nicotiana

People like me seem to enjoy wasting our lives typing information about pipes and tobacco into the internet. We do it mostly from belief: we believe that life is good, and smoking a pipe is good, so we should pass on what maximizes that goodness, both for those who already like it and those who might be lured away from less salubrious practices. That, and we've screwed it all up before.

Trust this if nothing else: behind every bit of solid pipe advice is a legacy of screwing up. We listen to the lore, which is equal parts gossip and time-honored knowledge, and attempt to figure out how to do this weird thing of keeping a fire-stick in the mouth, and get most of it wrong. Over time, that percentage declines, but never really erases. This is called “learning.”

I present to you the short but ever-expanding list of everything I have ever done wrong with a pipe:

• Did zero research heading in. I went to Walgreens, bought a pipe, filters, cleaners, and tobacco based on what seemed to be on offer. Did I pick up a book? No. Search the internet, which existed even then? No. I just went to figure it out, and ended up with a Dr. Grabow Grand Duke and Blender's Gold Golden Burley. This meant that I smoked one of the most difficult tobaccos to keep lit in a decent but tiny pipe, which obliterated the idea of nice long contemplative smokes. Had I possessed even a homeopathic inkling of a clue, I would have gotten myself a cob and some Prince Albert, Carter Hall, or Sir Walter Raleigh, all of which are brain-dead simple to smoke for hours on a regular size corncob bowl.
• Destroyed a few pipes. One Dr. Grabow went to the hereafter in an unfortunate washing machine accident, and another perished of aggressive tapping it out, since at that time my only “pipe tool” was the ignition key to my 1993 Geo Prizm (this car belongs in a separate list of screw-ups). A few cobs have made the ultimate sacrifice in service to the cause, including one that is still floating in the Gulf of Mexico to this day, probably providing home to whatever barnacles enjoy Erinmore Flake.
• Didn't breath-smoke from the get-go. Most people who grew up around pipe smokers do this intuitively. You stick the pipe in your mouth and breathe very slowly, letting the air pressure of your breathing create a natural slight but incessant draw on the pipe. This fills the mouth with smoke without jerking on the airflow, and keeps the fire smoldering as opposed to burning or going out.
• Didn't realize this is a technique, not things. My first few years of discovering the wider pipe world involved focusing on having the right pipes, blends, tools, and settings (the environment in which I smoked, including mental state of mind). None of that was wrong, but you wake up one morning and realize that you are nowhere that you were not with a cob and a pack of Carter Hall. Filling, lighting, breath-smoking, tamping including ember-chasing, and breath regulation comprise the biggest part of smoking a pipe.
• Forgot the wisdom of “smoke what you like, and like what you smoke.” One of my favorite images is the grindcore band Napalm Death hanging out around a rock on which has been spray-painted CHANGE YOUR LIFE. Smoke what you like; unless it is terrible, you can find a way to enjoy it for that moment or moments of your life. But make sure you really are smoking what you like, and that when you smoke it, you actually enjoy it instead of participating in FOMO-YOLO culture regarding Unobtanium and tin notes of forgotten summers followed by the taste of leather, yeast, and banana croissant. If you smoke something because you think you should like it, but do not, CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
• Did not understand pipe maintenance. On first blush, it's a pipe: you put tobacco in it and smoke it. The bigger picture is that you can enjoy this tobacco more if you clean it regularly with alcohol and cotton, let your pipes dry out every now and then, and trim cake. Everyone worries about how to build cake, since they are afraid of burning their pipes, but really that only happens when you pack badly and draw too hard, creating a real tenement fire in the bowl that eventually damages it. People should focus on how to trim cake and remove ghosts from the stem, not the bowl, because an awful lot lives in the stem including some icky microbes that can make you very nauseous very fast (sort of like the last Star Wars film).
• Bought the wrong things. When I first started out, it was considered sage advice to tell new smokers to find themselves some 1-Q and then sample a bunch of exotic tobaccos. When you are new, none of this stuff will make sense to your palate, and if you start on 1-Q you will probably not continue out of frustrating, since sticky aromatics made translucent with humectants like that best-selling blend are only good for keeping others from complaining, which is why they are widely liked. You will gurgle, hack, suck, curse, and relight frequently, but at least the wife or friends have quit their whining. Hint: go to the garage, and smoke what you like instead.
• Didn't understand cellaring. When I first found the “internet pipe smokers community,” they understood cellaring as squirreling away rare stuff so that they could haul it out later and be cool. I get that. The nü-skool internet pipe community likes to have 387 sample jars of exotic tobaccos to sample with their pipe collection, each one of which is either massively expensive or has an interesting backstory. I get that, too. Your average functional pipe smoker — a guy like me who wanders around with a pipe in his mouth for much of the day — goes to his favorite mail order joint three times a year to order five pounds of Superior Navy Flake, Virginia Slices, Virginia Flake, Old Joe Krantz, Golden Extra, or other all-day blends for experienced smokers. He smokes a little over ten pounds a year, so every year he puts away three or four pounds for the future. Sometimes he goes to his B&M and picks up a new interesting tin to smoke or samples the bulk, but basically, he orders a lot of what he likes and keeps it stashed for lean years or the coming collapse of Western Civilization when the UFOs come down and tell humanity that we're actually idiots and will henceforth be serving in the Martian rhodium mines.
• Didn't keep a notebook. I wish I'd kept a diary, too, despite thinking that such things are sort of like scrapbooks and belong to the demesne of twelve-year-old girls. Some will tell you to have a tasting journal, others to keep a blending log... I say combine the two and add a smoke diary. Note down what you have learned, what you're thinking, what you have enjoyed. Looking back, it is like reading the biography of a different person, and might tell you about more than your pipe smoking habits.

I have forgotten most of the other screw-ups, but maybe you can imagine them for me. It took me ages to learn that “packing” the pipe is the wrong verb and leads to the wrong assumptions; you want to fill the pipe, then gently push down any extra. It took me aeons to figure out breath-smoking to the point where now I do it without thinking, which is the point where pipe smoking is the most enjoyable. But in the end, I just hope to pass along what I learned from my pains so that you do not have to, since this way you'll enjoy it more. As they say: smoke what you like, and like what you smoke.

I write to you about the many exotic and interesting blends out there because they fascinate me for their variety and creativity. From one plant, talented humans have expanded on the vaster talent of nature to make all of these different blends that, true, are of a few major types, but achieve great differences and diversity within.

For example, if I say I like English blends, there are going to be twenty opinions in the room as to which the best Englishes are. Some will say that on the price-performance curve, English Luxury wins out over the others; others will say to go for the finest you can find, so check out the Red Rapparee or My Mixture 965. Some will favor strong, rich blends like Nightcap and Artisan's Blend, while others will prefer the sweet light English of Early Morning Pipe or Presbyterian. Some of us will weigh in that American Englishes give these blends the shove they need with Burley power, and speak up for Mountain Camp or Engine #99. Which is right? It depends on who you are. We are all what our nature is plus the choices we make, souls riding the currents of genetics and history.

On a slightly different (tin) note, today I want to praise that which does not seem praiseworthy, namely the joys of smoking straight Burley. It sounds boring, but we are looking now into the brilliance of nature and the accumulated learning of those who grow, harvest, cure, and prepare the tobacco plant. People sometimes look at me like I have grown a forehead limb when I say that I smoke straight Burley sometimes, but to me, this is a way of reconnecting to the beauty of tobacco itself without a complex formulation. Would I smoke a pipe if this was all that was available, with no fancy blends and far-out concoctions? Yes, yes, I would, and I would enjoy it.

What you notice first about Burley — I smoke dark Burley, the fermented version of the descendants of the original varietal, an atavism that popped up in a field of Virginia, bringing back many of the attributes of its distant ancestor Nicotiana Rusticum, from with Nicotiana Tabacum emerged in the Central American highlands — is that its flavor is both familiar and undefinable. Some of this is the anisette-based casing, no doubt, but much of it is the flavor, which I can compare only to almonds, cracked grain, and most importantly, the scent of a summer field. It is not hay like Virginias, rarified into a single domestic species, but all of the grasses, flowers, roots, and nuts of the field taken together, making a flavor both of its constituent parts and of the environment itself. There is earthiness to dark Burley, as well as those light grass-like flavors, a roasted grain and aged nut flavor, and something else, perhaps the taste of life itself. I like to think on this as I rip (slowly) through another bowl.

Over time, doing this helps to connect to the process of smoking a pipe as well. It carries with it the weight of tradition, something I respect since anything that endures centuries independent of some political or economic need must have some relevance to objective reality within it. It forces me into the meditative breathing of the pipe smoker, keeping myself slow and steady, relaxing the mind both with nicotine and the breathing of a Zen monk hiding underwater from his pursuers. It brings to me the flavors of the field, of late summer, of sunlight and earth, and of the sweetness of nature, which does not whack you over the head like refined sugar, but floats up like a dream during deep sleep in a rainy night, just barely reminding you that it is there until you recognize it, and suddenly it is most of what you taste.

Sometimes I smoke dark Burley, sometimes white, and sometimes the dark fired Kentucky Burley (a re-sale of TS12 Dark Fire Cured) which forms the basis of many of my home blends. I have been known to smoke isolated Virginias and even straight Perique from time to time. When I tested out ingredients, I would smoke any varietal — Orientals, Maryland, Latakia, Connecticut — straight to get a feeling for its flavor before I began playing with the combinations it could have with other types of leaf.

All of these help bring me back to why I smoke a pipe. I like the relaxation, the mental intensity, and the ability to use my hands to fiddle around with a pipe, matches, tobacco, and Czech tool. I enjoy the process of lighting and breath-smoking, tamping and poking, and keeping the flame alit but at a slow smoldering pace. I enjoy the beauty of the wood, the smells of the tobacco and tar, and the feel of a warm pipe in my hand. I enjoy having an excuse to dart out-of-doors or for a short lunt, and the ability to generate thick clouds of smoke when tax collectors show up at the door, vanishing like a squid in his cloud of ink. But at the end of the (summer) day, the joy itself is indefinable and therefore infinite, and I simply appreciate it, thankful for this chance and the endless possibilities it provides.

Some habits of the pipe smoker become easily confusing because the terms used for them mean multiple things. Such is the case of tobacco cellaring, which calls to mind ancient dungeons piled high with barrels of Shire pipe-weed. People use the term instead to mean two things:

1. Samplers like to have 400 jars of special, exotic, rare, and unique tobaccos with custom-printed labels that they can then sample twice a month in their pipes with unique backstories and tassels and all sorts of other stuff that looks cool on Instagram
2. Bulkers like to have a few thousand jars of a few blends they really like so that as prices go up, the tobacco Karens close in, the laws get crazier, and the mail service gets worse, they will have plenty of the stuff they like.

In reality, most of us are somewhere in the middle. For example, I'm a bulker by nature, but have a few tins and jars tucked away of rarities and treats or some things that are too expensive or too time-consuming to order regularly. I break those out after weddings, funerals, and near-misses with candidates for the Sweet Meteor of Death that is going to carry us off if the UFOs fail to.

For the most part, however, I cellar as pipe smokers have since the dawn of time: when something is on sale or at a good price, I buy a lot of it, and then I stash it the same way I hoard okra or blackberries, namely in jars for long-term storage so that in the depths of winter, there is always something. I aim to have more than I need, because you never know when you are going to want to be able to trade or gift a few ounces of something tasty.

If you want to be a sampler, you know the drill: buy rare stuff, then transfer it to jars, and a few times a month, take down that Nording with the silver military mount and reverse flame grain that was once owned by Bruce Willis but you won in a game of Russian roulette played in the basement of the World Trade Center on September 10, 2001.

Being a bulker takes a little more work. Most of us mail-order in five-pound quantities three to five times a year, buying jars frenetically whenever they are on sale at our local Walmart, Kroger, Target, or Aldi, and we stash away as much as possible so that when we look out there and see the mushroom clouds, we can just pull shut the (titanium) windowshades, turn on the air filters, and dig out a jar of something tasty.

This overlaps with aging, which is the simple recognition that over time, most bulk blends start tasting a lot better. They are cheaper because they are mailed relatively new, that is only a few years from the field, and over time they off-gas some of the weird unpleasant stuff like ammonias, ferment slightly, lose some of that vegetal taste, and gain a delicious sweetness sort of like how pickled onions are good in the depth of winter but not before.

If I were cellaring today, I'd look at these cellar-friendly blends.

You will notice that most of these are Virginia or Virginia/Burley (“half and half”) blends. These age the best, with the Burleys losing some vegetal flavor and the Virginias trading off raw sweetness for depth. You may notice “plume” on the outside of these starting at a year, crystalline (not furry, fuzzy) white stuff that to my mind represents components leaving the leaf.

There are not any English blends above, not because I do not like them, but because over time the Latakia loses a slight amount of its spice and gets a little smokier. Personally, I prefer it this way, so I have Nightcap and My Mixture 965 in bulk, since for the price those are about all that one needs for the English genre, but I might throw in some Engine #99 and Mountain Camp for the American English subgenre.

Recently I got in an order from Tobacco Pipes with two 16oz bricks of HH Bold Kentucky and three 16oz bags of Superior Navy Flake. I went on down to Walmart and picked up two flats of wide mouth pint Mason jars, and the same from Kroger, simply to avoid depleting everything that they had at either location. Then I cleaned them, running the glass through the dishwasher and hand-washing the metal rims and lids.

At that point, it was time to divide up the tobacco. I washed my hands, and got out a Kroger parchment sheet and unfolded it on a clean desk. I moved all of the bags of tobacco and a clean pair of scissors over to the desk. Then I washed my hands again, opened up the bags, and transferred about two ounces of tobacco to each jar, then cranked them all tight and restored them in their little flat boxes with the cardboard dividers intact.

You will notice two things:

1. An obsessive cleanliness. This is not normally me (heh) but it helps to keep mold away. You do not want to drop any dust, dirt, dander, feces, nose pickings, food, or stagnant water into the jars. You want them dried with a clean, fresh towel after you wash them. This is your first line of defense against mold.
2. I completely failed to label these things. The fact is that I know my favorites by sight, and even more, do not much care which one I pull out, as long as it is something that I like and am looking forward to smoking. The cellar has serendipity built into it, and it bestows many gifts.

I've super-simplified the process here. I stash a few other things, like homemade mixes (40% Cotton Boll Twist, 40% Brown Twist Sliced, and 20% Long-Cut Perique plus a smattering of Virginia Flake makes for a very tasty homemade vaper) and any Prince Albert that I can get from the guys who look like they wandered off a Mad Max set. There are some things that come in tins that I like, such as Erinmore Flake and Scottish Cake, and those stay in their tins, sort of like that massive stash of Irish Flake I built up starting in the dying days of the 2010s. Those tins are good for at least a couple decades, probably twice that or more.

How much do you need? They sell over-the-counter (OTC) blends in fourteen ounce tubs for a reason; your average smoker can have a bowl before work, a bowl before lunch, a bowl after lunch, a bowl on the way home or before dinner, and a bowl before bed, which adds up to five bowls times two to three grams which is a half-ounce a day, allowing a little more for Saturday and a little less for Sunday (if you go to church and/or take an afternoon nap, both of which are good for you, only one of which I manage).

This means that you go through about ten pounds of tobacco a year, rounding down for those holidays or summer colds when you can't smoke. You need ten pounds a year for the rest of your time as a smoker, which is a number known only by the darkest reachest of the universe or ancient gods, but you can estimate approximately and plan accordingly. If you order fifteen pounds a year, somewhere between $500 and $750 worth of tobacco, you set aside a half-year in the future for every year that you smoke.

All of this really depends on your consumption. If you have to commute to work and live with people who freak out at the scent of fire, you might get through only a couple bowls a day, at which point three pounds will last you a year. Then you might as well just order the tins, since that will cost you only a few hundred dollars a year. But for those of us who smoke what we like and like what we smoke all the time, the number if higher.

The pipe tobacco industry designs itself around different types of smokers. If they could have it their way, we would each buy a couple $16 tins of specialty blends a week and a new pipe every month; there are people out there with 300 or 400 pipes in their harem. They know however that many of us are just “everyday smokers,” and we like value-priced blends that start tasting great after six months in the jar.

I hope this brief introduction demystifies cellaring. I use the little pint jars because they fit two ounces with plenty of air to help the tobacco age, and I can take one down and smoke through it in a week or so, then go back into the murky recesses of the cellar — really, a guest room closet that belongs on Hoarders or This Old House — and dig out something “new” that is not new at all, but enjoy it like a new discovery.

Market concentration means that a whole lot of similar products condense down to one, whether through competition killing off some or the usual mergers and acquisitions streamlining product offerings. In my view, the Burley wars have just begun, and the winner will be Newminster No. 702 Light Burley:

Summary: a gentle Burley blend full of natural flavor with a light honey, maple, or sugar casing or topping.

The blend comes in ready-rubbed form, which is to say big chunks of flake, and gives off that sweet smell of fermenting hay from an old barn. It lights easily, but you might want to dodge the “Mac Baren fireball” from a casing of honey, maple, or possibly sugar which gives this flavor a spin. At this point, you get into the guts of this white and dark Burley mix, which favors the sweeter almonds, oats, barley, and molasses tastes inherent to Burley, given just a nudge by the sweet casing or topping. In my experience, if breath-smoked this blend tends to stay lit and smoke down effortlessly to the end of the boll. A skosh short of medium strength, full of flavor and not unpleasant to the bystander, this blend takes my vote for future of Burley in the pipe.

Most of us will compare this instantly to Sir Walter Raleigh, and the Newminster blend dopes out favorably with less topping, more Burley flavor, and an even easier cut to smoke. This one is a super no-brainer: you push a wad of it in the pipe and light it. It is just damp enough to compress, and pounded flat enough by the Mac Baren tendency to steam press and then clamp tobacco for a month, so you do not even need a charring light.

It just starts up and goes right into the flavor. I taste the casing or topping of honey, maple, and maybe straight sugar, but it gives a “spin” to the natural Burley flavors mixed in this blend, rather than dominating them. There is enough nicotine here that you can appreciate the fact that you are smoking, but not enough to build up over the course of a day and make you sick.

In my view, Newminster has tamed the wild Burley. They pound it flat, keep it under pressure, then rub it out slightly into this blend that tastes like an oatmeal cookie with almonds, molasses, and honey. With Prince Albert having gone AWOL, C&D's Cube Cut Burley rarer than a four-tongued possum, and even Sir Walter Raleigh being sparse on shelves, this blend will be a champion of the coming battle for the Burley OTC which pipe smokers will know from here forward.

Years ago, when as kids we realized that this civilization was heading into the toilet and its rules were arbitrary, I may have become familiar with breaking rules, including indulging in some substances that were designed to expand the mind by altering the framework of reality.

Eventually I followed the wisdom of Alan Watts:

If you get the message, hang up the phone. Psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.

However, back then I was still peering into that microscope, and common wisdom held that “set” and “setting” were important for having a good experience. Set means mindset, as far as I can tell, and setting means what it does in scriptwriting class, namely the location and your level of comfort with it in the past.

You have to program your mind to have a good experience with anything. If you are going to run a foot-race, you have to tell your brain: yes, I want to run faster and harder than I ever have before, but without hurting myself or others. If you are going to drop an assload of acid or smoke high-THC weed all night, you have to train your brain to look for the positive in existence so that it can be open to possibility, even if that is not all happy stuff inside. The positivity is there to avoid the inherent negative bias of the human brain, which always looks for threats, not opportunities.

Psychedelics made me a realist, which means that I am always in conflict with what “most people” desire to believe, but I've never been a utilitarian. Reality is what it is, and those who see the most of it win, in all cases. If you are going imbibe a bunch of LSD-25, you need to have a firm grasp on reality, and a positive orientation so that you do not fall into the abyss of paranoia, negativity, self-criticism, neurosis, and all that jazz.

In the same way, I treasure my time spent cleaning, filling, and lighting a pipe. These are the steps of orienting myself toward the positive: I clean it, taking time to remove all dust and ash, so that only the wood and cake are visible. I have almost always cleaned it already after the last smoke, but now it has dried, and I want to get any of that stuff out of the way. I rub a thumb or forefinger around the bowl to take out any leftover bits, and sometimes blow out the pipe then run a pipe-cleaner through it to get anything that has loosened.

Next, I fill up the pipe in a ritual process. That is, I am following memorized steps by testing for certain conditions. It is not the same as just going through the motions, but paying attention to the motions and what is necessary for each to happen. It is more like dance than recitation, in that sense.

Most of the time these days I smoke flake, but I still load up a fair number of ribbon-cut bowls. To do this, I put in a pinch, smooth it out, and then put in another and do the same. Every few pinches I stick my thumb over the top of the bowl and give it a vigorous shake from side to side, letting every bit settle into place. The final pinch produces a conical heap on top of the bowl, and I press that down, which slightly compresses everything but leaves airflow intact.

Then there is the process of fire. For me there are two stages, the loop and the hold. First I whip the lighter around in little circles, getting the periphery at least very warm if not lit, and then I hold it for a second or two at the center, letting fire radiate out from there. Breathing technique here makes a big difference, since I am trying to draw steadily without drawing hard, which starts the fire off as a blaze, when I want it to be kindling that briefly flares and then drops into a smolder.

At this point, I begin my breath-smoking, which at this point happens whenever I stick something pipe-like in my mouth (I have had to stop using forks to eat as a result; I try to smoke them). This is mostly mindset, letting the brain relax and focus on regular rhythms. It, too, is part of the ritual.

When you get in the right frame of mind, and you determine that you are going to enjoy a pipe, you are able to partake of what I see as the dual wisdoms of pipe smoking, the first being that this is a meditative breathing practice more than consumption, and the second being my favorite homily, “Smoke what you like, and like what you smoke.” It's the latter part that I focus on, maximizing enjoyment so that no matter what I have, in whatever pipe, I get the most out of it and go about my day in a fog of contentment (and covered in ash, but that's another story).

I was on a forum where users were discussing the relative merits of AR-15 and AK-47 styled assault rifles (an assault rifle is a semi-automatic weapon that fires short cartridges, usually in machine gun mode). The group neatly separated into two sides who proceeded to insult each other's sexuality, genital size, intelligence, and parentage.

This struck me immediately: I have seen this pattern before! GOP versus DNC, Christians versus Muslims, New York versus Los Angeles... no, it was none of those. It was closest to the Mac-versus-PC wars that were settled a few years back when it was revealed that people buying Macs just viewed them as Guccis with lights, and people buying PCs were basically video gamers who like fiddling with lots of settings. But even that seemed “off.”

Finally I realized that I was seeing the same effect that happens when you put even a single ribbon cut shred of Latakia into a room. Half of the people immediately hate it like their mothers-in-law winning large legal cases, and the other half start breathing deeply and salivating at this herbal smoked tobacco. Fortunately for you, because otherwise this post would be (even more) boring, I am in the latter category.

I remember being a kid and walking into the tobacconist in Disneyland (we went to the cool California one, instead of Disneyworld, which is in Florida, although I could never keep the names straight) where the smell of Latakia, rosewater, maple, rum, whisky, cherry, geranium, and vanilla soaked my sinuses. It was glorious, a glimpse of the forbidden world of not just adults, but where adults play. I was already somewhat dismayed that so few adults seemed to have treehouses, but seeing them enjoying their cocktails, cigars, pipes, and key parties (whoops, not that last part) gave me some hope.

Latakia provided perhaps the most exotic flavor. First, because it was smoked, at a time and place where relatively few foods were, and second, because Latakia is smoked with a mixture of piney woods and spices which are by legend burned over camel dung. In reality, smoked items tend to take on a somewhat composty stench over time, simply because like fire, sterculum consists of the broken-down chaos of what was once alive. That's a nice way of explaining why my mother fanned her face and said “let's get out of here” once she smelled the stench of a dozen open tins of Dunhill blends.

Fast forward a few decades and I went down the path of pipe smoking, being unsatisfied with cigarettes, wary of vaporizers, and too peripatetic for a cigar (since then, my clamp-clench technique has improved dramatically, to the point where a cigar is one of my main friends for certain types of yard work). At this point, I rambled on down to the local tobacco shack and quickly found a tin of Dunhill Standard Mixture, at which point it was off to the races with me and Latakia.

English blends — you will find most Latakia blends are these — consist of Virginias, Orientals, and Latakia at a minimum; lately it has become an industry trope to leave off the Orientals, probably to save a few cents a tin. If the percentage of Orientals is high, the blend may be called a Balkan, and these are quite good too, like Peter Stokkebye English Oriental Supreme:

Summary: a new take on the ancient discipline of the English blend.

People are divided over Burley in Englishes and especially Balkans, the variety of Englishes with a higher proportion of Oriental leaf. In “English Oriental,” the Burley broadens the flavor and gives it a bit more fullness, raising the contrast between the other ingredients. While the Virginias form the basis of this flavor, a light and sweet cheerful taste, the fusion of Cavendish with Orientals translates the flavor of Latakia from dominance of the blend into a background influence, so that a smoky molasses flavor emerges and takes the edge off the Virginia sweetness, ending up with an overall taste to the blend that is a lot like hazelnut. The Burley winks from behind with its nutty, grainy warmth, and this allows the Orientals to dominate without dominating as their isolated flavor. Light in nicotine, and with a gentle but powerful flavor, this blend makes an easy introduction to Englishes and a comforting, all-day smoke, but it must be smoked slowly to avoid some sizzle from the Virginias.

Today I am smoking a fat bowl of this one, although to be fair, I usually tuck in a little bit of Gawith Hoggarth Black Twist Sliced, since that gives this relatively mild blend a richer flavor and a higher dose of delicious nicotine.

Lore tells us that Latakia blends are perfect for winter, while Virginias are good for summer. In my world, you smoke whatever the hell you want whenever the hell you want because they all taste quite good. The advice comes I think from what was mentioned earlier in this little screed, namely that in the presence of moisture, the dung-like aroma of Latakia emerges. Then again, once you have plumbed the depths of Perique and smoked fermented Virginia flake, a like composty stench of death and decay really does not seem like a big deal.

I can see starting with this mellow blend, basically a sweet English right on the edge of being a Balkan, because the excesses of the Latakia are tamed without crushing its flavor, and the sweetness of the Virginias pops with the ginger-mint-clove-rosemary flavor of the Latakia. Whenever you smoke it, look for the subtleties. They do not require fancy terms to describe, but insist on some concentration to really enjoy them. Smoke what you like, and like what you smoke (I know I do).

Much of life may be homebrew. When I got into things, whether high school sports or learning to code, the emphasis was on being adaptable. You took whatever you had on hand, made it work, and could do so because gear and requirements were less specialized.

The world has changed, as usual both not for the better and with some great potential unrealized, because now specificity rules the game. Your software, athletic gear, cooking ingredients, business attire, and so on are no longer approximations, but exact products or very specialized product-types that you need.

This creates some anxiety for the new pipe smoker. “Do I have all the right gear?” he or she asks, looking a bit sheepish and manic. These poor folks do not have a grandfather who can step out of a time warp, clamp a soft but heavily firm hand on a shoulder, and say, “Get a cob and some Prince Albert, then enjoy yourself!”

When I started out pipe smoking, we got advice for new pipe smokers straight from industry: buy the most expensive briar you can and a bunch of aromatics, since 90% of what we sell fits in this category. I have since come to distrust not only that advice, but that statistic. I think there are a lot of people out there smoking natural blends, but probably not boutique blends.

That advice has now changed slightly to people recommending Carter Hall and Prince Albert, which happened just before those sold out and became status symbols. “You have a Jaguar? Well, that's very nice, Mr. Jones, but I have four tubs of Prince Albert!” Unfortunately this has not diminished new smoker anxiety.

As some guy who has learned about everything he knows by doing everything all wrong and then figuring out why it was all wrong, your author can offer only one piece of advice: chill the heck out; you're burning dried leaves in a wooden tube, which means that ninety percent of what is ahead of you is mental. That means technique, and mind-discipline, so that you can both taste what you are smoking and find a way to enjoy it.

After all, life rarely offers “perfect circumstances.” People who dream of the perfect wedding day, the perfect night out, or the best smoke ever as if they can will these things into being just by wanting them are missing the point. Life is serendipitous: you stumble along, find some things of beauty, and hang on to them not so you can become an assembly-line factory reproducing those immaculate moments, but so you can appreciate the path and the journey. Perfection on Earth involves imperfection that you maximize.

This means that your pipe smoking journey will not start with the perfect pipe, perfect tobaccos, perfect matches, perfect $0.95 tamper pipe tool thingy, and perfect pipe cleaners. In fact, only an enemy would wish that upon you, since it would make you weak if you encountered anything else. Your task is to embrace the imperfection and find a way to enjoy the process, which includes learning but also simple enjoyment.

Today I am smoking a good tobacco made into an imperfect mixture by the addition of other blending components. The base tobacco is Peter Stokkebye Virginia (No. 701):

Summary: a good straight Virginia that needs age to reveal its depth but mixes well and is a fine smoke on its own.

It smells bready with a hint of vinegar in the bag, but when lit this Virginia reveals its vegetative flavor with an intense neutral sweetness behind it, like Agave. Burley broadens this into a good lightly-toasted white bread flavor, but this Virginia smokes well straight. It has the faintly rubbery flavor that a good oily Virginia gives; Burleys, which are lower in sugar and oil, burn faster, which is why they often smell like cigarettes. For those of us who love straight Virginia, the faintly acidic tang on this smoke could be an impediment, so it behooves us to cellar this for a couple years to let it mellow. As it stands, this blend offers a great smoke for a low price, and when mixed with just a bit of Burley and dark fired or Perique, will make a fantastic aged blend.

I like this blend. If you want a tasty Virginia for a light smoke, it scratches that itch and just improves with age. My gut instinct is that if you ordered five pounds of this blend and jarred it for two years, you would have a Virginia on par with the best stuff you find in tins. Out there in the wilderness of the randomness of humanity, quite a few pipe smokers buy a lot of this. Some mix it with the Turkish Export (No. 84) and the Pressed Burley (No. 702), which as you can tell from the proximate numbering, might be intended as a good friend to this one.

For a basic smoke, the American “half and half” works great, which means a half-Burley and half-Virginia mixture, sometimes called a “Burley and bright” overseas. It is a generic term which refers to a range of mixtures, but for me today, the mixture involves the Stokkebye Virginia mixed 50/50 with a blend of Burleys, mostly white Burley with a fair amount of dark Burley and a touch of dark fired Kentucky Burley.

This will not produce the perfect scenario envisioned by pipe tobacco catalogs, YouTube videos, and influencer reviews on TobaccoReviews. You will not experience a tin note of caviar and Mauna Loa nuts, taste the mixed notes of salted filet mignon and Rhodesian blue cheese, nor experience a room note like the ambience of a Grand Canyon vista viewed from a Harley-Davidson doing 88 mph in a school zone, but you will get to experience basic tobacco flavor and have your technique tested.

One of the best smokes of my life occurred burning through this blend earlier today (technically yesterday, but who's keeping track of normie hours). It offers simply basic tobacco flavor, which rewards the smoker who can enjoy that and adjust his smoking cadence to fit mostly dry leaf smoldering quietly in a no-name basket pipe. If you get slow enough to avoid charring the heap of leaf into cigarette ash, there is quite a bit of flavor to be found here, and without all of the false nuance and over-done flavor bomb to which both boutique blends and over-the-counter aromatics seem unfortunately prone. It's tobacco in a pipe, enjoyed by smoking it well, and then seeing what is to find there.

These are the moments we love because they are unintended collisions with eternity. If you are like myself a bleak nihilist prone to see life as the oddball accident caused by a bunch of atoms knocking together, finding that nature has made something good opens up new pathways. This basic tobacco blend which can teach us how to be good at being alive and take each day as it comes like a slice of adventure, hints at something out there in the mystery more than our world of commodity prices, popular trends, strategic assessments, and utterly boring paperwork. We look past a tendril of smoke into an infinite starfield and see possibility.

Long and short of it is, don't fret much if you don't have perfect gear or blends. Get something and learn to enjoy it. Then move on to something else. This is the second part of the mantra I like to repeat in these little writings, “smoke what you like, and like what you smoke.” You won't always have a perfect setting, so find a way to enjoy the basics. Unless you get something truly terrible like a trout-mango-cadmium Cavendish, you'll be fine. Relax, don't overthink, have fun, take it slow, and most of all, appreciate what's there hidden in plain sight.

When I ran my first BBS, I came to know the concept of gestalt, or the parts adding up to more than the whole, like a spirit. A bulletin board was not a computer, a phone line, the software, or even the person maintaining and paying for it; those formed a meeting place, and the bulletin board was the community and the micro-culture which developed.

Similarly pipe smoking consists of a meeting place crafted from an industry, fields across the globe, experts on every continent, a few conferences, many B&Ms, online forums, and the people who smoke pipes. Our industry is currently trying to decide whether that community is dying, at which point it should squeeze more bucks from the remaining suckers on the hook, or has some chance of survival, at which point it should focus on opening the world of pipes to smokers coming from other forms of enjoying tobacco.

Like Sun Bear, Three Sails, nü-Warhorse, and Plum Pudding, many of the blends coming out of Pipe Tobacco, Inc., lately have been cash-ins. They are designed to take advantage of the hype of YouTube channels, internet forums, and social media, and get a small group of pipe smokers to rush off and mash that BUY NOW button as many times as possible. Do they live up to the hype? Let's look at the latest, Eight State Burley.

Cornell and Diehl describes Eight State Burley as a rare Burley collection perfect for boutique tobacco collectors and novelty seekers.

Cornell & Diehl's tribute to historic US Burley growing regions, Small Batch: Eight State Burley is an elegant and elevated take on the traditional American Burley tobacco family. Starting with a specially sourced blend of air-cured leaf from 2015, this unique mixture is enhanced by choice Red and Bright Virginia leaf (the same Reds used in Carolina Red Flake), as well as a blend of Samsun, Sokhoum, and Katerini Orientals from 2005. Pressed, sliced, and tumbled into an old-fashioned ready-rubbed mixture, Eight State Burley is extremely well-balanced, offering a rich earthiness and sweetness marked by elements of spice, tartness, and even a bit of cream. Building from a place of nostalgia, it offers a familiar, comforting flavor — one that builds and expands to challenge preconceptions and set the new standard for Burley blends across the board.

Of course, the influencers rushed in on that one, doing what they usually do which is to list a lot of nonsense they claim to taste in it simply because this fascinates the audience, who will sit around sucking on their Savinellis trying to find that elusive flavor of horsehair with cardamom espresso and civet cocoa on it. Here is a short list of the terms employed by influencers to describe this blend:

nutmeg, toasted nuts, earth, rum and maple sugar, wood, clove, brown sugar, nuts, mild creamy cocoa, cherry, sugar and molasses, wood, herbs, chili powder, floralness, spice, zesty tart sweetness, leather, vegetation, citrus, grass, bread, light floralness, mud, tart lemon, tangy dark fruit

For a high school creative writing project, this would be pretty good, except that it consists of distractions, not focus. We know what Burley tastes like as well as the other components, and we can guess at the topping, but anything else is pure marketing. Let us focus instead on what we can find in the blend.

To my mind, the tragedy of this blend is the topping, which needed a gentle hand and instead got a Gallagher-style sledgehammer. Looking past that, one tastes white Burley, with a little bittersweet sourness from the Orientals and a wine-like fruitiness from the red Virginias. Together, this tastes like a Burley blend with garnish over which someone poured a bottle of Karo syrup and some associated flavorings from those little bottles they use at the coffee shop, maybe the ones marked “Vanilla,” “Cherry,” and “Chocolate.”

What is the result? It's a mess, but not a terrible one, as my review of Cornell and Diehl Eight State Burley states:

Summary: a boutique OTC that would be good if sold at normal prices with less sauce

Tobacco reviews like to baffle you with a flood of flavors, but the reality is far simpler and involves the interaction between flavors, not a laundry list. This blend attempts to hybridize “Sir Walter Raleigh” and “Prince Albert” into what we might call a boutique OTC, or a fancy-pants take on traditional drugstore tobacco. You mostly taste the Burleys, which emit a rich chocolatey odor from the tin, with a bit of sweetness without acidity from the red Virginias, aided with a bit of sourness from the mixture of Orientals. That follows the basic formula of the original “Prince Albert,” but with more of the white Burley heavy mixture that “Sir Walter Raleigh” uses. Mostly I taste marshmallows, which means that too much corn syrup was used in the sauce. The vanilla flavors burn off quickly, leaving behind the taste of white Burley with hints from the Virginias and Orientals. This would be a good blend if they used half the sauce and sold it as a regular mixture; whatever pedigree the Burleys have is lost in the sauce and clash of flavors of the condimentals, so they might as well use regular Burleys too. But at that point, you have a regular OTC, and can't charge boutique prices.

Thanks to /r/PipeTobacco member “GulliblePause8606” for this generous sample.

Dial back the toppings, use regular blending Burleys, and this could be an entirely decent OTC. Like Plum Pudding, it is not worth the boutique prices, and like Sun Bear, it aims too much at being cute, niche, unique, different, and so on, and not enough on the end smoker experience.

The fact is, in my view, it would be very hard to screw up a white Burley based blend. Nature did all the hard work for us, and if you dust it with a little Virginia and some Orientals (possibly just a little less than used here), you end up with a flavorful mix. At that point, it comes down to figuring out that anise, whisky, wine, vanilla, and cocoa flavoring that the Prince Albert guys use, but I'm sure that C&D is up to it.

I hope they fix this blend, and make it a regular blend, at a regular price, to join the other 4,096 blends that Cornell and Diehl produces. Without the hype and the consequent need to justify it, this would be a solid winner to compete with the former unobtanium of Prince Albert and other perpetual favorite Sir Walter Raleigh.

Apparently this is new:

The First Amendment to the Drucquer catalog in 40 years, this blend celebrates the collective right to free expression with an enduring formula of red and bright Virginia tobaccos and fine air-cured leaf, seasoned with Cypriot Latakia and Louisiana Perique, then pressed and aged in cakes and sliced. First Amendment is rich and satisfying, with notes of dark chocolate, malty Assam tea, black walnut, hints of a deep, earthy sweetness, and a complexity whose nuances are as endless as those of our time-tested and essential freedoms.

I remain skeptical of these boutique blends, since the blurb here says basically that this is a mix of blending red and bright Virginias, Latakia, and a smidge of Perique pressed into cakes. Like the G.L. Pease releases, these Drucquer & Sons need a bit of age for these raw blending components to marry and mellow. Cool name however. I've always been a free expression junkie, simply because suppressing information validates it and ties the hands of those who need to explore it.

You all know the big sites — TobaccoPipes, SmokingPipes, and PipesAndCigars — but very few optimize their strategies for buying from these companies.

First, you always want to hit the minimum for free shipping. They make some money off of the shipping, since they are re-selling a service they buy in bulk.

These companies follow the time-honored mail order pattern (I ran a mail order business, back in the day) of doubling the cost of an item and making that the sale price, but will kick it up more if they can.

Remember the Iron Rule: everyone in an economy, and even socialist states have economies, will try to take as much as he can for the lowest possible cost. If you will pay more for something, they will charge more, and still sleep soundly at night.

This means that they can take a discount on the price and still make money, if the amount purchased is right. Economies of scale tell us that the more of something that is sold, the lower the cost, and for mail order companies, it is better to sell off inventory now rather than keep it for later, unless it can be sold for more later (Esoterica, for example). They get taxed on their inventories quarterly.

Pay attention to those quarters. At the end of each, you start to see sales, generally in March, July, and October. Their last quarter includes the great Christmas rush. Why are the Father's Day sales so bad? Like Christmas, Father's Day has traditionally been a time when people who have no idea what they are doing buy lots of gifts and pay full price. No point having a good sale; those are there to lure you in, so you buy something they wanted to dump anyway, and then why the heck not add a pound of Golden Extra?

The audience that they want buys $300 pipes and $16 tins, a few at a time, and avoids sales because they need the stuff right now. In my view, this is a mistake, because the much wider audience wants $40 pipes and $2.50/ounce bulk tobacco or $9 tins of specialty tobacco. You have to either build your audience or squeeze more bucks out of your declining audience, and most of these have chosen the latter.

Every now and then they throw out a sale with a loss leader that they got in bulk for cheap. They want people to come in, buy a few tins, then pay the taxes and shipping costs. The company hangs on to that tax money for up to a year, earning interest on it during the time. Is that profit? Yes, it is. Same with up to half the price of shipping.

You don't hurt them by shopping the sales. If you hold out and buy at a 20% discount with free shipping, they still get 30% profit over cost (their overhead is factored into cost, if their accountants are as savvy as I suspect). Since you buy more, they move more inventory, and can then restock with whatever the market is responding to right now.

The big companies make a lot of money by offering you a lower price if you buy a pound, but no discount for five pounds, unlike the wholesalers who really want you to buy those five pound bags a few times a year. Businesses thrive on trends, for sure, but they live on their regular customers, and if they can count on you for four orders a year, you are part of one of the pillars of their survival.

These days, I do most of my buying from TobaccoPipes and a bunch of sites not listed above that give discounts or charge lower per-ounce prices for five-pound bags. I'm building a cellar, which means stockpiling the stuff that I like to smoke as cheaply as possible, since I'm also paying for storage (jars, mortgage, air conditioning) in addition to the tobacco itself.

I hope this helps clarify the process and makes it more fun to order online. Smoke what you like, like what you smoke, and smoke whenever you can.