nicotiana

Long ago, your ancestors roamed the continents of the world looking for places to camp. An ideal place would be near water, food supplies, and some nice warm caves to hang out in when the weather turned cold.

Finding a place like that requires passing by a lot of near-misses. In the same way, these days whenever you look into something new, you have to bypass all the half-right advice before you get to something good.

The same was true for me with pipe smoking. There was a lot of lore, some of it time-honored and true and much of it the type of gossip and superstition that people usually pass around. Comments on a forum or YouTube video launched panics and then trends, like how the trope of “is your tobacco too wet?” turned into a compulsive one-upsmanship to be more rigid about drying tobacco.

All of this danced around the fact that almost no one knew how our great-grandfathers smoked their pipes, few had any clue how to achieve that mystical and ephemeral best smoke of all time, and almost everyone was camping out trying to one-up everyone else with the rarest tobaccos, coolest pipes, and best stories of that elusive amazing bowl that smoked down to “fine white ash” (arguably the first panic/trend).

It bothered me because people talked about sucking, drawing, pulling, and treating a pipe otherwise like a straw that you drank from. Having known some old school pipe smokers, this advice never sat well with me, because in my experience the oldtimers enjoyed the steady trickle of smoke not the sudden deluge.

Naturally, since most of these smokers came from cigarettes and vapes, they were accustomed to the idea of pulling in smoke like they were sucking on a 64 ounce Dr Pepper from the corner store (note: do not do this; it will give you the beetus).

In my view, pipe smokers have always favored the breath method because it works best at keeping the pipe tobacco at an optimal temperature for flavor and nicotine, and avoids burning out your pipe by fanning the flames.

If you watch pipe smokers from the past, you do not see them drawing in past the lighting stage. You see them stick the pipe in their mouths, draw a little as the flame goes in, but not much. Then they keep the pipes in their mouths, with a little smoke periodically coming out when they breathe.

This is the breath-smoking method. You seal your lips around the stem and let the air pressure of your breathing create a little vaccuum in your mouth, or at least a lower-pressure area than the bowl, and the smoke naturally rolls over your tongue.

Straws provide one analogy, which is that if you are drinking a milkshake, you suck on the straw until the goo makes its way to your mouth, at which point just clamping your lips over the straw keeps the flow of flavor continuing. This does not work so well with soda, but works with a thicker drink.

Your goal, in other words, is not to suck, but to let the natural forces at work on the pipe move smoke slowly into your mouth. You do not want a sudden blast of hot smoke; you want cool smoke uncoiling into the stem, drawn steadily into the mouth, for maximum flavor and nicotine.

This leads us to an important bit of technique, which is more important than gear/kit. When you have the stem in your mouth, and the bowl starts to go out, try fishlipping. That is, quickly open and shut the bottom or side of your mouth in which the stem is not resting. This pulses air through the pipe quickly, stoking the flames slightly, but does so without sucking the flame deeper than it needs to go.

Want a wet, ashy bowl? Light too deeply into the bowl and burn several layers at once. They burn badly because they burn incompletely, being dependent on sudden gusts to keep them lit, and as bits go out they absorb the moisture which is naturally releases from the process of burning. These bits turn into dense little fire-killers, so you have to suck more, and soon the whole bowl sucks because you are mostly tasting ash from the blaze and moisture from the bits giving off steam. Even worse, all of that ash-dust and bits of now unburnable tobacco collapse into the center of the bowl, destroying the natural draw. If you suck, you are going to keep sucking, and eventually you will have a wet mucky bowl that went nowhere.

Want a dry, tasty bowl? Light the top layer only; tamp and relight as necessary. Stick the stem in your mouth and make a seal. Fish-lip if you need to stoke the flames. Otherwise, just let that smoke keep rolling in like fog off the Atlantic (Editor's note: less idiotic metaphor must go here). Enjoy the flavor. Do not think, neurose, worry, or obsess. Just enjoy, both in the moment and in eternity. Peace be upon you and all that happy stuff.

My guess it that a lot of the high turnover we see in the pipe smoking community happens when people get bad advice. They buy fancy new pipes, exotic tobaccos, and custom hemp-wick lighters, then figure that the products they bought will translate directly into a good smoke. They suck, notice the result sucks, then suck again, and soon are puffing like freight trains to keep a bowl going. Somewhere in here they may roast that fancy pipe and end up chucking it into a retention pond to hide their shame. After spending a few thousand dollars, they fling up their hands, then shrug, and pack the stuff away in an attic where a mother, girlfriend, or landlord will find it later and chuck it all into a retention pond.

The people who sold them the stuff do not care because they have a couple thousand dollars now. Our pipe industry suffers from a terminal lack of hope because it believes it is doomed and therefore its only workable business model is to bring in suckers, ream them hard with high-priced repackaging of low-cost tobaccos, and then let them drift away. This strikes me as dumb; finding customers is difficult and worth doing, but retaining them is easy and rewarding. Just make sure they have a good experience.

I would like you to have a good experience. I do not make any money off of this stuff, nor do I want internet niche celebrity fame (if I did, I would start an OnlyFans where people of both sexes and all genders would quickly become addicted). I think that in a world of chaos, a quiet smoke alone or with friends makes a big difference, and I want you to enjoy it. Start by not sucking.