Brindle is just a word. "a brownish or tawny color of animal fur, with streaks of other color."
Dunhill most particularly was adept at making something, calling it something special, and elevating it by doing so in the eyes of buyers. They literally could not make a pipe without naming it, and good on them. Smart.
There's only a few manufacturers of ebonite in the world, and while there may have been more call for it for industrial bushings etc 100 years ago (we use teflon, delrin, various acetyls etc) I don't think there were ever hundreds of manufacturers, it's a very small corner of the manufacturing world. And only a few places make a pure/clean enough product to make pipe stems with. There are a few different recipes, which range from wrapping sheets of different color to having multiple tiny rods (which is what the OP's pipe stem was) extruded in a single large rod. In fact you can see the wrap in the pipe Embers posted and also in the third pipe I posted, it's layered, as it were. SEM uses a slightly different red than NYH (both out of Germany), you can tell the rods apart. But we don't order one as "brindle" and one as "cumberland" - you designate whether you want wrapped or streaky, and with SEM you can actually order custom colors at this point, but if you phone an ebonite manufacturer and say "I want one Cumberland rod and one Brindle" there would be silence on the other end.
Dunhill most particularly was adept at making something, calling it something special, and elevating it by doing so in the eyes of buyers. They literally could not make a pipe without naming it, and good on them. Smart.
There's only a few manufacturers of ebonite in the world, and while there may have been more call for it for industrial bushings etc 100 years ago (we use teflon, delrin, various acetyls etc) I don't think there were ever hundreds of manufacturers, it's a very small corner of the manufacturing world. And only a few places make a pure/clean enough product to make pipe stems with. There are a few different recipes, which range from wrapping sheets of different color to having multiple tiny rods (which is what the OP's pipe stem was) extruded in a single large rod. In fact you can see the wrap in the pipe Embers posted and also in the third pipe I posted, it's layered, as it were. SEM uses a slightly different red than NYH (both out of Germany), you can tell the rods apart. But we don't order one as "brindle" and one as "cumberland" - you designate whether you want wrapped or streaky, and with SEM you can actually order custom colors at this point, but if you phone an ebonite manufacturer and say "I want one Cumberland rod and one Brindle" there would be silence on the other end.
ons. I never knew there were so many colors.