** As my long posts are failing to post, I've broken this into four parts; parts two, three and four are below.**
Cut matters, but not to me. As one afflicted by major palate drift, such that the bowl of Escudo I'm smoking in a not yet venerable MM Mark Twain is about 25% of what this decades long superstar reliably provides, how can I discern such lower level tastes? But for those not so afflicted, I have reservations about the claims that superstars in the pipe arena make about such arcane matters of the pipe, such as tasting briar and its adequate cure, tasting corn from a cob, tasting Izmir in the setting of Embarcadero more like pine resin while in another it tastes like oak, etc., etc.
Now Messrs. Pease and Ouelette are very able blenders, and Mr. Ouellette's current coup of resurrected blends to be released by Standard Tobacco this fall, and in fact his many other blends already revivified, amply attest to the superiority of his palate. But blending skill, which as Mr. Pease has said, needs to constantly reconfigure, as the stand alone flavor of a tobacco can substantially change in combination with others.
But my point is that very little in pipe smoking is a science, by which I mean that the palate expertise of a Pease or an Ouellette cannot be scientifically measured, and this was Todd Johnson's point in the one-back discussion of bowl coating which occurred after Mr. Pease's two articles about it on pm in 2013. I believe Mr. Johnson has two Youtube videos that were designed to yield quantifiable results, but the latter involved the same thickness of briar both plain and coated, suspended over tea lights. He was then able to say that the uncoated piece of briar lasted a number of times longer before burning as compared to the uncoated. Touche. Time is a measurable referent But the reply to Mr. Johnson was that we don’t have the science to discuss much in the pipe world, which is the point of this post.