at one end, then roll the rest of the card around that zigzag to make a cylinder. The zigzag is what stops loose material coming through while leaving a channel open.

Doing that on a plain strip of card is fiddly. The first fold wanders, the concertina ends up uneven, and the finished tip is either too tight or falls apart.

Pre-punching puts a row of perforations across the card exactly where those first folds go. The card breaks along the line instead of wherever your thumbnail happened to be, so the concertina comes out even every time and the finished tip is round rather than oval.

That is the whole feature. It is a fold guide. It makes an awkward small job repeatable, which matters more if you roll often or roll in the cold.

The trade copy attached to these tips also says the pre-punching serves to improve filtration, and another listing in the range says the perforated tips enhance airflow. We are not going to repeat either. A card tip has no filtration medium in it and removes nothing from what passes through. What it does is hold the end open, keep material out of your mouth and give you something firm to hold. Our page on the Mr Tipp's glass tip goes through this properly.

Roach, tip, crutch, filter: four words, one piece of card

British smokers call it a roach. Americans mostly call it a crutch. The trade calls it a tip. Packaging very often calls it a filter.

Three of those four are fine. The fourth is doing work it has not earned.

Roach is the older British term, and confusingly it also refers to the stub left at the end, which is why you will hear the same word used for the thing you put in and the thing you throw away.

Crutch describes the function honestly, since the card is holding the end of the paper up.

Tip is what the trade prints because it is neutral and short.

Filter is the one to be careful with. A cigarette filter is a plug of cellulose acetate designed to trap particulates. A rolled piece of 160 gram card is a tube with a folded partition in it. The two things look similar at the end of a roll and do entirely different amounts of nothing.

We use tip on this site for that reason, and where a listing says filter we leave the word in the quote and do not adopt it.

Why the booklet holds the same number of each

The distributor's specification lists 32 king size slim hemp papers and 32 tips in a booklet. The matching is the entire point of the format.

Buy papers and tips separately and you will always be out of step. Tip packs and paper booklets come in different quantities, so you end up with a drawer of orphaned tips and no papers, or the reverse, which is the specific annoyance the combipack was invented to remove.

It also means one thing in a pocket instead of two, which is why the brand's copy for this style keeps calling it convenient for travelling.

There is a trade-off and it is worth naming. If you already use glass, ceramic or wooden tips, half of this booklet is redundant to you from the moment you open it, and the papers-only booklet in the same hemp and the same King Size is the honest choice instead.

The papers themselves are unchanged between the two. Same 108 by 44mm King Size slim leaf, same natural Arabic gum, same hemp. Our page for the papers-only booklet sets out the size system and the gsm bands in full, and none of that changes because a tip section has been bound in beside them.

Four combipacks that look alike and are not

This is where the range gets genuinely confusing, because the packs are near identical in shape and the paper inside them is not.

The hemp combipack on this page is natural hemp paper. The Natural Unbleached version is listed simply as unbleached paper. The White Ultra Thin is white paper, which means bleached, whatever the surrounding copy implies. And the Classic Wood version, despite sitting in the same rack, is 14gsm wood pulp, a completely different fibre with a different burn and a more noticeable character of its own.

The Billionaire editions go further again and are described as rice paper, and they are the ones quoted at 110mm rather than 108 by 44mm, an inconsistency that runs through this brand's listings and that we cover on the papers-only page.

None of that is visible from the front of the pack. If the fibre matters to you, the material line is the only place it shows up, and as our papers-only page documents, that line is not always reliable across this range.

Who should buy something else

If you use a reusable tip, skip this and take the papers on their own. Carrying around a tip section you will never touch is the most avoidable mistake in this aisle.

If you have never rolled before, the tip is the easy part and the paper is not. A 14gsm King Size slim is long, narrow and about as thin as paper is made. A shorter Medium leaf in something heavier will be far kinder while you learn.

If you want a tip that does something a card tube cannot, the answer is a glass one, and our Mr Tipp's blunt tubes come with a washable 12mm glass tip already fitted.

If you want the fibre named reliably, be aware that the material line on this range is inconsistent enough that we have raised it with our distributor. The hemp variant is the one where the description and the product agree.

And if you came looking for a paper with a cannabinoid in it, this is not one. Hemp here is the stalk fibre. Our ROOR CBD infused papers are the ones on this shelf that genuinely contain CBD.

Over 18s only.