Cool and the Geezer Factor

A Whole Lot of Buzz

There is significant buzz among the Internet pipe-smoking community in response to the November launch of Stiff Pipes. It’s amazing, to me how the new Swedish pipe company has managed to build awareness of their new product at near light speed. None of the great icons of pipe-making – not even the legendary Bo Nordh – ever managed to break into the mainstream lifestyle-media space before.

Then, along comes a newbie pipe-making company from Sweden, and they make it happen. I respect that. Stiff deserves a more serious look than they’ve gotten from the mainstream pipe community, if only to understand what they’re trying to do and, may, in fact, accomplish.

Stiff Pipe in blue and dark navy.Proportionately, most of the buzz I’ve read and heard ranges from amusement to outrage. There’s scoffing and scorn, mostly in response to two factors: 1) Stiff pipes are made of thermoplastic  and 2) Stiff has priced their pipes at US $800 – an unthinkably high price to the briar-buying crowd, most of whom would seldom, if ever, spend so much on a crown jewel for their collection, let alone on a pipe with no possibility of straight grain or birdseye.

The Force of Orthodoxy

A conventional billiard pipe: Comoy Blue Riband Billiard: briar and vulcanite.Orthodoxy is so strong among pipe-smokers that our tenets and belief systems are nearly cultish in their force. First among those beliefs is that a good pipe is fashioned from briar. Second is that a sweet smoke emerges from good briar. Third, the most valuable pipes reveal the most exquisite grain, whether the pipe is smooth or sandblast.

Thus, to most pipe people it is all about the briar, be it quality of pipe, quality of smoke, or quality of experience. There is a “thus saith the Lord” force to these precepts. To a pipe-smoker contentedly steeped in pipe orthodoxy, an $800 plastic pipe is not so much gimmick as heresy. Hence, all the “How dare they?” reactions.

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