Pipe Tobacco Smoking Guide (PTSG)

Our modern era mystifies pipe smoking because it is associated with a far-off time, but as recently as the 1980s, many men and some women smoked pipes. When offices no longer allowed smoking, those who enjoyed Nicotiana Tabacum were forced to huddle in small groups around disgusting ashtrays for fifteen-minute breaks, during which time most of the big decisions in the office got made.

Forty years is a blink to history. Those of us who maintain, rather foolishly in a world of skyscrapers and modern monetary theory, that life exists so that we can explore, learn, choose, and most of all, enjoy being incarnate, argue that the pleasures of life like tobacco, wine, intimate relations, and music serve the role of letting us discover the purpose of life through its heights, not its materialistic, repetitive lows. Unlike the clever people nowadays who say that these things are “bad,” we say that in the right form, they are good, just like a medicine is safe at one dose, effective at another, and fatal at a third.

That being said, pipe-smoking takes a different form than the cigarettes and vape that most people have experienced. Unlike those fast jolts of nicotine, you get a slow steady pulse of nature's best alkaloid with a pipe (or a cigar, although less so because people tend to “puff,” or violently suck upon, those). You have to take your time. Ritual and contemplation is part of it, since pipe smoking is a meditative practice based on timing your breathing and unfocusing your mind.

Early Smoking

The best way to do anything is to dive right in. Acquire:

  1. A cob pipe
  2. A pipe nail
  3. Matches or a Bic lighter
  4. Pipe cleaners
  5. Prince Albert or Carter Hall

This set of gear forms your basic equipment. Now, let us get started. Open open your package of tobacco, insert the bowl of the pipe, and scoop tobacco into the pipe until it is heaping full. Then, extract pipe from package of tobacco, press down on the heap with the same form you use to press buttons on those membrane keyboards on microwave ovens, stick the stem of the pipe in your mouth, and light the tobacco in a circular motion while drawing in slowly.

It will take a few tries. While you are doing that, let me let you in on a secret: absolutely no one knows how to smoke a pipe. They assume it means that you suck on the thing like a cigarette, or “puff” (quick sucks) like on a cigar, or that you slurp like you would on a straw. All of these are wrong. What you are going to do involves capillary action:

Clear as mud? I'm going to let Ian Kerslake explain the traditional breath smoking method of pipe-smoking to you. This is how since the dawn of time people have learned to smoke pipes while keeping them lit without burning the tobacco at too high a temperature, which kills taste and worst of all, reduces the constant flow of nicotine.

You probably remember for-next, while, and until loops from your basic programming class. You are now in a loop for awhile, probably about a year. While you are still perfecting your technique, keep perfecting it using your tools. Acquire more of your gear when you need it. Worry not if you roast a cob or end up dumping some tobacco. Worry even less about how many times you must re-light. The point is to learn the meditative breathing of pipe tobacco.

Here was my learning curve:

  1. Starting out. Get a corn cob pipe and some light OTCs like Prince Albert, Carter Hall, or Sir Walter Raleigh. Do not get aromatics; they are actually difficult to smoke well. Spend a year focusing on how to breath smoke, pack the bowl, emberchase/tamp (using the tamper to direct oxygen to the sides of the bowl), clean the pipe, and avoid setting yourself on fire. Then order a bunch of 1oz samples of major tobacco blend types like Burley, Va/Per, English, and so on. Whatever you find yourself reaching for time and again should be explored further.
  2. Tamping. Most of the time, you want a gravity tamp, which means lightly dropping the tamper from a centimeter off of the ember. You also want to chase that ember, which means holding the tamper over the coal so that the air going into the pipe distributes to the sides, causing a nice even burn.
  3. Pacing. People call it “puffing” and “smoking,” but really what you are doing is breathing normally through a pipe but keeping the smoke in your mouth. Once you learn the rhythm of inhaling/exhaling every seven seconds or so, you can keep even a moderate bowl going for over an hour.
  4. Packing. With ribbon cut, you want to take a nice thick wad that is wider than the mouth of the bowl and cram it in so that the last third or quarter of the bowl is empty, then loosely stuff tobacco on top of that. You do not need to press down much; you are aiming to evenly distribute the leaf in the top two-thirds or three-quarters of the bowl — it varies between pipes — instead of compressing it fully. With flake, you want to fold it lengthwise, then twist so that a few openings appear in the flake, then stick into the pipe so that there is horizontal room for it to expand when it burns. Most “bad bowls” originate in packing too tightly. You can also screw up by packing too lightly, but the only consequence there is a fast bowl that requires dozens of relights, and that is a better experience than a congested bowl. You should not have to suck, draw, etc. with any kind of force; air should flow naturally through the pipe as you breathe.
  5. Lighting. I am less of a technicalist here; I torch the bowl with a lighter or match, gravity tamp it to compress the top layer of ash, and then torch it again. The point is to make a thin top layer of tobacco burn evenly so that the fire descends slowly as the bowl diminishes, since what you are doing is using the insulating property of the pipe and the top layer of ash to create a constantly smoldering but not blazing heap of tobacco. Much of the flavor comes from cooking the tobacco right below the layer of fire.
  6. Cleaning. After every smoke, run a pipe cleaner both ways up the tenon. Then fold it in half and vigorously sweep out the bowl. If it makes you feel better, use a paper towel to clean out the remaining ash dust. I let pipes sit a day or so between smokes, but on the road, I use the same pipe for a few bowls at a time. After about four it needs some time to dry out unless you want to puff a swamp bowl. Every few months, pour some cheap whisky through the pipe. I never use any alcohol inside the pipe that I could not consume.
  7. Jarring. If you have a packet or tin and are going to consume it within the week, just use that, resealing each time. If you plan on taking longer, get yourself a Mason jar and seal the contents in there. When I buy bulk, I use lots of half-pint jars to store the tobacco, labeled carefully. That way, you can take one off the shelf in the coming years and smoke it as you would a tin. For rare tobaccos, it makes sense to keep some in jars so you can have a bowl or two on a special occasion. You can use bail-top jars if they are designed for food; make sure you flip the insulating liner away from the clamp mechanism so that the jar has an even seal. If you have a question about a jar, fill it with water, seal it, and turn it upside down for an hour. If any water leaks, throw it out.
  8. Cellaring. In my view, G.L. Pease is correct and most tobacco blends benefit from a year or two of storage in a cool, dark place. Some peak after only six months. While people talk up aged tobacco, much of this has to do with the original quality of the blend, and the tendency to lose toppings and some of the smokiness of dark-fired and Latakia leaf. Most blends do quite well after a year, and beyond that point, the utility of cellaring declines.
  9. Mold. Mold is fuzzy stuff; plume is crystalline. If it molds, throw out everything in the container. If it plumes, expect a slightly sweeter smoke. In my view, much of what makes plume valued is that other chemicals have left the leaf, making it gentler and warmer in flavor.
  10. Cake. You want to keep cake about the thickness of a dime in your bowl. This will happen naturally, and you will have to use a reamer, sandpaper, or (for the lazy) your Czech pipe tool or pipe nail to scrape out the extra, something best done when the pipe is just smoked so it is warm and damp and the cake is soft and malleable. Too much cake will cause your pipe to crack; too little cake reduces the insulating properties of the pipe. I use Virginia blends to build cake, but anything with sugar will do.

One final note: “smoke what you like, and like what you smoke” is not merely lore. People vary in pH and susceptibility to certain leaf; for example, some people get hit hard in the gut by smoking Burley. Find out what works for you, order a lot of it on sale (usually the end of summer), and have a good time. Pipe smoking is a combination of hobby, habit, lifestyle, and mental stimulus. Only you know what works for you, but you have to pay attention to what you do, not what you think you should do. I found a few of my favorite blends simply by noticing that the tins got empty fast, but would not have said those were favorites until I observed myself liking them. Good luck and have fun.

Also relevant:

Summary:

Get a cob and some Prince Albert or Carter Hall. Take your time to learn how to smoke. Then when you do encounter one of those delicious-smelling tobaccos, you will know how to actually enjoy it instead of screaming at the pipe in frustration. It will take you about a year to learn to smoke, and after that, your technique will refine to the point where you can be like one of those weird old guys who smokes for two hours on a bowl and reduces it to fine white ash.

Do not worry about relights. Just get the rhythm down.

Most problems come from smoking too fast or packing too tight, and these are related.

My advice for packing is to fill the pipe, not cram it, and do it in layers, taking time with each to spread the tobacco bits out toward the edges of the bowl. You want little bits of tobacco touching each other, but not compressed into a tight wad. This way, flame travels naturally in thin layers from the top to the bottom, releasing delicious smoke each time. Once you have the pipe full, you press down just a little bit to compress the mass by about a quarter inch.

If you want an easy way to pack, dump a bunch of tobacco into the bowl, then put your finger over the top and shake the bowl vigorously from side to side. Tobacco tends to sort itself into the right Tetris-style order this way, with all of the space taken up but enough gaps for air to pass easily through the bowl. If you wondered why some of your best smokes occurred after you took a short walk with the unlighted pipe in your mouth, this is probably why. Your walking rhythm hammered that tobacco into place.

If you get the spins from nicotine, stop and take a drink of water, maybe have something with a little sugar in it. Wait awhile before resuming. Nicotine is cumulative within a certain time window, so if you get the spins or feel sick, you do not want to pile any more nicotine on top of the load you already have.

I use a Bic lighter or kitchen matches to light. There are probably better ways. Someday I will find them. I am not too worried.

And for the love of all ancient gods or at least graven idols, enjoy yourself. This is meant to be a relaxing break from the neurotic world. Cram some tobacco in a pipe, light it, and go for a lunt (a walk while smoking) out in the hills or hinterlands. Focus on something else for awhile. Let your mind drift. It's amazing how of the work of alive you get done, while not trying to.

Intermediate Pipe-Smoking

Once you have mastered basic technique — the time required can vary, and hopefully my description sped it up for you — it is time to explore tobaccos and briars. You will want to find a local pipe shop, formally called a “tobacconist” or in the vernacular a “brick and mortar” or “B&M,” or use online ordering.

When looking for a pipe, you want to (if possible) do a draw test. The simplest way is to whip out a pipe cleaner and run it through the stem. If you find any obstacles or have to use more force than you would for a key in a lock, pass on that pipe. When you find one that fits in your hand, meaning that it is consistent with your proportions, and with good draw, pick that one up. I will buy pipes online from manufacturers with high quality control like Savinelli through some sites, but I prefer the ones that “vet” their pipes, like SmokingPipes and TobaccoPipes.

You will have to go through a little work to buy tobacco. First of all, there are many types; second, most places selling “pipe tobacco” are in fact selling cigarette rolling tobacco labeled as pipe tobacco in order to dodge exhorbitant and insane taxes. You kind of want to give that stuff a miss, although Ohm Natural works in a pinch. It helps to read up a bit on the varieties of tobacco that are out there, but the following brief guide may help:

These come in different grades, usually colors like “bright,” “white,” “brown,” or “red” which determine how long they have been cured, prepared, fermented, or aged. Generally, the lighter it is the less time it took to prepare, therefore it is cheaper; the smoked tobacco cures the fastest and has the heftiest amount of nicotine. Blends are made of mixtures of these tobaccos which are then pressed, steamed, fermented, flavored, or otherwise manipulated by talented chefs known as “blenders.”

Blends also come in different types:

An important note: all blends are “cased,” or soaked in some kind of mixture, usually honey, vinegar, and possibly anise, in order to keep the leaf pliable. Some have “top flavorings,” or food-grade extracts, sugars, and alcohols poured over them to give them additional flavoring. Aromatics are difficult for a beginner because sugar burns hot, and so you frequently get a very warm pipe and hotter burning, which ironically reduces flavor. You want to smoke at the lowest temperature and speed possible.

Blends come in different cuts:

Each one burns differently. Flake for example is for me the easiest to smoke and the hardest to light; cube cut (like one of my favorite blends) is easier to smoke, but shag is easiest of all. You may want to try this sampler:

Each of these comes in bulk form, so you can order a one-ounce sample and play around with it. You might do the same with the types of leaf (Latakia, Virginia, etc.) in order to condition your taste buds. This process takes time, since you are building brain receptors for these different flavors, but will enable you to pick out the different nuances and essences of any blend. Please ignore all “internet reviews” which use excessive comparisons to foods and smells, e.g. “this blend lit up with an aura of lemon, creosote, broccoli, and 1973 Pinto left front tire at a police impound lot.” These are just an exercise in throwing adjectives at a problem and are exclusively the domain of bad, non-informative writers. They help those writers get famous, but do not help you, and are generally followed by people who experience none of those tastes but keep trying for six months, then throw their pipes and tins in the trash. This harms the industry and the smoker, but helps those who make a living through minor celebrity.

Advanced Pipe Technique

Now we should talk about what it takes to be an expert, at least according to my experience. This is going to take you from the world of buying stuff and learning the basics, to the more complex task of perfecting your breathing rhythm and techniques like packing, tamping, ember chasing, and lighting.

Imagine it is a sunny spring Saturday. Everyone else is busy elsewhere, and you have some free time, so you walk on down to the creek. Before going, you load up a pipe with Prince Albert or Carter Hall, then grab your lighter and tamper and head out the door. About two hundred yards on your journey, when you are halfway to the creek, you stop to light the pipe, then keep walking, smoking as you traverse the forest path. Once you get to the creek, you sit on a large rock for over an hour, smoking without thinking about it and watching the water pass. When you get back to the house, you find that you have a pipe of fine grey ash and nothing else, and that this was one of the most memorable, magical, and transcendent smokes you have experienced.

Let us do the postmortem: what went right? First, you let gravity pack your bowl for you, because you walked those two hundred yards over grass and let the impact of your feet sort the little tobacco bits into place without compressing them. Now all of the pieces of tobacco are touching each other, with no empty spaces, but also no obstructed airflow (let us assume that you had your thumb over the top of the bowl, and this kept you from creating a small tobacco blizzard). Then, you lit and smoked without thinking, which let your body rhythms take over and enabled you to breath smoke like a pro. Finally, you had something else to occupy your mind, so you were not focused on tasting, but appreciated it nonetheless.

Pipes and water both relate to the subconscious. Our conscious mind is a tiny little middle manager who sits on top of this vast teeming horde of thoughts, impulses, emotions, notions, reactions, and desires. With his book of rules, mission statement, and calendar he chooses from these a few at a time, and writes them into a memo, which then presents itself before your mind in a screen labeled CURRENT REALITY. When you smoke a pipe, the subconscious horde is able to stop worrying about what it officially things, and simply express itself and its many notions as fleeting thoughts. You are no longer trying to force yourself to think; you are thinking better by not thinking at all of what you are thinking about. It is like putting the ego into a lengthy staff meeting so that everyone else can get the work done without the little fat man at the top barking out orders and pointing an angry corpulent finger at the book of rules. The conscious mind is happy because it feels like it is In Control, and the subconscious mind is happy because pipe-smoking has become the agenda, freeing up the horde to work on its own projects, or even play a little. Naturally, this drops barriers in your mind and the little parts communicate with each other more freely, not having to filter themselves through the conscious mind. This meditative state also causes you to stop thinking “I must force this pipe to smoke” and allows you to simply breathe through the briar object temporarily attached to your face.

You can have a smoke this good every time, but you need to master packing and breathing.

Let a master writer, William Faulkner, describe his smoking technique:

Mr. Billy said, “Once I knew an old man who smoked a pipe. He took great care in stuffing his pipe. The old man would start loading his pipe by putting just a pinch of tobacco in the bottom of the bowl. Then he would carefully smooth the tobacco around the bottom. Then he would put a little more tobacco in and do the same thing, almost as if he were laying shingle on a roof. He would keep this up just a little bit of tobacco each time, carefully spreading and leveling it around the bowl. After doing this as many times as necessary to fill the bowl up to about a quarter of an inch below the top of the bowl he would put his little finger in the bowl and gently tamp it down about another quarter of an inch.   “Finally, he would light a match and wait until it had burned away the smells and color of sulfur and the flame was exactly right and smelling only of burning wood, then he would move the match, now half-burned, around the bowl clockwise two or three times to be sure that the flame had lighted the tobacco evenly at every point in the bowl; and, as he circled the bowl with the match, he began to inhale just a little bit. He seemed to be merely breathing the smoke in and out instead of puffing and blowing. Puffing and blowing like a blacksmith's bellows would have made a ball of fire and overheated the pipe. The way he did it, the entire surface of the bowl let an even flow of smoke drift upward, and the fire could scarcely be seen. He kept on just sort of breathing the smoke in and out slowly and gently. After he got the pipe loaded and fired up, he could smoke that pipe on that load for four hours.”

Most difficulties experienced by pipe smokers involve packing too tight, and consequently smoking too fast, leading the fire to get too hot, therefore both incinerating most of the flavor in the smoke and producing too much water, which in turn causes an uneven burn and an unsatisfying smoke. This is controversial because it requires you to learn a skill, instead of the following one of the two extremes that appear in any group, the “smoke what you like, like what you smoke” people who insist that “there is no right way to do this, just follow your own path” and the “there is one right way to smoke a pipe, graven in stone on the wall by the pipe gods of ancient time.” In reality, life is closer to the latter, but only because some things work better. Smoke what you like, and like what you smoke, but your results may vary. Smoke something of quality, and do it mostly right, and you will always have a better experience. The former group generally focus too much on what they own, and not enough on how they use it, while the latter group spends too much time searching for tobacconists on remote islands who might have that last tin of aged Penzance, a type of rarity that the internerds call “Unobtanium” but the rest of us recognize as a conspicuous consumption vanity project.

As with most learning, we should start with vocabulary. The term “packing” describes almost nothing of what you will do; you are going to fill a pipe, sorting the contents in the process, and then press down on the top with as much force is required to depress one of those membrane keyboards on a microwave oven. We say “packing” and that signals the newer pipes into a mindset of cramming stuff in the pipe and squeezing it into a brick. For ribbon cuts, you will want to fill with three pinches. Take a big one and drop it on the bottom, then use your finger to push the tobacco bits toward the edge, and groom them a little bit, making sure you neither have open spaces or tightly compressed ones. Then add another big pinch and do the same. Your third pinch you want to heap on the top, then push to the edges and holding your thumb over the top of the pipe, shake it around a bit to let saltation (a fancy term for the movement of particles over an uneven surface, falling into place like Tetris) settle the leaf. Then press down once to lightly compress the top layer, light the pipe and take a very shallow draw, then gravity tamp — let the weight of the tamper do the work, and do not push — to get a nice flat surface, then light again.

Next, we want to master breath-smoking, which is how the old school pipe smokers used to enjoy tobacco. Without a pipe in your mouth, practice slow breathing, as if you were just about to fall asleep or were sitting on a rock watching the creek pass by on a pleasant spring day. In my experience, this generally means that you breathe in for about three seconds, then blow and rest for about four seconds. When you are nervous or busy, you will breathe more rapidly, puffing away like an animal in distress. When you have mastered inner calm and organized your thinking, you can be regular in your disciplined motions even in the midst of chaos, and your breathing and heart rate will be consistent, allowing for maximal brain and muscle function. This orderly breathing allows you to keep a constant draw on the pipe by sealing your lips around the stem like when you use a straw in a drink, then breathing through your nose while keeping your throat shut to air from the mouth. This assembles smoke in the mouth, where flavor can be appreciated and nicotine absorbed, while using capillary pressure to create an even, steady draw. You might puff a little when lighting, but the shallower, the better. You want slow smoldering tobacco, not burning tobacco. Every seven seconds, open the lips and let the old smoke out. Once you fall into this rhythm for a little while, your body will take over and autopilot smoke a pipe unless you become agitated or nervous.

When you are done with smoking a pipe in this way, there will be very little dottle — some will exist because as the flame gets to the bottom of the bowl, it is closer to the draw-hole, and therefore tends to form a little vortext of current there, which misses the tobacco on either side of the invagination of flame — and you can scoop that and ash out with your pipe nail or tool. Dump that somewhere good, like on the flower garden, and blow through the stem. Then feed a pipe cleaner into the stem, first one side and then the other, rotating it and moving it back and forth to catch all the nooks and crannies. When done with that, fold the pipe cleaner in half so it forms a loop, and use that to scrape out the pipe, clearing more ash. For a final pass, use a shirt-tail or paper towel to wipe down the sides of the pipe.

Every few months or sooner if your pipe tastes sour or boggy, dip a pipe cleaner in whisky or another alcohol; I only use alcohols intended for human consumption, since my general rule is that I never put anything in a pipe which could hurt me if consumed. Run this through the inside of the stem, then make the loop, dip in alcohol again, and swab down the interior of the pipe. Let this dry in the pipe. It will draw out any “ghosts,” or stubborn flavors that arise from smoking a lot of a strong-smelling blend, with the worst offenders being Latakia, aromatics, and the natural scent infused tobaccos from the Lakeland region in England. Generally, one should not fear ghosts, since it takes a long time to make them, and they consist of deposits in the stem and within the cake on the sides of the bowl. Since you will be trimming cake anyway, this reduces fear of ghosts to keeping the pipe clean. In some cases, if you smoke the same tobacco for forty years, the oils will make it into the briar. At that point, your best option is to smoke dry Burley blends like Five Brothers, which will absorb the oil as they burn. I use Prince Albert as a ghostbuster since it seems to layer its flavor onto any others, rendering them ambiguous.

Internet pipe-smokers talk a lot about pipe rotation, but in my view this is simple: you want to give each briar at least a half-hour between smokes to dry out, depending on the humidity in your area. If you smoke five bowls a day, you can do that with a couple pipes, but it tastes better if you have five, and some pipe smokers would want ten so that you could give each pipe a full twenty-four hour rest. Obviously, a longer rest will mean a drier pipe, so it is hard to argue against this. Personally, I have a dozen or so favorite pipes at any time — whims change with the seasons — and I smoke the heck out of them, giving them a half-hour rest or so, and smoking most of those in a day. Then, I rotate those out and have another dozen come out of the long-term storage (a banker's file box marked CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS) so that I can let the last batch rest for a few weeks.

Cake also needs some debunking. You do not need to worry about building up cake; it happens naturally, especially if you smoke high-sugar blends like Virginias or aromatics. I tend to break in new pipes with Prince Albert, since it burns cool and leaves behind a nice layer of tar and ash which becomes the cake. Your cake should be the thickness of a dime. Too much more than that it and it endangers the pipe, possibly causing the briar to break. If you get too much cake, trim it with an old knife that has a dull tip, or a rounded knife if you can find one, scraping over the surface more like if you were sanding than trying to “cut” the cake. When it gets to a uniform depth of the required width, shake out the black ash dust and blow through the stem. Cake helps insulate the pipe, but this can backfire because too much insulation makes a little firebox.

If your pipe gets too hot when you are smoking it, stick your metal pipe nail or tool into the edge of the tobacco near the stem, and set the pipe aside. The metal will radiate heat and cool down the pipe, killing the fire, and allowing the briar to reduce temperature.

That is what I have for you, as a guy who smokes all the time because he likes it. I do not have ten thousand blends in my cellar; I have about five that I really like, but a lot of them. Anytime I find a new one I like, I wait for it to go on sale and buy a lot of it. I like what I smoke, and smoke what I like, because life is short and I want to spend all of my time in this mortal stage of existence in that state of meditative calm, smoke curling around my head. But don't take it from me. I'm just a guy with some experience and analytical ability. Here are some of my favorite resources:

Smoking * Introduction to Pipe Smoking and Pipe Tobacco * Pipe Packing and Smoking Techniques * A Pipe Smoking Primer * How To Get Into Pipe Smoking * A Pipeman's Handbook! * How to Smoke a Pipe

Blends * G.L. Pease FAQ: mostly on tobacco types and blending * Tobacco Reviews: reviews of blends, some of which are not blather

General * PipePedia * Pipe Q&A * PipeTobacco Wiki