nicotiana

Out on a mission in the world when my track ran close to the local tobacco shack, I evaded the parking goblins — this hoity-toity shopping center has started trying to bill people $2 an hour through credit card apps at the meters — and contorted my way into a parking sign just short of the warning signs at the intersection.

Tobacconists (this is the old school term for B&M or “brick and mortar” shops that sell pipe tobacco, cigars, maybe whisky and guns if you are lucky) provide a unique experience for those of us who are sometimes road warriors in our own region. Not every job is always done from a desk, and sometimes you end up cruising around git-er-done-ing even if it takes you many miles into the concrete, aluminum, and plastic wilderness of modernity.

Nothing compares to, when you have a half hour between attending to the crises of others, stopping by a cool, dark, and smoky establishment where you can pick up a little treat. You outgrew candy, food treats in general just mean dead calories at this point, and you own all the books you want to read, or at least most of them (current as of last Saturday). So you pull into the adult recreation center and look at tobacco.

Lately my tastes have run only to flake tobacco, which puzzled me. It started with a question by shop owner Diane Grace about how the Coniston Cut Plug being purchased would be consumed. Rub it out? No, even though “ready rubbed” may be the easiest smoking cut, since it burns slowly and yet lights easily; cube cut is a second place, if you can get a good cube cut like Cube Cut Burley, which if it were widely available would be my recommendation for new smokers since it smokes easily like a summer daydream. Cut it into cubes? Maybe, if there is a good knife and chopping block handy, which there almost never is. For whatever reason, flake smokes best to me in flake form, even if it takes more effort to get it lit.

Historical conjecture being fun, we can see why flakes came about. Crushing the tobacco, like fermenting cabbage to make it into sauerkraut, lets the annoying chemicals escape to the wind while making the leaf sweeter and stronger. Old school pipe smokers in a time before the ubiquitous ziploc plastic bag probably picked up an ounce down at their local in a paper sack and carried it around in their pockets. Flakes will endure that without terrible moisture loss, especially if you keep them together in a stack. These same sepia smokers probably lit flakes with kitchen or coal lamp matches or splinters stuck into the fireplace, so they had good quality big flame they could dip down into the stack of leaf, getting it hot enough to light.

At that point, the appeal of flake becomes evident. It smokes consistently; the flavor is roughly the same throughout as is the pace of burning, and you do not get the wet gutter of half-burned tobacco bits to which some ribbon cuts degrade as the flame crawls downward. It smokes long, even more if you breath-smoke it while clenched, which makes it perfect for long drives, walking through the woods, or cussing up a storm over some persnickety gadget that you have just about got working except for this one thing, oh, and that other one too. It tends to stay together so you have less of the cloud of ash flying around when you accidentally swing a pipe too fast. It also in my view produces less visible smoke and stench, so it is a good way to smoke a pipe where the background smell will not be noticed but abundant clouds of bountiful smoke will scare off the womenfolks.

On top of that, if you get a strong blend, flake smokes like a cigar and will keep you on your feet. This is useful when the day is cold or wet, when you are brain-fogged and sleepy in the way that even a hot bucket of bullet coffee cannot fix, or when you are dealing with the little not entirely unpleasant but not enjoyable either tasks that life pitches tenfold into any project. You keep that warm smoke rolling over the tongue and ask the nicotine angels how many demons can dance on the head of a pin, and soon you have secured the hoses and spliced the wires enough that it is time to move on to the next life micro-adventure.

My flake journey started with the Gawith Hoggarth leaf, of course, because Coniston Cut Plug is one of the best tobaccos known to humankind (and probably the aliens who keep visiting to see what civilizations dying of their own fear look like). It is formed of dark fired leaf, mostly Kentucky-style Burley but with enough Virginia to sweeten it, matched up in nearly perfect proportions. Yes, it has some of that clove, frankincense, rose, geranium, and souls of the dead essence that they spray on it, but the stuff is organic enough to not bother the nose and sinuses like the soda pop sugar soak they give the commercial blends. The leaf comes to you in long thin flakes, so the right move is to roll it up in little balls, squish them vertically from one side and then the other, and stuff them into the pipe so they slide in easily and have some breathing room on the sides. A moderately large pipe of this stuff will last you a few hours and end up with a faint taste of berries instead of the carpet shop and geriatric lady bathroom stench of the “Lakeland Essence” that burns off when you first light it.

As a self-proclaimed lazy hedonist dedicated to enjoying life and its mysteries more than slaving away at repetitive tasks for the sake of the economy, for me the process does not include the tamping light. You light and go. If the pipe goes out, then you can knuckle-tamp or otherwise push down whatever has risen up to meet the flame, but usually after a good solid light it starts burning and may only need a refresher fire to make sure you get the edges. Again, this works best with the breath-smoke and clench of someone who is doing something with the hands instead of relaxing at the local wheatgrass bar, so this will not be for everyone. Flakes are best in the field.

The flake journey picked up the pace when the next purchase tried out the “new” — Peterson reformed its blends a couple years back — University Flake in one of the battered Rossi Vittoria pipes that floated onto the pipe desk a few years back after a particularly good sale. They dialed back the strength a bit, which made this feel unsatisfying, but the basic flavor has a bit more Virginia sweetness now, making it a solid Burley flake with enough sweet-sour going on to avoid descending into the roast almonds on toasted wheat bread feel of a strong Burley. This tin met the qualifying test of being smoked without thought and appreciated doubly so after the fingers hit the bottom of the tin and groped fruitlessly for another flake, only to find that all had been consumed. If we rated blends by how little they made us neurotic, this one would rank up there as almost free of neurosis, but for this active and frenetic pipe smoker, it could use to rise a notch on the nicotine scale above medium-to-strong, which I associate with breakfast blends.

For years, its cousin Irish Flake has been a favorite around here, but as usual, the old ways were better, since over time complaints pile up until the people in charge make everything into the same old thing that gets the fewest demerits from those who like to complain. If you give a focus group any food, they will turn it into a version of a Big Mac or Budweiser given enough time, and you will want to find something else after awhile because the perfect balance of sweet, salty, and carbo-loading becomes unsatisfying because it lacks what inspires those complaints, character. Character means excess in the sense of being emphatic about certain aspects of personality, more than the gestures that novelists use in place of moral and intellectual maturation in their characters, and the old version of this blend was a grotty old guy who would fight anyone who wanted to turn up the heat because cold builds character. The ancient tins that the cellar metes out for pleasure on religious holidays (still not sure of the religion since the days are picked randomly) wanted to tell you a fish story, down five pints, and the go wrestle a boar. The new version would like you to step into its office to consider the architecture of downtown in twilight.

At this point the quest for flake hit high gear. With a head full of figures, my bedraggled flesh avatar wandered into the store after parking in the lot across the street where the first hour or so is free, avoiding the headache of the parking hall monitors and their esurient surcharges, the tin of HH Bold Kentucky practically screamed out to be selected for a pagan fire sacrifice, so for the entirely reasonable price of $16.75 (the Peterson blends are decently priced too at $18) it came home with me, or rather was opened with a locker key in the car and enjoyed immediately. This blend like the other UK-type flakes above consists of a balance between Dark Fired Kentucky Burley and aged bright Virginia, making it not so much sweet-sour as a constant Moby-Dick style contest between sweetness and that rich cocoa, coffee, and fire type flavor from the dark leaf. If you hand me a tin of this, you make a happy man, and the tins last a long time because the flake naturally smokes slowly with full flavor to the last guttering flame.

The parking authorities are worth mentioning because they are helping to kill that shop. The local tobacco shack suffers already from post-COVID pricing, with pipe cleaners now going for a painful $4.50, and the parking debacle drives away many of those who simply want to stop in, pick up a tin or bag to enjoy on the road as they wander through life, and make a little small talk before disappearing into the hazy grey miasma of the city. The guys that the stores focus on who show up to buy a couple hundred bucks of cigars and then sit around smoking them for several hours are not bothered by the additional six bucks in parking fees, but the casual smoker finds this disturbing, which may be why fewer of those are seen even during peak hours. Those guys, while not a yuge portion of the buying audience, are the lifeblood of these shops because they show up week after week, year after year, and others observe this, which draws community traffic to the shop. With luck the shack will make it, but inventory seems thinner of late, so there is some worry.

Flake tobacco will not be for everyone. In particular, if you are like this smoker-writer, it may take you months or years before you are ready to smoke it well, and before it is smoked well it hides its majesties and mysteries behind endless fumbling with a Bic lighter and a soaking bowl. Those who want to plunge into the Marianas Trench of flake smoking would do well to follow their gut. You look at the tobacco and see density; you will have to light it more, and most importantly, you need to avoid cramming it in there like a trash compactor load because it needs to breathe. Denser things go out faster, too, so it rewards the breath-smoke or at least slow steady burning, as you might expect looking at tobacco that sometimes resembles wood more than leaf. But in the end it is worth it, like many of these little challenges in life, because in the technique a skill of self-control is also learned.

It happens sometimes, especially when stranded in the days that are so warm that my energy pales in comparison and inactivity seems likely if not desired, that pipe ennui kicks in. Nothing seems quite like the right thing to load up a pipe.

A week prior, I had gone through my routine of acquiring new-old tobacco. That is, I went to the anomalous walk-in closet in the room we use as an office and storage dump, pounded twice on the wall and picked up the jar that rolled out.

Regular readers may know the drill. This room is almost half closet, a big L-shaped walk-in that seems to serve no purpose and was probably part of a forgotten half-started renovation years ago. I store tobacco in there (“cellaring”) inside little half-pint Mason jars along with the fishing gear, old clothes, books, boxes, heirlooms, bulk spices, broken routers, family photos, Christmas lights, pickled tomatoes, guns, bicycle wheels, and probably pieces of NASA satellites or UFOs that came down in the yard years ago. No one goes in to clean it because that would be an all-day job if not longer, plus you might disappear or get crushed by an avalanche of falling stuff.

Ironically, this closet represents both our hopes and our discarded attempts at vainglorious activity in the past. There are skis in there, somewhere, as well as mountains of boxes and gear which frequently collapse in the middle of the night, increasing entropy just that much more. There are also far too many flats of jars, many of which are loose in the heaps of miscellany.

To make things more entertaining, the labels have fallen off of half of them, which means that there is a bit of serendipity or hazard in reaching in to find the hard, round, and smooth surface of a unit of my tobacco stash. When someone gifted me an aromatic, for example, I would mix it with strong Burley and file it away. Ten years later, when I knock and the jar comes rolling, oftentimes the mixture is improved. The Burley has mellowed and simultaneously, so has the aromatic, so I end up with lightly flavor Burley where the sugar has either caramelized with time or been eaten up by exciting bacteria and fungi, leaving less of the acidic hot air it tends to produce.

My procedure has evolved over the years. Once upon a time, I used to be brave and actually go in to the closet (note: do not do this; we may never see you again) to root around and find something new to smoke. Sometimes I would take an old hockey stick and poke around to see if I could snag something; this was before the heap got piled up so high it blocked the weak light of the decorative button lamp in the closet. Now, having learned that strategic cowardice is both common sense and makes my actuary happy, I just amble over to the closet and stand with my back facing the wall next to the door. Then I swing hard and fast three times, pounding on the sheetrock, and usually this dislodges a jar. I open the door quickly, since only Satan knows what lives in that closet, and reach in to grasp the first jar that comes rolling my way. Then I flee to safer quarters to figure out what I have captured.

This last venture however brought a surprise. I managed to, in the process of reaching into the closet, knock my elbow hard into great Aunt Marybelle's antique dresser which sits next to the door and curiously resembles something Walmart might have sold in the early 90s, placing its heirloom status in some doubt. As I howled from the sudden sensation of my funny bone being very unfunny, something soft and crinkly fell from one of the top shelves and lodged in the crook of my arm. For a moment I thought it was one of the spacesuits the little greys wore at Roswell back in '47, but then I realized that it was square and suspiciously felt like a package of Five Brothers. When nature gives you top-notch aged Burley, you accept the wisdom of Fortuna.

You can smoke Five Brothers just fine on its own, since it is a birds eye cut medium Burley with casings of anise, honey, and molasses. It has a pleasant flavor like late-season wheat or slightly stale sourdough toast, and they made it moron-simple to pack and enjoy. The stuff comes out like cotton candy, then you cram a bunch in a pipe, tamp and light, and you are off to the races. Some complain that it is a bit too strong, so if you are not a raging nicotine maniac, tread with caution. This leads to the most common use of Five Brothers, historically, which was to shore up weaker blends to make them a tad stronger without going into the full-bore passage between the worlds that a powerful Burley can do for you. I bought these some years ago with that practice in mind back when Pipes and Cigars were selling five-packs for something like thirteen dollars. Then again, back then thirteen dollars could buy quite a bit, where now it seems to be the going price for two screws and a washer.

Conveniently on my desk sits a tub of Prince Albert, the tobacco that combines bulk pile Burley with a top-note of chocolate, vanilla, cherry, rum, and possibly raisins. Back in the day, they probably just went around the office and stole all the snacks, then boiled them and poured the result over a dry heap of Burley. When they smoked it they figured it was great, since these additions seem to mellow the Burley as well as give it a nice chocolatey flavor, but then they were afraid to mess with the formula. Whole generations of executives passed down the word that you could change the organization chart all you wanted, but if you played around with the magic recipe, they were going to haul out the Civil War era rifles and shoot you against the wall of the factory. For that reason, Prince Albert has stayed consistent and mysterious since the time when your grandad was a wee little barn with a clean police record. He probably shored up his bowls with Five Brothers, and the practice continues today in my house.

When you get a tub of Prince Albert, the magic topping is rather intense. They pack the stuff densely in the tub after spraying, so when you first rip off the plastic wrap and pop the lid, you will get a dense blast of raisiny (probably to emulate Perique) and chocolate goodness. I take out the little cardboard divider, then stick the lid back on securely, and shake. I do this a couple times a day for two weeks to drive away the most intense part of the topping, namely rum or a rum-like extract. This off-gasses and each time you open the tub, fills the room, so it is unwise to do this around hungry people because Prince Albert smells like a really tasty brownie and will spark a run on the refrigerator if not an outright riot. Once you have prepped your Prince Albert this way, the topping drops back to a complementary role vis-a-vis the Burley, making for a pleasant but not overpowering blend.

When you mix it with Five Brothers take care because this shag is as dry as the humor on C-SPAN and as finely cut as the distinction in a corporate regulation. Take a generous pinch, then drop it on a handy plate or in my case piece of cardboard from a box of sardines, and add to it an even more generous pinch of Prince Albert. Wad that up, stick it in the pipe, tamp with thumb, and light. Note for the old school smokers: they fixed the font on Prince Albert so that the “c” is clearer, de-obfuscating the name for all of those far-sighted smokers who kept asking for “the Pringe” when they went to their local tobacconist.

To my palate, the Five Brothers/Prince Albert mix tastes a lot like milk chocolate. The rum and fruit flavors fade into a background sweetness and the vanilla-chocolate topping rides a wave of buttery Burley flavor for a succulent melts-in-your-mouth calming smoke. The Five Brothers kicks the mixture up to a gentle medium-to-strong, making this the kind of all-day smoke that a working pipe smoker could use. If you are a carpeted office weekend smoker, this might be too strong for you. If you spend your days in the field or pounding away at something challenging, this blend will be approximately the right strength to keep you focused without ending up in a cross between occult symbolism and quantum mechanics in your mutterings.

Smokers have enjoyed this mix for generations, just as they tucked a pinch of Five Brothers into their favorite aromatics to tone down the topping and kick up the intensity. For many of us the emphasis on the exotic and varied of internet pipe-smoking pseudoculture misses the point, which is that a pipe is an extension of life and how we must live it. It can be a companion during heady labors or heavy labors, or even quiet moments of uncertainty or boredom. It helps us live as better versions of ourselves, and for that many of us reach for the tried and true not looking for experience to change us, but to enhance what we know to be real and infuse our life-experience with rich, chocolatey goodness.

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.

Some years ago when in the midst of exploring pipe tobacco, some Esoterica blends came my way. My general opinion on these is that they are quite good and refined but that the patience required to acquire them is often not realistic to expect of oneself. As trends and prices have gone up, many of us have shrugged off the “unobtanium” style blends in favor of that which is abundant and good, of which there are many options.

One tin that came my way was Esoterica Margate, which immediately made an impression as a fusion of the light English with a solid dose of Latakia, making an old school style English blend that has lots of smoky flavor but melts down into an almost candy-like sweetness. I enjoyed it, but found its mild strength off-putting, so mixed in some Cotton Boll Twist and Black Twist Sliced. This improved it a great deal.

All of us can recognize the blasphemy inherent in that. This ornately manicured blend, cut in thin ribbons, now mixed with big chunks of rude and crude high-powered tobacco seems like a rejection of everything that makes it good. Some of us would beg to differ on that point because we recognize that the old school way of pipe smoking was not based on anything but enjoyment.

Back in the day, pipe smokers mixed up their tobacco blends all the time to get what they needed, and frequently shored up weaker blends with stronger leaf or threw in a little aromatic to give a gentle surface flavor to something they otherwise enjoyed. An old school pipe smoker might have mixed Margate up with some Five Brothers (an actual shag, not merely a thin ribbon cut) and then thrown a little cherry tobacco on top. Most likely, he or she did this in the pouch carried with the pipe in which roughly a week of tobacco would reside.

It is part of the fun of having a pipe. You play around with things and find out what works. I will always respect what Esoterica does, and enjoy these blends when I stumble across them, but at the end of the day, there are many good options and part of the joy is the serendipity to find something and enjoy it in the moment, then move on. I smoke the pipe; the pipe does not smoke me.

When our ancient ancestors on the steppes and savannahs of the world found themselves confronted by a quandary, they engaged a simple ritual: they made an ikon of it out of wood and grass, then gathered around and burned it, perhaps to the slow beat of the drum and the dissonant, erratic cries of wild creatures around them.

Sometimes, when life like the bends and twists of spacetime itself curves around from good to ambiguous, you find yourself weltering in fears. At work, something may have gone wrong and you wonder if the company will be there tomorrow; at home, you face any number of fears relegated to the personal sphere as if we were all afraid of being infected by them. Sometimes there are tragedies, missed opportunities, or simply the sense of a good era or experience gone by never to return.

At that point, in my view it is sensible to return to the ways of the ancients and make an ikon of tobacco, then convert fear into pleasure by burning it slowly (gourd drum and wilderness noises optional; I usually go for Beethoven, Tangerine Dream, Ornette Coleman, or Burzum). Cut it precisely, light it by drawing the flame close to it but not quite touching it, and then settle down to breath-smoke that tobacco branch as if you were Samuel Clemens, Winston Churchill, or Orson Welles.

In my view, we are here in these incarnate bodies to learn something and report back to the heavens. We seek to understand life as a form of pleasure and not drudgery in the avoidance of fear. We want our lives to have a seed of joy at their center, a sense of meaning in what we do, and a great satisfaction in having made ourselves sane, whole, and abundant with goodwill for nature and (the good among) humanity.

My morality may be simpler than most, but it is this: what works is good, what does not is not useful, and what destroys what works is bad. Make things work. Beat the fears, lack of knowledge, doubt, emptiness, and sadness. Sculpt beauty from the unknown and the mundane alike. What works is an enjoyment of life and a desire to improve it, usually with a cigar in hand.

We may think we have come far from our origins, and maybe we do not even know those origins. Perhaps humans popped up in their present form and ever since then we have been slowly becoming more like the wild animals around us, or more like our machines. But the rituals are eternal, and the slow smolder of flame, the rise of smoke, and the accepting heavens blessed by it both dispel fears and bring joys even in uncertain times.

Last week at the local tobacco shack the owner, a patient and gentle lady, asked me if I rubbed out the Coniston Cut Plug I was buying. The answer is no, and the reason is that flakes smoke best if not rubbed out.

Such a statement will provoke controversy on pipe forums, but it is not my goal to tell you that you are doing it “wrong” by rubbing out your flakes. I do not care and I am not trying to control you; however, in my experience, flakes smoke best as flakes, but (and you knew a “but” was going to show up) flakes are difficult to light, smoke, and enjoy and therefore few get to enjoy them.

Let us see, you and I, if we can scrub our heads of preconceptions and live entirely not so much “in the moment” but in the experience of the present tense so that we can take a look at a flake. What do you see?

A flake consists of layers of tobacco leaves that have been pressed, either with cold presses or steam-driven heating, and possibly roasted or aged. These giant cakes of delicious tobacco are then sliced into thin strips. Those are then optionally sliced the other direction to make little tobacco pop-tarts that fit in your pipe.

This tells us that the dominating characteristic of flake tobacco is that it is compressed. You have to muck around with pipes a bit to realize that this means that as it it burns, a flake of tobacco will expand and slowly constrict airflow.

Loading

Your first challenge in smoking a flake arises when you load it into a pipe for this reason. You want to forget about “packing” and even filling, and think about a flake as something that should easily slide into your pipe. No further compression is needed or wanted.

All of my best flake smokes have come from bowls that, if I were to turn them over, would have probably fallen out on the grass in front of me. You want the different parts of the flake to be touching each other, but not crammed together, and the flake wad should barely touch the sides.

For ribbon flake like Coniston Cut Plug, it makes sense to tear off strips from the long side of the flake, wrap them in a circular fashion, and then squeeze until the different sides of the ribbon touch. Slide that into the pipe; it should go easily and barely touch the sides, leaving plenty of room to expand.

With the little pop-tart style square flakes, I tend to fold it over lengthwise, twist to expose the inner tobacco, then slide it into the pipe and leave even more room. These little tobacco wads expand quite a bit.

You may want to keep some of the “shake,” or little bits of loose tobacco at the bottom of the tin or bag, around so that you can pile it up on top as kindling. This makes it easier to get the flake below hot enough to ignite.

Lighting

Normal pipe smoking involves filling the bowl with loose tobacco shreds, compressing the top, sparking a “charring light” which causes tobacco to rise as it expands, then tamping and lighting again.

With flakes, you have a different situation. Your charring light has to go a bit deeper because the point is to make the different layers of tobacco swell in the flake, texturing the surface and giving it more area to ignite.

Then, your tamp needs to be more like a leveling off than compressing down into the pipe. Flake tends to expand more when lit, but collapse into dust when burned, so you can have a bit higher fill on the pipe.

At that point, you want to really give the pipe the coal but do so in a shallow but wide layer. You want the whole top of the tobacco wad to be on fire because flake goes out easily, being denser than regular tobacco. Think of trying to burn a roll of toilet paper versus a heap of loose toilet paper; the latter goes up immediately, but the former will resist your flame until you light it from the side and separate some layers so the fire has somewhere to grab hold. Do not ask me how I have experience in this area, I beg of you.

With a regular pipe-load, your goal will be to avoid getting it to burn too hot, but flakes tend to have more moisture, so you want to get that top layer a bit hotter. It needs to really be “on fire” as opposed to smoldering. It will quickly die down into a smolder anyway since flakes, like most compressed things, resist flame.

Smoking

If you can avoid packing too tightly and get the flake lit, you have a decent chance of having a good smoke if you manage to keep a steady draw.

Puffing, or alternating between no draw and a fast draw, causes the flake to flare up, then rapidly go out. This leads to relighting ten thousand times until you dump the bowl and go find some Prince Albert.

From my experience, the only way to smoke flake is the breath-smoking method. Clamp pipe in mouth, seal lips around the stem, and breathe normally through your nose. Every seven seconds, open the lips and the old smoke leaves.

Maybe this does not work for you. If that is the case, you may have to stop taking sudden draws and instead focus on long slow puffs, blowing out and then resuming. The less pressure you exert on the draw the better.

My favorite flake pipes tend to be light and moderately capacious ones so I can keep the stem in my mouth for a few hours while the flake burns down slowly. This means a steady dose of flavor and nicotine without constant relights.

Types

Flakes come in many flavors, with some using sugar additives like the delicious Scottish Flake or Navy Flake. However, that causes them to both burn hotter and be more acidic, which can result in burns on the roof of the mouth if you clamp.

Were I to nominate favorites, these would have to be the relatively unsugared flakes in the UK style such as Irish Flake, Coniston Cut Plug, and HH Bold Kentucky. American variants like Burley Flake #1 rank up there too.

Continental-style flakes like the Mac Baren and K&K offerings seem designed for use with pipe filters which cut down on the heat from burning sugar and the acidity. Dodge the first two puffs and smoke even slower if you can.

In my view, flakes get a bad rap because experienced smokers view them as elitey-petey, and yet few will tell new smokers what they need to do in order to avoid disappointing hot and wet flake bowls.

Some years ago rumor had it that a Nightcap flake was going to be introduced. I could go for that, but really I hope they make a Prince Albert flake so I can enjoy the slow boat to chocolatey Burley goodness.

The internet changed after Google. Their algorithm rewarded popularity. Search engine results popped up whatever was trending. This created an echo chamber which intensified demand for a few products and ideas, changing frequently, making it harder to find out about anything else.

Naturally this ramped up into social media. Why even bother with a search engine when you can have a scrolling feed of The New in real time, and “live in the moment” like a 1990s indie-grunge song? That further intensified the pursuit of a few conspicuous consumption trends at the expense of everything else.

That dovetailed nicely into the old bad habit of “keeping up with the Joneses,” where if your neighbor bought a Twitter-enabled digital refrigerator, you competed by getting a better one, maybe with BlueTooth connectivity so you could post photos of your dinner to social media directly from your kitchen.

After a number of things — social security to disincentivize saving, public education to keep you focused on all the wrong issues, diversity to replace organic culture with ideology, and 14A-enforced equality to make sure that you had a social position starting at the zero and needed to draw attention to yourself to “be someone” — changed society, conspicuous consumption camouflaged as culture and activism was all that remained.

Consequently, if you want your friends to take notice of you on the internet, you have to find something rare, weird, with a cool backstory, or absurd in order to draw attention to yourself. This created a pursuit of oddball pipes, antiques, and rare tobaccos that are both expensive and require hours of trolling online sites or driving to far-off B&Ms to obtain.

In my view, this causes a lot of up-and-coming pipe smokers to miss the point. We smoke this way because nicotine brings pleasure, calmness, intensity, and clarity to life, but we do not want to choke our lungs with weird vape oils or gritty particulate pollution. We put tobacco in a pipe, light it, focus on our breathing, and enjoy the whole experience instead of doing things just so we can get more “likes” on Facebook, Twitter, or Deddit.

Let me tell you a story about one day in a pipe smoker's life, and ask you to keep in mind this quotation:

It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.

This pipe smoker, who shall remain unnamed, was gifted with a tub of Prince Albert. Purchased at a local grocery store, it was unexceptional in every way: mass-produced, from a large corporation, probably anonymous generic Burley from a thousand farms, covered with time-honored standard toppings like whisky, vanilla, and chocolate.

The smoker, delighted with the gift but moreso that someone out there thought enough of him to remember his likes and habits and the things he enjoyed versus the things he was compelled to do to survive, immediately tore off the wrapping, flipped open the tub, and loaded a bowl in a no-name pipe and lit it with a generic lighter.

What happened then, Dear Reader? Was it a moment of bliss, transcendent ecstasy, and having the third eye open to reveal the unitive structure of the cosmos?

No, friends. The pipe smoker simply enjoyed his pipe while he puttered, ran, jumped, walked, and moseyed around doing everyday things. He cleaned the gutters. He fixed the sink. He tightened the screws on the shower door and beat the sealing liner back into place.

But he enjoyed himself. There, independent of what “the world” thought, or any concern for what others thought, he just appreciated life, including its many parts: daydreams, musings, contemplations, activities, family, friends, maybe a little Corelli or Bach on the radio, the tight fit of a seal, a job well done, and, of course, the constant stream of flavor and life-enhancing nicotine from the pipe.

During this time, he was not busy mentally writing his auto-biography or thinking of what he would say to his friends at the next class reunion to prove that he was in fact living a better life than they were. He did not contemplate water cooler conversation at the job, or church chatter over coffee after the sermon droned to heat-death as the audience considered that Jesus was wise but the world has Control. He simply enjoyed his pipe and his life.

He was free for a moment of what Tom Wolfe called the fiction-absolute:

Even before I left graduate school I had come to the conclusion that virtually all people live by what I think of as a “fiction-absolute.” Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world — so ordained by some almighty force — would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.

We all struggle to be more than anonymous equals in this world. The old social order gave us each a place that we could not lose except through the usual gross transgressions (negligence, murder, theft, assault, inability) and therefore, we were someone even if just to our local area, family, and friends. We had a center, a position, and an immutable identity.

When we connected up the world and abolished all of the old stuff, which like most time-honored things win out by utility and not moral rectitude, we lost a sense of place, and the internet, television, and press tied us all together and made each of us competitors for “the most interesting person in the world” at least during our fifteen minutes of fame.

We are going to need new things to replace the old and the intermediate that came after it. Obviously, the modern world does not work so well for most people, so we turn to our gardens, bird-guides, hunting lodges, homesteads, churches, and pipes. That turning begins with appreciating not just the moment, but its connection to all other moments.

In the bigger picture, that means having the ancient, eternal, and continuous things in our lives. Those may be as simple as being with friends for timeless rituals like the hunt, the fire, the drinking too much Natural Light and waking up in the woods, or as complex as the inter-related dynamics that make a healthy, comfortable, sturdy, and generous family.

It can include the gods — Thor, Athena, and Krishna guide us! — and time-honored wisdom. It can mean simply firing up the tobacco your great-grandfather smoked and enjoying having your pipe with you while you find a way to enjoy other everyday tasks like fixing the shower and cleaning the gutters.

Pipe-smoking cannot be a god for us. I like Esoterica Tilbury, but only when it shows up in my hand because fortune had me show up at our local B&M when it was in stock at a good price. That means rarely, and I am fine with that. I like fine and fancy pipes, or ones owned by famous people that have silver tassels on them, but I reach for a basket pipe with a good draw. There is a great joy in having someone bring you some Prince Albert back from the grocery store, loading it in a battered old faithful, and enjoying the day without complexity because pipe smoking fits into a full life but is not a substitute for it.

When I see people paying absurd prices like $50 for a 3.5oz tin of some not-mindblowing flake, or wasting hours of every week chasing down the last tin of Tilbury, I feel like the point has been missed. Pipe smoking is not here to bring you fifteen minutes of fame to substitute for a life-long feeling of inadequacy, irrelevance, and anonymous insignificance; it is here to be part of what you do to fill this void, which is having a decent simple and normal life in which any greatness you achieve is part of what you do to make that a good life.

For some, that means acts of heroism on the battlefield. For others, being the village plumber or lawyer, or even just the guy in your suburban neighborhood who people come to with the hard problems or the glitchy lawnmowers. (My view of the suburbs: they are generic on the outside in order to hide the inner life, so it can be privately enjoyed without being subject to social pressures. In individual lives and civilizations, increased entropy can be traced to the accumulated influence of social pressures.)

I notice that they have changed the font on the Prince Albert tub to make the “C” look less like a “G.” Salespeople have in the past looked at me quizzically and said, “Pringe Albert”? This led to the the mental meandering that had me wonder if I should not come up with an alternative blend named Fringe Albert, flavored with JP-4, green onions, Cointreau, and the flowers of the African violet. It would probably sell for $50 a tin and make a lot of YouTube videos just pop and sparkle.

In my view, there is nothing new under the sun; there are good people and bad people, with some in the middle, and notions are either mostly realistic or based on some phantom of the human mind, and the latter (Communism, Nazism, COVID-19, The Satanic Panic) always end badly with shattered lives and ruined hopes.

Those of us who saw the Wall — the scary one, under Communism — and witnessed the world ready for nuclear annihilation at any moment, while we heard weekly of those who died trying to escape empires that were not just repressive and incompetent, but seemed to delight in humbling the talented so the herd of incompetents could run free, tend to distrust ideology of any kind, whether native Utopian ideology or some other notion like religion or capitalism made into an ad hoc dogmatic belief system.

No matter what intellectual background we have, then, we find ourselves gravitating toward the simple principles that show up consistently in life. One of these seems to be that life should be pleasurable, since people are driven to acquire pleasure more than they are compelled to avoid pain. If you want adequate results, scare people; if you want great results, reward them for getting it right and let them figure out the rest on their own.

I can never believe in One Big Idea, since the more broad the solution the less specific it is and therefore it creates resistance from details moving bottom-up to eventually dethrone it. The more cooks in the kitchen, the worse the soup, and if you write a rule to control the methods used by all cooks, the less it applies in the infinite variation of everyday life. But as a starting principle, I tend toward realism, a sort of seat-of-the-pants type of scientific method that says pay attention to reality instead of coming up with a testable hypothesis and assuming that this represents the whole of the system.

In this view, history is a better guide than theory, and time-honored things endure because they work even if they become unfashionable. This is equal parts frontier practicality and Zen Buddhism, where you are induced to meditate and experience life until you creep out of Plato's cave, the mental ghetto of human brains responding to their own impulses more than perceiving the world around them. The Zen of Pipe Smoking might begin this way: what matters is the rhythm of the pipe, not the rhythm of the smoker.

Like all good principles, this consists of a nice tidy statement followed by a few pages of footnotes. The draw on the pipe depends on the pipe, what is in it, the humidity that day, the heat, and of course the mouth of the smoker. Pipe enjoyers since the invention of the device have smoked by place the stem in the mouth, lighting the material in the bowl, and allowing the low pressure area of the sealed mouth to draw in smoke from the open bowl. Leaf crackles, embers glow, and every seven seconds or so the smoker opens the mouth in order to let out the old smoke.

If pipe smoking has a Zen, it consists on maintaining this rhythm no matter what is going on around you. You may be fighting with a fidgety lawnmower, dodging bullets in Ukraine or Taiwan, running to grab your kid before he falls over a cliff edge, or simply typing back one of those urgent messages on the internet that begin with an insult to the mother of the other party. You may be under massive amounts of stress and fearing for your life or future. The world could well be on fire around you.

But somehow, you must keep the rhythm of the pipe going and not start puffing fast, at which point you lose flavor and the pleasant balance of nicotine, and send yourself into a cytokine storm of panic and anger. Instead, you clear your mind, keep the rhythm, and look with new dispassionate eyes at the problem from a 30,000 foot view before zooming in to what is immediate, necessary, practical, and realistic.

Much of the lore around pipe smoking involves the smoker being a thoughtful, analytical, and perhaps wise sort of person. One cultivates wisdom by clearing the mind and looking at what is there, studying it in depth with the patience that only someone enjoying the flavor of tobacco and calming waves of nicotine can do, so this stereotype makes some sense. Possibly much of it comes from the Zen of the Pipe, since to have that amount of mental discipline orients the individual toward sanity, balance, and understanding.

As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun; we have seen all the patterns before. In fact, many of them become obvious when examined under the magnifying glass of cold and dispassionate thought applied toward a goal of making life more pleasurable. For those who adopt the Zen of Pipe Smoking, this type of thinking hovers within reach, since they have accepted the pipe as a greater reality than their own impulses and therefore, have lost the veil of illusion that causes us to focus on our own thoughts more than the world around us.

Longtime readers may recall that for this pipe smoker at least, no blend satisfies quite like the legendary Irish Flake. During the early days of my pipe smoking, this blend was obsessively overlooked by the pipe-smoking literati and nomenklatura of the day since all you can say about it is that it is a typical UK flake: a mixture of dark fired Kentucky Burley and bright Virginia, it delivers a sweet-sour-spicy-smoky mixture that might also knock you flat.

Tobacco blends like this tended to be strong because UK plugs, flakes, shags, and curly cuts were generally designed for the working smoker who whether he was building walls, watching the big board in a nuclear power plant control room, herding sheep, or shooting at colonials and antipodeans, needed something somewhere between a pleasant smoke to make it through the muck, smoke, and fire and a bracing jolt of a beverage that kept him awake. Irish Flake obtains both credentials: it tastes a bit like dark roast mocha sweetened with honey, and will open up those eyes with a long-lasting, highly flavorful smoke.

Stirling Flake, which was the version of Irish Flake made by Kohlhase & Kopp back in the 1990s, gained its name after the contract for manufacturing passed to Scandinavian Tobacco Group. The original blenders gave it a new name and released it under their Rattray's label, allowing us to continue to enjoy the older version, which is sweeter and also a little bit stronger, possibly a nod to more middle Burleys or Virginias padding the current STG variety. It aims less for well-rounded flavor that a sweet-sour contrast between the lemony bright Virginia and the rich, chocolate and coffee notes of the dark fired Kentucky Burley. If it is like other Rattray's blends, it also probably has a fair amount of added sugars, giving its sweetness a boost.

K&K has a mixed reputation for this reason. Their blends show great finesse but often have too much sweetness that is not from the tobacco itself, making them less than ideal for daily smoking. When you stick a pipe in your mouth with the dawn and remove it only reluctantly to go to sleep — although by legend some smokers can smoke when they sleep, this requires the use of an E-Z chair or other non-bed sleeping arrangement — you want less burnt sugar gunk in your mouth and will over time find the cotton candy flavor of roasting sugar to be less than appealing. Luckily, in these richer blends it is basically undetectable, so the sweetness here may simply be some nicely fermented Virginias.

A blend like this reminds me of the silliness of the current age. This absurdity transcends politics, religion, whatever; it is a zeitgeist of being in denial of reality because we fear being insignificant, mainly because when you are politically equal, all the great peaks have been conquered, and life consists mostly of purchasing decisions, people feel as if they are lab rats more than rugged individualists. People fear reality and want to live in fantasyland. They'll scapegoat anything like they attacked smokers back in the day.

In reality, you are most likely to die from car exhaust or the terrible food or even just existential misery at your sad cubicle job to which you commute for two hours to drive around the vibrant ghetto and the industrial wastelands that dot our nations but since they are “job-creators,” would be forgiven even if they re-enacted the Holocaust nightly with orphans as victims. Everyone fears the loss of what little they have, even while they try to pile up enough wealth to escape.

We could not face the fact that democracy does not work so well, that free markets beget dangerously powerful corporations, that diversity means we are all at each others' throats, that organized religion hides the bad within the good by forcing them to obey dogma, that unless we give plants and animals rights we will exterminate them, or that allowing individual liberty means unlimited human growth which dooms us all. Whew, that sounds darker than it is, but let us just say that there are no new problems nor new solutions, only non-solutions that people like which eventually destroy us. We the people are our own problem and the more we try to make things better, the more we make everything worse.

They started by scapegoating smoking. People thought that the reason they were all dying of cancers involved the smoke in their offices, so the pipes and cigars smoked got booted and everyone else clustered around the electric meter out back, smoking quickly twelve times a day. Now they have even eliminated those, so people have turned to a myriad cocktail of SSRIs, vaping, grocery store wine, prescription opioids, legal weed, and kratom to keep their mellow. We had something less destructive, but that upset people, so instead we got the really bad stuff with even worse stuff coming.

In a sane society, you would find Stirling Flake at every corner store. You would pop in, pay a few bucks for a tin, and then remove a single flake, fold it lengthwise, twist, and insert into your pipe. The struggle here is getting the pipe lit, so you do the old char the top and then let it dry out for a few moments before mashing it slightly to expose the dry leaf, then lighting it three times in a circular motion until it really glows. The trick to UK plugs et al. is to give them the gas like mad on that second light, then to do only light relights if you do so afterwards, since you have already kindled up enough that it will take easily.

Most of us, however, start out with gentle lights and slowly work our way up to blowtorching the crap out of the tobacco heap as the bowl goes on, since the “[beep]ing [beep] won't stay lit” (hint: it rhymes) and that makes us mad and sad because we are not getting delicious tobacco. Instead, make sure that whatever wad you pack slides easily into the pipe and requires no cramming, then char it and tamp lightly, not compressing it at all, before you give it the fires of Hell just once. You will have a lengthy and pleasant smoke after this point.

Shag tobacco offers a good smoke with the convenience of a blend that, since it mostly clings together in the pouch, travels well. On the downside, it also tends to leave a great deal of dottle, since most shag is designed for cigarette smokers and therefore is dry, which means that it soaks up a lot of water quite quickly and then the cherry sputters out before the bottom of the pipe.

To counter this we use an old technique, “wadding,” which consists of taking about the amount of tobacco that fits in your pipe out of the pouch, then compressing it horizontally into a dense wad that can then slide into the pipe as a single unit. This keeps the tobacco from pressing hard against the bottom of the pipe.

As a result, moisture gathers in the little gap at the base and the tobacco burns more like a compressed variety such as flake, allowing for a cool and long-lasting smoke without a little puck of dottle at the bottom.

Dry shag — distinct from wetter shag designed for pipes, like Dark Bird's Eye — soaks up moisture very easily and requires an approach like this. While you can fill from the pouch, if you do not compress in advance, you end up with too light of a pack, which results in a quicker, hotter smoke.

This keeps the advantage of shag intact, namely that you can one-handedly fill your pipe while driving. It took me a few tries to get the wadding technique right, and while it did not improve the quality of the smoke, it avoided the additional complexities of having to dump wet dottle while cleaning a pipe one-handed.