Advantage your favorite tobaccos

I am a nicotine lightweight. Maybe even a bantamweight. Tobaccos with a nic punch can send me ‘round the bend, and that is no pleasant experience. However, it is no uncommon thing that I discover a nicotine-rich tobacco the flavor of which I enjoy.

Stonehaven is such a tobacco. Ever since I was introduced to this blend by Richard Friedman aboard the Alaskan Song, I have loved smoking it on occasion, albeit with no little attention paid to an oncoming visit by “the swirlies.”

To my palate, Stonehaven’s flavors are advantaged by a larger circumference bowl not unlike blends rich with Orientals or Latakia. This posed a real dilemma for me. Pots and princes are my shapes of choice for English and Balkan blends. Their flavor blossoms in their bowl geometries. My experience, however, has been that optimal flavor delivery seems almost always to be accompanied by optimal nicotine delivery. A large distillation zone provides for distillation of nicotine right along with the volatile oils, resins, and sugars entering the smokestream. Obviously, I don’t want to sacrifice flavor if I don’t have to do so. What to do?

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The Limitations of Experience

As related to pipe-smoking, few things annoy me so much as the arrogant certainty of some pipe smokers who believe, because they have smoked a pipe for some 30 to 40 years or more, that they know all there is to know on the subject.

Invariably, these people accredit their opinions by their long experience, implying that knowledge and wisdom are conveyed by virtue of having passed time with a pipe in their kisser. They trumpet, “I’ve smoked a pipe for over 40 years, and blah, blah, blah (insert opinion-of-the-day here)….”

Bullshit. Many have smoked a pipe for 1 year and repeated that single year 39 times.

Decades of jamming Prince Albert into a cob pipe will make you conversant with cobs and Prince Albert, but it certainly doesn’t substitute for active inquiry and experimentation with scores of different pipe makers and tobacco blenders over that same 40 years. By making this comparison, I am not denigrating Prince Albert or cobs, both of which are what they are, I am declaring that if that is all you have done, then you haven’t done much. This would be just as true for someone who has smoked Balkan Sobranie in an S. Bang. That experience would be just as limited.

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The Perils of Food-based Bowl Coatings

Few topics are so controversial among pipe-smokers as is the coating of bowls. Developed to accelerate cake formation and to protect pipes from burning out, bowl coatings are used by many of the biggest names in pipedom. However, there are those who dislike them intensely, and these people have yet another reason to avoid them.

Extreme close-up of mold.Humidity spikes in a room with little air movement can cause mold to grow on bowl coatings, especially food-based bowl-coatings. (Artisans’ recipes for bowl coatings tend to be proprietary, but food-based coatings are often comprised of substances like sour cream, yogurt, and dietary charcoal.) In the case of one fellow pipe man and reader here, the mold grew on a couple of unsmoked pipes in addition to smoked estates. Unbelievable.

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Tending the Fire

Søren Kierkegaard’s observation that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” is as true about pipe smoking as it is about most other aspects of life. When examined in the rear-view mirror there are lessons that only experience can teach.

These elusive insights are often counter-intuitive, striking me as things that could not possibly be true. Because I couldn’t imagine how they could have been true, I summarly ruled them out as explanations for things I couldn’t understand. Looking back, I wonder how much or how often I have ruled out the truth because I couldn’t understand what was going on. A particular example concerns the relationship between tamping tobacco in the bowl and keeping a pipe lit and flavorful throughout the bowl.

Like many younger pipe smokers I struggled for years to learn how to keep my pipe from going out. When I would hear about slow-smoking contests wherein some pipe smokers kept their pipe bowls smoldering for hours at a time, I marveled at the feat. “How?” I wondered, “were they able to nurse that smoldering cherry slowly downwards from crest to dottle?”

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Taking a Pipe from Good to Great

Bamboo Pot by Jess ChonowitschThere is no little irony that a pipe’s monetary value decreases by approximately half when it is smoked because a pipe begins to deliver value to its owner when it is smoked. Some pipes are great smokers from the first light. Others require a breaking-in period to come into greatness. Regardless, when a flame kisses the tamped tobacco inside the bowl chamber  for the first time, the journey begins. Will the pipe become a beloved favorite, or will it rest, dust-laden, on a rack next to its owner’s better friends? To some extent, the answer depends on you.

As much as pipemakers concentrate their efforts on making beautiful pipes, they know that, over time, most pipe smokers become inured to a pipe’s beauty. Smoking quality, however, is a very different matter. A pipe that repeatedly delivers wonderful flavor–especially from the first light–endows its creator with favored-maker status. Pipemakers sweat that first smoke. They want it to be superb. The desire to deliver a great first smoke drives decisions ranging from where briar is sourced to how it is drilled to whether or not a bowl is coated.

Most pipemakers I know don’t want their customers to have to endure a break-in period. They want their pipes to immediately satisfy their owners. However, this doesn’t always happen, and sometimes one’s best smokers start out poorly. In my experience, even wonderful pipes improve when they are skillfully developed.

Bent Apple by Peter HedegaardAlmost every pipe – regardless of cost – requires stewardship and skill in being developed from good to great. While there is the occasional pipe that is a superb smoker from the beginning, most pipes can be improved no matter how humble their beginnings. While I’m not particularly a touchy-feely type who is inclined to make sense of the unknown with metaphysical rationales, I do believe that affection improves pipes. This is probably because beloved pipes are smoked more often, with greater care, and with more preferred tobaccos than are others. However, this is an incomplete explanation. Affection makes most things thrive, and pipes are no exception. And while love may make a good pipe better, it’s not a prescription to improve every pipe. It is nigh impossible to conjure love when it is absent.

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