The other night I had one of my rare -- thankfully -- thoroughly terrible smokes. It wasn't the tobacco that was the problem, it was my technique.
Some blends have an extremely fine shag cut, especially a few Esoterica blends I like quite a lot. Every so often I fail to pack a bowl with the focused delicate touch such cuts require. The other night is a case in point.
I was trying a new blend (Esoeterica's Tilbury) for the second time in a billiard, so it was still a bit moist. I normally use a deft packing method for fine shag cuts, but my finger was a bit too heavy when packing it this time. The charring light was fine. But as soon as I did the true light it was all downhill from there.
I had to suck pretty hard to get a good mouthful of smoke. So I tried to loosen it a bit with the poker tool, make some holes to aerate the mass. Woops, blocked the air channel at the bottom of the bowl, nothing coming through no matter how hard I sucked at it.
So I use the digger to move stuff around, try to clear that air passage. Nope, still blocked.
Remove the stem (something I never do while smoking), push a cleaner through, light up again, get a few mouthfuls; but it's kind of loose, so give it a tiny little tamp. Clogged again.
So I blow through the air channel while covering the bowl with my fingers, and burn my fingers when the embers hit.
I spent the next twenty minutes fighting like this. It was an intensely unsatisfying experience. I'm still not sure what this blend tastes like, since it was like sucking a golfball through a garden hose to get any smoke half the time, or relighting almost every other puff so it burned too hot the other half of the time.
If anyone has any similar stories to share I'd like to hear them, especially if it includes some advice about how to rescue a bad smoke like this.
Some blends have an extremely fine shag cut, especially a few Esoterica blends I like quite a lot. Every so often I fail to pack a bowl with the focused delicate touch such cuts require. The other night is a case in point.
I was trying a new blend (Esoeterica's Tilbury) for the second time in a billiard, so it was still a bit moist. I normally use a deft packing method for fine shag cuts, but my finger was a bit too heavy when packing it this time. The charring light was fine. But as soon as I did the true light it was all downhill from there.
I had to suck pretty hard to get a good mouthful of smoke. So I tried to loosen it a bit with the poker tool, make some holes to aerate the mass. Woops, blocked the air channel at the bottom of the bowl, nothing coming through no matter how hard I sucked at it.
So I use the digger to move stuff around, try to clear that air passage. Nope, still blocked.
Remove the stem (something I never do while smoking), push a cleaner through, light up again, get a few mouthfuls; but it's kind of loose, so give it a tiny little tamp. Clogged again.
So I blow through the air channel while covering the bowl with my fingers, and burn my fingers when the embers hit.
I spent the next twenty minutes fighting like this. It was an intensely unsatisfying experience. I'm still not sure what this blend tastes like, since it was like sucking a golfball through a garden hose to get any smoke half the time, or relighting almost every other puff so it burned too hot the other half of the time.
If anyone has any similar stories to share I'd like to hear them, especially if it includes some advice about how to rescue a bad smoke like this.